Free Jazz Blog Interview With Phil Freeman ~ The Free Jazz Collective

Phil Freeman

How did you get the assignment to interview Cecil Taylor for

The Wire in 2016?

I was the only journalist granted an interview with Taylor during the
run-up to his Whitney Museum show, Open Plan: Cecil Taylor, in
February 2016. (The show ran for two weeks in late April of that year.) The
whole thing was coordinated between the show’s curators, Jay Sanders and
Lawrence Kumpf, and The Wire’s then-editor, Derek Walmsley. He
emailed me one day and asked if I was interested in interviewing Taylor and
I responded affirmatively in about two seconds.

I had previously done lengthy interviews with Ornette Coleman and Bill
Dixon for the magazine (and attempted to interview Pharoah Sanders, but it
didn’t come off), so obviously there was precedent for a piece like this,
but it really turned into something I could never have anticipated.

How did you prepare for the interview? Did it go according to plan?

I prepared as I always do, by listening to as much of the artist’s music as
possible and thinking about what I would like to ask them if it were just
the two of us talking, without considering a reader. In Taylor’s case, I
had been listening to his music for nearly 30 years by then, having first
seen him perform at the Village Vanguard in August 1997.

Did meeting Cecil change at all how you listen to, interpret or
appreciate his music?

No, but I greatly enjoyed our time together. He was a fun person to hang
out with – he was a smart, witty man who was deeply engaged with the world
far beyond music. We talked about politics, about food, about birds, about
our respective family histories, and many other things.

Meeting him strengthened my appreciation for his music, because it caused
me to read more deeply into it, looking up what the titles of his pieces
might mean and in the process gaining insight into him as a person by
charting the evolution of his interests. This came into play again when
writing In The Brewing Luminous, as I was able to trace, for
example, his interest in African history and religious traditions through
the titles of pieces like “The Stele Stolen and Broken is Reclaimed” (from
Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!) or “B Ee Ba Nganga Ban’a Eee!” (from

Olu Iwa

).

What was your first interaction with Cecil’s music? Do you recall what
it was? How did you feel when you heard it?

I don’t remember if I had heard any of his records before the Village
Vanguard performance from August 1997 that I mentioned earlier. I went to
that show because of a blurb Gary Giddins had written in the

Village Voice

’s club listings, asserting that Taylor was a genius and that any NYC
appearance was not to be missed. The music rolled over me like a tidal wave
that night; it was a single long piece and far too much to take in
unprepared. I walked back upstairs afterward, my head swimming. Not long
after that, I bought Trance, a Black Lion CD that featured some
(but not all) of the 1962 recordings from the Café Montmartre; when the
Revenant label issued the complete Montmartre tapes as

Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come

, I bought that, and over the next few years began picking up one title or
another here and there. I specifically remember buying the CD of

Dark to Themselves

as research for my first book, New York Is Now!, which included a
profile of David S. Ware. (Ware was in Taylor’s band on that album.)

I remember finding Taylor’s music overwhelming for a long time. Sometimes
that was pleasurable, other times not. Listening to it was like trying to
climb an icy cliff; it pushed me away. It wasn’t really until I got hold of
some of his solo albums, especially Air Above Mountains and

The Willisau Concert

, that I was able to hear the romanticism and beauty at the heart of what
he did. Once I was able to identify those qualities, I could go back and
listen to the group records with new ears.

Do you have a “favorite” period of his music? A favorite album? If so,
what and why?

My favorite period of his music is definitely the 1978 Unit with Jimmy
Lyons, Raphé Malik, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone, and Ronald Shannon Jackson, which
made the albums The Cecil Taylor Unit, 3 Phasis,

Live in the Black Forest

, and One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye. I wrote a

long essay

about their work for Burning Ambulance, parts of which made it into

In The Brewing Luminous

. But I love albums from every era of his career, including early works
like Looking Ahead!, The World of Cecil Taylor and

New York City R&B

; the solo albums Air Above Mountains,

Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!

, the two volumes of Garden, and The Willisau Concert;
the early ’80s Orchestra Of Two Continents, heard on

Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants)

and Music From Two Continents; his collaboration with the Italian
Instabile Orchestra, The Owner of the River Bank; and the
collaborative session with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones,

Momentum Space

.

When did you decide you would write this book? What did you think the
challenges would be? And were they? 

The book didn’t start out as a biography of Taylor. Originally, I wanted
to write a history of free jazz as a whole. That was far too unwieldy,
though, and inevitably more people would be overlooked than covered. Then I
thought about a book that would profile seven major avant-garde jazz
figures: Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell,
Wadada Leo Smith, Taylor, and Henry Threadgill. (I considered including
Julius Hemphill as well.) The point of that book would have been to discuss
these men as major American composers, and bring so-called “free jazz” into
the spotlight as, in fact, a deeply considered music full of theory and
conceptual rigor. But then I realized that no one had written a full-length
biography of Taylor. So I emailed Wolke Verlag in Germany, whose books on
avant-garde jazz have been excellent, and pitched

In the Brewing Luminous

. I had the title and everything, and they went for it right away.