Ich wusste schon länger, dass es vom irren (irre-guten!) César Aira einen Text über Cecil Taylor gibt, hatte aber die ganze Zeit gedacht, der sei ohne Klarnamen, und gehofft, er würde irgendwann in der schönen Reihe von Matthes und Seitz erscheinen:
https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/autor/cesar-aira.html
Dabei scheint der Text schlicht „Cecil Taylor“ zu heissen – und ist online zu finden, und sehr, sehr toll! Ein „Bericht“, der nah an der Wirklichkeit sein könnte, über die frühen Fünfzigerjahre in New York, inkl. Erwähnung des veröffentlichten Auftrittes beim Jazzfestival in Newport.
He couldn’t come up with an answer, then or ever. Over the following months he performed in half a dozen bars, always a different place because the result was always the same, and he received two invitations, which reopened the wound of anticipation, one from a university and the other from the organizers of a series of avant-garde events at the Cooper Union. He took up the first with some hope, which turned out to be misplaced (within a few minutes, the room was empty; the professor who had issued the invitation came up with complicated excuses and hated him ever after), but at least it served to provoke a reflection, which might have been misplaced as well, not that Cecil cared any more: an educated audience was equivalent in every respect to an uneducated one. They were the same, in fact, except that they were looking in opposite directions, facing away from each other. The pivot on which their seats turned was the hoary old tale of the emperor’s new clothes. For one group the obscene and shameful thing was nakedness; for the other, it was clothes.
Den ganzen Text gibt es hier:
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/cecil-taylor/
Irre gut, aber das sagt ich ja schon…
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #158 – Piano Jazz 2024 (Teil 1) - 19.12.2024 – 20:00; #159: Martial Solal (1927–2024) – 21.1., 22:00; #160: 11.2., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba