Label:
Pablo Live – 2620 108
Format:
2 × Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: US / Released: 1978
Style:
Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation
Recorded live on
17 April 1977 at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
Design
[Cover] – Norman Granz, Sheldon Marks
Photography
By – Phil Stern
Producer
– Cecil Taylor, Mary Lou Williams
Phonographic
Copyright (p) – Pablo Records
A1
- The Lord Is Heavy (A Spiritual) . . . . . . . . . . 6:09
A2
- Fandangle (Ragtime) . . . . . . . . . . . 1:15
A3
- The Blues Never Left Me . . . . . . . . . . 5:00
A4
- K.C. 12th Street (Kansas City Swing) . . . . . . . . . . 12:32
B1
- Good Ole Boogie . . . . . . . . . . 5:35
B2
- Basic Chords (Bop Changes On The Blues) . . . . . . . . . . 7:40
C1
- Ayizan . . . . . . . . . . 14:22
C2
- Chorus Sud . . . . . . . . . . 9:25
D2
- Back To The Blues . . . . . . . . . . 14:47
D3
- I Can't Get Started . . . . . . . . . . 4:10
Mary
Lou Williams – piano
Cecil
Taylor – piano
Bob
Cranshaw – bass
Mickey
Roker – drums, percussion
A
masterful meeting of two important of piano genius – Mary Lou Williams and
Cecil Taylor – sounding incredibly here in each other's company! The set
features a core rhythmic pulse from Mickey Roker on drums and Bob Cranshaw on
bass – and Williams and Taylor really take off on their twin pianos – with
Cecil almost leading Mary Lou more into territory of his own, although she also
brings an undercurrent of soul to the set that makes the record unlike any
other that Taylor ever recorded! The approach shouldn't work, but it's
captivatingly brilliant from the start – as you'll hear on tracks that include
"The Lord Is Heavy", "Good Ole Boogie", "Basic
Chords", "Ayizan", "KC 12th Street", "Fandangle",
and "Chorus Sud". _ ©
1996-2015, Dusty Groove, Inc.
When
pianist Mary Lou Williams decided she wanted to perform with legendary
iconoclast Cecil Taylor, she figured it would be a love fest. But as the
concert and resulting album Embraced attest, it was anything but amore. This
excerpt from Linda Dahl’s book, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams
(Pantheon Books), tells the story.
Many
people wondered why Mary chose to perform in a dual-piano concert at Carnegie
Hall with Cecil Taylor, perhaps the ultimate avant garde pianist. She had
repeatedly made her negative feelings clear about the avant garde in jazz, with
its rejection of established harmonic and tonal patterns. In an essay that
became part of her liner notes for Embraced, the album resulting from her
concert with Taylor, she described the avant garde as being filled with “hate,
bitterness, hysteria, black magic, confusion, discontent, empty studies,
musical exercises by various European composers, sounds of the earth, no ears,
not even relative pitch and Afro galore (although”—she hastened to add—”I’m
crazy about African styles in dress”).
Yet
something in Taylor’s music appealed to her, as did John Coltrane’s late
playing; or, rather, she accepted both musicians’ work because they could
still, if they wanted to, play “within the tradition.” And although tradition—the
heritage of suffering embodied in spirituals and the blues—was sacred to her,
Mary had always pushed herself to experiment and master new styles of black
music. And by the mid-’70s, she was eager to reposition herself on the cutting
edge. She was not, she wrote in her diary, “corny” (her word for passé and
hidebound); no, she had “changed with the times.” Still, by then she had felt
at least a twinge at being passed over. So much had happened since her
reemergence in the ’60s—rock, soul, long hair, Afros.
It was, then, in the
spirit of reconciliation between the two “camps” of jazz (avant garde versus
everything that came before) that Mary conceived the idea of doing a concert
with that lion of “out” players, Cecil Taylor. He had won her over with his
admiration for her playing. Actually, he’d been listening and appreciating
Mary’s music for a long time, since 1951, when he first caught her at the Savoy
Club in Boston while a conservatory student in that city. “She was playing like
Erroll Garner, but her music had a lot of range,” Taylor said in a rare
interview. Almost two decades passed before Mary, in turn, listened to
Taylor—during his engagement at Ronnie Scott’s in 1969. Then, in 1975, Taylor
really began listening to Mary, dropping by the Cookery often. And each time he
came into the club, as Mary remembered it, he’d move closer to the piano,
until, she said, “He sat down one night at the end of the gig and played, but a
little too long,” clearing out the club. But when Taylor told her, “No one’s
playing anything but you,” Mary’s reaction was, at first, “Here’s somebody else
putting me on.” But he kept showing up to listen, and eventually Mary broached
the idea of doing a concert together. (It was Taylor who came up with the
title, Embraced. In response, Mary drew a picture of three concentric circles,
symbolizing, as she saw it, her music, his and the music of their interplay.)
Organizing
the April 17, 1977, event fell to Mary, who followed her usual game plan.
Friends received photocopied requests: “Help save this precious music and keep
me out of Bellevue! Smile! Send checks for your tickets or donations.” Despite
such efforts, made at her own expense, and Peter O’Brien’s publicity, the house
at Carnegie Hall was no more than half-filled and Mary just broke even on the
concert.
But
it would be a hall filled with partisans of the two pianists, and speculation
ran high about what sort of jazz would emerge from the meeting of two such
strong musicians—for if Taylor was a lion at the piano, Mary was a lioness. To
Village Voice jazz writer Gary Giddins, the concert promised to be “doubly
innovative for bringing together two great keyboard artists in a program of
duets, and for dramatizing the enduring values in the jazz-piano tradition.”
But hints of a possible musical fiasco were also in the air. Rehearsals
revealed frayed nerves and disparate purposes. Cecil Taylor had never shown any
desire to play predetermined music from a written score, although Mary claimed
that for the first half of the concert he’d agreed to play the new dual-piano
arrangements of spirituals she’d written, using her “history of jazz” approach.
Then, after the intermission, they would use “rhythm patterns as a shell,” in
Mary’s words. “When Cecil is doing his things, I’ll start moving in his
direction. I’ll play free and then I’ll jump back to swinging.” But in the
hours before the concert began Taylor fumed. Not only had she written a part
for him—a “free” player of the first rank—but she had not consulted him about
the rhythm section—her own—that was to accompany them for the first half. To
Mary, of course, this seemed fair: she got the first half, and he got the
second half of the concert. But as Taylor told a journalist, Mary “wanted him
to play her music but [she] refused to perform his music the way he wanted it
heard. We are not certain exactly how the concert will be structured,” Taylor
warned.
Clashed
would be a more accurate title than Embraced for the music that ensued; the
concert confirmed gloomier predictions. Reviewers tended to write about it more
as a contest than a collaboration: “The result was at best a tug of war in
which Mr. Taylor managed to remain dominant,” wrote the New York Times. On
“Back to the Blues,” to take one example, Taylor plunges deep into his favorite
nether musical regions. It takes Mary’s strongest playing, the signature crash
and crush of her left hand at full throttle, to tug the piece back from outer
space. When, as Gary Giddins described Taylor, “the predatory avant gardist”
overreached Mary’s “spare, bluesy ministrations,” she called in the rhythm
section quite as if she were calling in the troops.
Listeners—at
least those in Mary’s camp—saw little of the “love” she had urged Taylor to
play after the difficult first half. Backstage, fur flew. “I slammed the door
on him hard,” says Peter O’Brien, “and saxophonist Paul Jeffrey, who was
listening backstage, had to be physically restrained from punching him. Mary
came off the stage and said to me, ‘Oh man, I played my ass off.’ And she did,
but I made her go back out there.” Her adrenaline was up and Mary played
brilliant encores—”Night in Tunisia,” “Bag’s Groove,” and “I Can’t Get
Started,” the last a frequent source of inspiration for Mary.
Perhaps
the best review, though never published, came from Nica de Koenigswarter, in a
letter she shot off to Mary after the concert, written in the jazz baroness’s
beautiful hand and careful multicolored underlinings:
Rather
than an ‘embrace,’ it seemed to one like a confrontation between heaven and
hell, with you (heaven) emerging gloriously triumphant!!! I know it wasn’t
meant to be that way, but this is the way it seemed. I also know what a sweet
cat C.T. is and what beautiful things he writes, in words, that is, but the
funny part is that he looks just like the Devil when he plays as well as
sounding like it, as far as I am concerned, sheets of nothingness, apparently
seductive to some. Anyway I loved Mickey Roker and Bob Cranshaw for seeming
like guardian angels, coming to your defense and it was worth it all to hear
you bring it back to music.
Love
you, Nica
Two
years later, Mary could joke a little about the concert. “When I was coming
along, it wasn’t enough just to play. You had to have some tricks—I used to
play with a sheet over the piano keys. So when Cecil started playing like that
and kept on going, I started to get up from the stool, turn around and hit the
piano with my butt—chung, choonk! That woulda got them!” She revealed her hurt
only to her fellow artist in a letter two years after the fiasco:
Cecil!
Please listen if you can. Why did you come to me so often when I was at the
Cookery? Why did you consent to do a concert? You felt I was a sincere friend.
In the battlefield, the enemy (Satan) does not want artists to create or be
together as friends.
Cecil,
the spirituals were the most important factor of the concert (strength), to
achieve success playing from the heart, inspiring new concepts for the second
half. I wrote you concerning the first half. You will have a chance to listen
to the original tapes and will agree that being angry you created monotony,
corruption, and noise. Please forgive me for saying so. Why destroy your great
talent clowning, etc.? Applause is false. I do not believe in compliments or
glory, my inspiration comes from sincere love. I was not seeking glory for
myself when I asked you to do the concert. I am hoping you will reimburse me
for 30 tickets—would you like to see the receipts?
I
still love you, Mary
Within
six months of her concert with Taylor, Mary was back at Carnegie Hall for
another concert with another difficult musician, as a “special guest” in
January of 1978 in a 40-year “reunion” concert at Carnegie Hall. Billed as “An
Evening with Benny Goodman,” the concert attempted to recreate the spirit of
the famous 1938 concert where Goodman had been dubbed “King of Swing.” But the
1978 event was a disappointment, underrehearsed, ragged, with Goodman off
balance. Mary played gamely and took a sparkling solo on “Lady Be Good,” but
the gig was just a gig to her, a way to pay bills. (When Goodman approached her
afterwards about doing a record together of Fats Waller tunes, she declined.)
After
going from playing with way-out Cecil Taylor to comping for Benny Goodman—a
breathtaking musical leap few pianists would attempt—Mary could declare with
satisfaction, “Now I can really say I played all of it.”
Playing
“with” Cecil: The Rhythm Section Reflects
On
Embraced, the album that documents the meetingbetween Mary Lou Williams and
Cecil Taylor, the former closes the concert with a solo version of “I Can’t Get
Started.” The way the concert’sbassist, Bob Cranshaw, tells it,Taylor’s
performance should be titled “You Just Can’t Stop Me.”
“Cecil
was gone. There was nothing going to stop him from playing once he got
started,” Cranshaw remembers. “Cecil went on a piano back stage and just kept
playing during the intermission!”
Williams
got angry, according to Cranshaw, because he and drummer Mickey Roker, not
knowing what to do, just kept playing along with Taylor when she wanted the
concert to stop. Williams thought they were egging Taylor on.
“He
stormed over both of us. She was pissed and we were dying laughing because we
didn’t know what to do,” he recalls. “Mickey said, ‘Look, what do you want us
to do? Grab him by the arms and carry him off stage?’” Cranshaw laughs.
But
Roker willfully remembers little of the event. “I tried to do all I could to
forget that [concert]! It was confusing. And music shouldn’t be confusing.
Music should be festive,” he says. “The record speaks for itself. I don’t enjoy
that kinda thing.”
Cranshaw
admits he never heard the recording and he, too, says it was all very
confounding. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it,” he says. “I never thought
I played well on it to begin with.”
— By Christopher Porter (JazzTimes)
Well, what a tense story ... Listen to the album and... judge for yourself.
Enjoy!
If
you find it, buy this album!
