What Would Ellington Do? Pt. 2

What Would Ellington Do? Pt. 2: As the work continues on composing for Edition XL- a new project with Josh Berman, Erez Dessel, Lily Finnegan, Nick Macri, and Beth McDonald- I’ve already set my sights on the reference material for the next triptych: Cecil Taylor’s early period, before the bar line was broken, when Denis Charles was most often the drummer and Buell Neidlinger was the bassist.  Though the later chapters in Taylor’s career are rightfully celebrated for advancing the field of music I’m involved with, the material he created in the late 1950’s/early 60’s has fascinated me too.  And, though I’ve tried to explore Taylor’s rhythmic and compositional innovations in many of my groups, one of the challenges to the Edition XL performances at The Green Mill in August is to present music that works in that space, one of the great jazz clubs in the States.  I’ve performed cutting edge work there a number of times (most recently in January of 2023, playing the music of Fred Anderson and Don Cherry with Hamid Drake, Lemuel Marc, and Tomeka Reid; but also with groups like the VWCR quartet of Sylvie Courvoisier, Tom Rainey, and Nate Wooley [2018]; and the Eric Revis’ Quartet with Kris Davis and Chad Taylor [2017]).  I’ve found that exploring music that is centered around the many variants of pulse-based time, then pushing against those parameters, helps the music communicate well in the special environment that is The Green Mill.

So, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been listening to that early period of Cecil Taylor’s music and, though very familiar with it, while going through the Mosaic box set, “The Complete Candid recordings of Cecil Taylor and Buell Neidlinger”, I discovered that I had somehow forgotten that he had recorded versions of compositions by Mercer Ellington, “Jumpin’ Punkins” and “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be.”  Mercer was given the opportunity to write for Duke Ellington’s orchestra during the ASCAP strike in the 1940’s, when Ellington was prevented from airing his own compositions on the radio.  Taylor’s versions of these pieces are beautiful and feature Charles Davis, Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd, Archie Shepp, Clark Terry on horns, Neidlinger on bass and Billy Higgins, not Denis Charles, on drums.  The way Taylor and the band (particularly Steve Lacy and Archie Shepp) push the music while still representing the heart of Mercer Ellington’s pieces remind me of the title from a great monograph on Jackson Pollock’s paintings on paper, “No Limits, Just Edges” (D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers: 2005).

I started to regularly listen to Cecil Taylor’s work in the mid 1980’s, when Hat Hut was releasing a bunch of his albums, “Calling It The 8th”, “It Is in The Brewing Luminous”, “One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye”, and the volumes of “Garden”.  Though mesmerized by the power and energy of those recordings, I did not discover the compositional relationships within the music until later, when I found a copy of “Student Studies” (recorded in 1966, released on BYG in 1973).  There I heard Jimmy Lyons reference the same motif over the course of one of the pieces and understood the band was improvising with predetermined materials.  

In the interviews with Taylor I could locate around that time he would cite the influence of Duke Ellington, but it was very difficult for me to hear this in the music of Taylor that I was listening too.  Then, in 1987, Blue Note reissued Ellington’s trio album with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, “Money Jungle”.  Within the opening seconds of the title track the correlation between Ellington and Taylor, that had Taylor referenced himself, was made evident. “Money Jungle” was originally released on United Artists Jazz in 1963, just after the period of Cecil Taylor’s work that I’ve been examining for the Edition XL project.  Even when finding inspiration from sources perhaps considered to be outside the Ellington cannon, his impact looms large.