BY KEVIN LYNCH Ornette Coleman once called his music "The Shape of Jazz to Come. " Mandel calls it "Jazz beyond Jazz," music from a land where individuals chase their dreams and destiny, one reason why it begat an art form expressing that freedom.
And yet one of them, Cecil Taylor, says "there is no such thing as freedom, only preparation." He invokes an American boy scout motto! So in Mandel's excellent book we see three artists prepare for life's possibilities in his special way. Mandel, a superb writer and the President of the Jazz Journalist Association, explains these men as what critic Albert Murray called "Omni-Americans," who "want to claim and/or partake of everything available and relevant to their present nationality, more than their racial and ethnic ancestry." This aesthetic embraces an omnivorously eloquent Americanness. Mandel quotes Gerald Early: Miles was "enormously inventive, snappishly opportunistic and yet surprisingly principled in the simple act of making a living in a dying art, that is dying as an art form with a large audience."
Miles' limpid trumpet could melt your heart with future dreams which arguably arrive with "Bitches Brew," the surreal studio pastiche of sinuous polyrhythms which used "a street-savvy, pan global and well-capitalized slanguage, right for the present and maybe the future... What was always compelling was his personal line, variously wary, bold, romantic, wry, base and candid."
Pulitzer Prize winning Ornette Coleman's intellectual quirkiness and integrity radiate the dancing cubism of his "harmolodic" concept of equalizing melody, rhythm and harmony. You hear the three elements' intrinsic qualities deftly balanced in his incomparably mournful "Lonely Woman," the rambunctious "Ramblin'" or the hair-raising beauty of the song "What Reason Could I Give?"
Cecil Taylor invokes European sources, poetry and dance in music of rare harmonic density, evident in his piano ballads and darkly lyrical large group works. Though conservatory trained, he plays the piano like "88 tunes drums," as one critic resonantly wrote, with an elemental, primeival strength.
In 1977 his cougar like dynamism produced the greatest live musical performance I have ever witnessed - two three-hour solo piano concerts in one day. "Jazz beyond jazz" can speak to non-musicians whom, Cecil notes, grasp "a fullness of the dynamics" of sound structures that always appealed and enchanted" because it was arrived at through (the listener's) love" and "insight that could not be denied."
Taylor sees himself as part of a musical continuum that includes Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Marvin Gaye. Despite his music's tempestuous complexities the man possesses a warmth and humanity that I have sensed when I interviewed him in 1986 for Down Beat magazine. Such creative music gradually mutes life's contradictions and cruelty. As Mandel writes, "little if anything of lasting value comes from half-heartedness, hypocrisy or genuine cynicism about one's own work." This truth applies to every person's life. Mandel ends by noting how, in the climax of a 2006 concert, Taylor quoted from the joyous fifth movement of Olivier Messiaen's "Turangalila Symphonie." The work's Sanskrit title means "a love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death."
We sense how fearless creativity echoes and feeds from that continuum of human elements. Therein lie the wellsprings of hope even in these diminished times.
