This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Indent, a live album of solo piano by Cecil Taylor.
I often describe myself as a slow thinker. I don’t think I’m stupid, I can think pretty deeply about stuff and have good ideas, but it takes me a little longer to get there than some other more agile and witty thinkers. I once said this to a friend and he told me I was talking rubbish, and that it didn’t make sense to characterise thinking that way because it’s not as though everyone is going through the same motions in order to get to the same ideas, such that relative speed can be compared. I told him I didn’t like that as an excuse—that it felt inadequate somehow. A few hours later I told him I had decided he was right.
Sabine Liebner’s rendition of John Cage's Music for Piano 1 is so fast that it goes beyond being “too fast for my liking” and I begin to just rethink my position on the piece. It was a learning experience, to listen to it. I realised that when listening to indeterminate music I was mapping the notes by pitch and placing them into an imagined continuity according to how much silent space there is either side of the note, and so making sense of the whole music that way. Music for Piano was far too fast for me to do that, I don’t think fast enough. In terms of the actual density of notes it’s obviously far more spacious than basically anything from Beethoven, for instance, but in Beethoven we have the framework of tonality, the map provided by repetition and use of motif, and cadence. That means we can offload some of the mental computation—have the subconscious parse the grammar of western tonality and keep the conscious brain free to consider the events unique to the piece at hand.
I told a friend of mine who recommended I listen to Conquistador! that I liked it but struggled to think of it as a Cecil Taylor album. I naturally find my attention drifting into the interplay between the horns and the drums because I find those instruments more vocal in how the musicians can vary their timbre, and found the piano turned into a sort of drone that was difficult to listen to. There are just as many ways to play one note on a piano as on a saxophone, but the saxophone’s difference between those notes tend to be more pronounced and it produces the effect of talking over. Taylor’s style is so dense that I can’t possibly parse it all when he’s playing with other instruments, probably the only way I could do it is if I was watching him play live but obviously that’s never going to happen now. Taylor’s ensemble performances are in some way inaccessible to me because when he’s playing on his own, as he does here, his music pushes at the edge of what I can possibly follow. This isn’t indeterminate, there is the logic of jazz improvisation in how he uses theme and there is still another sort of internal logic in that all the choices are being made by one person. Cecil’s brain during this performance is pretty much a closed system—it is totally locked out of making new discoveries except by what it can learn from the music as it’s being played, which we as listeners are obviously also privy to. The music is of course the notes themselves, but the music is also what logic informs the notes. The joy of trying (and only just barely managing) to follow the mental dance between the familiar improvisational logic of jazz, the less familiar idiosyncrasies of Taylor’s style across his entire body of work, and the specific and ephemeral logic of the choices he happens to make here, in this performance, which are informed by the specific state of his mind during this performance, a state of mind which couldn’t ever possibly be repeated again... I think I lost the thread of what I was saying.