‘‘The Fools Don’t Think I Play Jazz’’: Cecil Taylor Meets Mary Lou Williams BENJAMIN GIVAN ‘‘ Imagine it,’’ the pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams exclaimed in April 1977. ‘‘A swinging pianist with an avant-garde!’’1 Williams (1910–81), a prominent figure in jazz since the 1930s, was eagerly anticipating an upcoming Carnegie Hall recital in which she planned to perform with her friend and fellow keyboard player Cecil Taylor (1929–2018). Planned for several months, the widely publi- cized concert, which was recorded and later released commercially as an 397 album titled Embraced (1978), featured the unlikely pairing of two jazz performers a generation apart who moved in very different artistic cir- cles.2 She nonetheless had high hopes for the event, which she had financed herself with the intention of inviting Taylor, a pillar of the postwar so-called ‘‘free jazz’’ movement.3 ‘‘Cecil is honest and sincere,’’ she said, telling the press that their rehearsals had gone very well, with I owe many thanks to Tad Hershorn, Vincent Pelote, Anne Rhodes, Elizabeth Surles, and Hollie West for their help. All transcriptions are my own. 1 Quoted in John S. Wilson, ‘‘Tradition and Innovation in Jazz Meet at the Williams– Taylor Concert,’’ New York Times, 15 April 1977, 77. 2 Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor, Embraced, LP, Pablo Live 2620, rec. 17 April 1977; and Hazziezah [sic], ‘‘Two Great Musical Giants to Entertain at Carnegie Hall,’’ New York Amsterdam News, 9 April 1977, D9. For previous accounts of the concert, see Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 333–36 (reprinted as eadem, ‘‘Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor: Embraceable You?,’’ Jazz Times, March 2000, 44–47, 110); Tammy L. Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 259–62; and Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘‘Zoning Mary Lou Williams Zoning,’’ in Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 154–80, at 162–74. 3 Hollie I. West, ‘‘Jazz Duo, with a Note of Tension,’’ Washington Post, 18 April 1977, B1 and B12, at B12. The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 35, Issue 3, pp. 397–430, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis- sions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2018.35.3.397 the journal of musicology the younger musician effectively complementing one of her gospel- flavored compositions and Williams reciprocating with equal enthusi- asm. ‘‘When he started his avant-garde things, I was on him,’’ she said. ‘‘Everything he did, I answered.’’4 The event did not go as planned. According to the New York Times critic John S. Wilson, ‘‘the two pianists spent the evening separated by the length of two pianos and by totally different musical concepts.’’5 The recording confirms that, by and large, Williams played her own swing- based tonal compositions, often infused with related African American idioms such as spirituals, gospel, blues, and boogie-woogie, while Taylor simultaneously played non-metered rubato textures and figuration, deploying modal and post-tonal clusters rather than triadic, functional tonal harmony. ‘‘At times, they seemed like performers on two different planets,’’ wrote Hollie I. West in the Washington Post.6 The majority of critics, ever since, have regarded the performance as ‘‘disastrous,’’ a view privately shared by Williams herself, who not long afterward wrote to Taylor, ‘‘Being angry you created monotony, corruption, and noise. Please forgive me for saying so. Why destroy your great talent clowning, etc.?’’7 She lost over $5,000 on the recital.8 398 Although a few who witnessed the concert or heard the released album remained open minded or at least noncommittal, most dismissed it as ‘‘a noble experiment that failed’’—an ‘‘ill advised’’ ‘‘misfire’’ that degenerated into a ‘‘farce’’—and several criticized Taylor for ‘‘exhibi- tionist pounding,’’ accusing him of ‘‘playing his own show’’ without due deference to Williams.9 Nevertheless, the Carnegie Hall recital should 4 Wilson, ‘‘Tradition and Innovation,’’ 77. 5 John S. Wilson, ‘‘Jazz: Strange Double Piano Bill,’’ New York Times, 19 April 1977, 30. 6 West, ‘‘Jazz Duo,’’ B1. 7 Lewis Porter, ‘‘You Can’t Get Up There Timidly,’’ Music Educators Journal 71 (October 1984): 42–51, at 49; and Mary Lou Williams, Letter to Cecil Taylor, 29 July 1977, quoted in Dahl, Morning Glory, 336. 8 ‘‘Mary Lou Williams Concert: Gross Receipts and Expenses,’’ Mary Lou Williams Collection (hereafter MLWC), Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, Series 6, Box 9, Folder 4. Adjusted for inflation, $5,000 in 1977 is equivalent to more than $20,000 in 2018 (see https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm). 9 Hazziezah [sic], ‘‘Swing and Avante [sic] Garde ‘Embraced,’’’ New York Amsterdam News, 23 April 1977, D11; Whitney Balliett, ‘‘Mary vs. Cecil,’’ in Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954–2000 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 494–96; Bob Blumenthal, ‘‘Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor: Embraced,’’ Jazz 2, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 74 (see also Gary Giddins, ‘‘The Avant-Gardist Who Came in from the Cold,’’ in Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop [New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], 274–96, at 286–87); Dan Morgen- stern, ‘‘Mary Lou Williams/Cecil Taylor,’’ in Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Sheldon Meyer (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 471–72, at 472 (see also Chuck Berg, ‘‘Mary Lou Williams/Cecil Taylor: Embraced,’’ Down Beat, 7 December 1978, 29); Arnold Jay Smith, ‘‘Mary Lou Williams/Cecil Taylor: Carnegie Hall, New York City,’’ Down Beat, 14 July 1977, 54–56; Ethan Iverson, ‘‘In Every Generation There is a Chosen One,’’ https://web. archive.org/web/20170311180508/https://ethaniverson.com/2017/03/10/in-every- givan not be dismissed as only an ill-fated debacle. It serves as a salutary reminder that jazz’s improvisational aesthetics do not inevitably yield the idealized democratic collaboration or egalitarian sociability that many of the music’s proponents and advocates have claimed.10 And it offers a striking illustration of how conflicts between dissimilar performance strategies can reveal a great deal about players’ thought processes and beliefs.11 In addition to manifesting the distinct musical idiolects of two African American pianists of decidedly different temperaments and aes- thetic sensibilities, the concert also, in its way, engaged longstanding debates over jazz’s history and identity; Brent Hayes Edwards has recently called the performance ‘‘historiographic.’’12 Its musical incongruities reflected Taylor’s and Williams’s contrasting definitions of the idiom and divergent views of its chronological evolution.13 The pianists’ strained musical interplay contravened any notions of jazz as a unified genre with a unilinear historical trajectory.14 In particular, it encapsulated - generation-there-is-a-chosen-one/ (accessed 11 April 2018); Richard Williams, ‘‘Farce, as Two Giants Meet,’’ Melody Maker, 12 August 1978, 28; and Tom Piazza, ‘‘Williams–Taylor Concert,’’ Jazz 1, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 14. 10 This point is also made in Mark Laver, Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2015), 234–35; Benjamin Givan, ‘‘Rethinking Interaction in Jazz Impro- 399 visation,’’ Music Theory Online 22 (2016) (http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.3/mto.16. 22.3.givan.html; accessed 8 January 2018); and Scott Currie, ‘‘The Other Side of Here and Now: Cross-Cultural Reflections on the Politics of Improvisation Studies,’’ Critical Studies in Improvisation 11, nos. 1–2 (2016) (http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/3750/ 3980; accessed 8 January 2018). See also Ingrid Monson, ‘‘Riffs, Repetition, and Theories of Globalization,’’ Ethnomusicology 43 (1999): 31–65, at 52; and Scott Currie, review of People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation, Ethnomusicology 61 (2017): 356–62, at 361. 11 Along the same lines, Andrew Berish observes, ‘‘‘negative’ collaborative contexts are just as valuable for study as their positive counterparts’’; see ‘‘Negotiating ‘A Blues Riff’: Listening for Django Reinhardt’s Place in American Jazz,’’ Jazz Perspectives 3 (2009): 233–64, at 242. Another perspective on collaborating improvisers’ use of conflicting concurrent musical strategies is provided by John Miller Chernoff, who writes in his well-known study of northern Ghanaian drumming aesthetics, ‘‘The power of the music comes from the con- flicts and conversations of the rhythms, from vivid contrasts and complementary move- ments’’; African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 160. For a discussion of similar phe- nomena in the context of improvised jazz performance, see Benjamin Givan, ‘‘Apart Play- ing: McCoy Tyner and ‘Bessie’s Blues,’’’ Journal of the Society for American Music 1 (2007): 257–80. 12 Edwards, ‘‘Zoning Mary Lou Williams Zoning,’’ 168. 13 Studies of past critical debates surrounding new trends in jazz include Bernard Gendron’s account of the controversies over New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop in Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 121–57; and George E. Lewis’s discussion of the reception of free jazz/African American experimentalism in A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and Amer- ican Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 37–50. 14 Critiques of the persisting orthodox jazz canon and historical narrative include Gary Tomlinson, ‘‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies,’’ in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed.