Listening to Cecil a Cecil Taylor record from Japan. The concentration the variation. Listening to what isn’t happening. There are no scales in the ordinary sense being played and yet he is repeating musical ideas and they’re frequently amazing. The pleasure some pianists get out of creating landscapes that other pianists can’t figure out is overflowing in these pieces. How did that happen and how did that happen and how did he do that? Proving each time it was intentional. In 1988, I met him at soundcheck at the Bamboo. Thanks Mark Hundevad for telling me. Memorable handshake, strange fat stubby ends to his fingers. Never encountered since or before. The actual concert was stuffed with people shoulder to shoulder but it also felt like many were there for a circus attraction, the spectacle of the famous outside player. There was a sax player at the front whose reputation was for playing inside, he had another Heineken in his hand and was laughing too loudly when the second piece ended. Not the laughter of disbelief but of superiority. Where’s a cream pie when you need one? Broke one’s heart, in these later years before his death, to hear about him being ripped off by a contractor working on his house who he befriended, trusted. Having to go to court and fight fraud when you are elderly, in your eighties. There’s a Lao Tsu saying that nature doesn’t have a human heart. Makes me think the idea of a human heart is an invention, something to aspire to rather than something to assume exists objectively. Kindness isn’t natural, you have to choose to try knowing it. Way easier for me to remember that player with his Heineken as a moron who couldn’t get it, rather than suspend musical acumen. The bigger picture in Cecil’s work is that you have to find somewhere else to place any judgment in order to follow the meaning in these pieces.