{"id":4631,"date":"2018-04-05T15:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=4631"},"modified":"2018-04-05T20:19:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T20:19:23","slug":"cecil-taylor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=4631","title":{"rendered":"Zen Koan Piano"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cecil Taylor, the man in the driver’s seat of modernity for decades, who is 89, I heard is ill today. First heard him at music school. Hard to believe there was a course on piano improvisation, thought it was only my secret hobby. The course was awesome, stayed after class to practice, lived and breathed it, slept in piano cubicles. The pieces and assignments were melodic but I had another secret, playing clusters and abandoning melody or the usual ideas of melody. It started one time when my parents were out of town. Definitely not something to do within earshot of my mother. When I found clusters I found a huge cavity of freedom, the kind of freedom you fantasize about reaching when doing the melodic work. Yesterday while teaching a student blues, someone struggling with patterns, I said you can also suspend all the melodic ideas and play free. Keep the rhythm internalized then return to it, and I demonstrated, he immediately understood. It changed his excitement for the work of what was going on in the first place. One night at York while working on my assignments, in the room with painful fluorescent lights and a baby grand Petrof, where there was a record collection for students to peruse, I put on a Cecil Taylor record, probably because of the groovy name, Cecil. Had no idea who he was. Wasn’t expecting my life to change but did for a couple reasons. First he was only playing clusters. There was no polite entry point, no melodic stairs to lead everyone up to a departure point. Pow. Started in the new land and didn’t leave. These were pieces and not easy to follow pieces, many listeners would dismiss it if they weren’t prepared to listen actively. Zen Koan piano. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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An even more extraordinary thing happened next, didn’t realize but it was a live recording. He stopped playing and a decent sized audience applauded. This whole recording had happened in public! Some involuntary tears, like realizing all my life I could speak Cantonese but never knowing it was an actual language with real people speaking, singing, living it.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cecil Taylor, the man in the driver’s seat of modernity for decades, who is 89, I heard is ill today. First heard him at music school. Hard to believe there […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[222],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-4631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-piano"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}