Last night on the way home I called Cecil Taylor. I know him from back in the 70s. His manager James Spicer had been a friend of mine until the silver-haired impresario ripped off my unemployment checks.
"Who's this?" Cecil answered the phone.
I told him who and he said, "What's it like out there?"
"Cold and white." The snowstorm was picking up forced. Three inches of snow were covering the sidewalks of Fort Greene and the forecast was more a total accumulation of a foot.
"Sounds like Alabama in the winter." The maestro of free jazz cackled with delight. "Why don't you come over and we'll drink something? I got a bottle ready to go."
"I'll be there in a few minutes." I was standing at the foot of his stairs. His house is the last on the block to withstand the renovation sweeping the neighborhood.
I climbed to the door and waited several minutes before Cecil unlocked the gate.
"Nice dress."
"I don't have to impress anyone at my age." Cecil was wearing a saggy sweater and a sheet of fabric wrapped around his waist like he was a sorcerer shed of his magic robes. He poked his head into the weather. "Doesn't look I missed anything. Come one inside."
His arthritis had been bothering him, but I was happy to see the ancient imp nimble up the creaking stairs to his drafty living room.
"You know what I like about this place. It reminds me of my old farmhouse in Brighton. I had the top floor. THere was no heat. Only the breeze through the windows, but New York is never as cold as Boston." My old hometown was supposed to have three feet of the white stuff by morning.
"Once I left New England Conservatory, I never lived up north, although long time this tap dancer hired me for a gig in Toronto. His regular sideman was sick and a friend said I was the best. We drove up there in a snowstorm. It must have taken a day. We get up there and this tap dancer who never heard me play before is disappointed by my style."
I opened the bottle of rose champagne and poured us each a glass.
"At the beginning of the set he tells the crowd, "I could have had Oscar Peterson, but instead I have Cecil. After the next song he says I could have had Art Tatum, but we have Cecil. I had heard enough and left the tap dancer on the stage. I went to the hotel and found his stash, taking enough money for a flight back to New York. The next day he called asking for his money and I said, "You don't have your money and you don't have Cecil Taylor."
We clinked glasses and laughed at this tale from the 50s. My host cackled with pleasure.
Cecil was his best audience and I was his captive, as he mazed through his life with each name twisting open another facet of the kaleidoscope; Miles, Trane, Dizzy, the 55 club, getting paid $7 to play in Harlem, a female tap dancer losing her wig during a performance and putting it back on her head without missing a beat, Chet Baker hitting the notes that Miles skipped, complimenting Horace Silver, James Brown, Dave Van Ronk and cocaine.
I might have said two hundred words in the course of his trackless trajectory across the decades.
Sometimes keeping my mouth shut is the only way to open my ears to something new from the Here-Before.
I left around 9 and reached the Fort Greene Observatory before the second phase of the storm hit the city.
Upstairs in my bedroom I put on BAMSHA SWING. I love the spacing and the near-collapse of the rhythm section from bar to bar.
To hear this tune, please go to the following URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AFf8HpVFuw
