In The Brewing Luminous: Chapter 3 Excerpt

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I am currently writing In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music Of Cecil Taylor for publication by Wolke Verlag in 2024. Here’s an excerpt from the first draft of the third chapter. (To read the full excerpt, become a paid subscriber for $5 a month/$50 a year.) Everything you read is subject to change, but this is where things stand right now.

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In July 1957, George Wein booked Taylor and his quartet to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. They played in the afternoon on Saturday, July 6, and were welcomed to the stage by Newport announcer Willis Conover, who hosted jazz programs for the Voice of America, the US government’s international radio broadcasting service. Restraining themselves, Taylor, Lacy, Neidlinger and Charles played three tunes in just over 25 minutes. Two of them were new original compositions, while the third was a version of the Billy Strayhorn composition “Johnny Come Lately.”

That piece, first recorded by Duke Ellington in 1942, is a bouncing, uptempo vamp with a short solo piano intro — played by Strayhorn, not Ellington, on the original recording. The primary soloists are the trombonists Lawrence Brown — with whom Taylor worked briefly, remember, in the early 1950s — and Tricky Sam Nanton. It’s a sharp-elbowed piece that anticipates the charging energy of bebop and hard bop to come, and it’s no surprise that Taylor would have been drawn to it. (Having overcome the deliberate rejection of Ellington discussed in Chapter 1, he clearly by this point had a deep love of his early 1940s work; in 1960, he would record “Jumpin’ Punkins,” and in our conversation in 2016 would cite “Main Stem” as a crucial piece of jazz history.)

Taylor’s performance at Newport was recorded, and released on one side of an LP on Verve Records, simply titled At Newport. The other side contained a set from the previous afternoon by the Gigi Gryce-Donald Byrd Jazz Laboratory, a group featuring Gryce on alto sax, Byrd on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Wendell Marshall on bass, and Osie Johnson on drums. It’s interesting to contrast Conover’s response to the two groups. When introducing the Gryce-Byrd quintet, who play straightforward hard bop, he’s effusive and discursive, giving information about the members — Donald Byrd had recently left Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Wendell Marshall was a substitute bassist in place of Milt Hinton, and Gryce was “continuing to write freshly and interestingly, and to feature himself on alto sax.” When called upon to introduce Taylor’s quartet, meanwhile, he says nothing but “The Newport Jazz Festival presents the music of the Cecil Taylor Quartet.” He doesn’t even announce the musicians until the performance is over, though to his credit he doesn’t stumble over Buell Neidlinger’s name.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Taylor says before they start. “For the first tune, we’d like to play Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Johnny Come Lately,’” notably citing the composer, rather than Ellington, under whose name the record was of course released.