Interview With Gregg Bendian

Re: In Florescence

I am currently writing In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music Of Cecil Taylor for publication by Wolke Verlag in 2024. I’m in the middle of dealing with the late ’80s and early ’90s, so this week’s paid-subscribers-only newsletter is related to Taylor’s last major-label recording, 1990’s In Florescence, recorded with bassist William Parker and percussionist Gregg Bendian for A&M Records.

In Florescence was one of a series of jazz albums shepherded by executive producer Steve Ralbovsky and producer John Snyder. These included two by Sun Ra (Blue Delight and Purple Night), Don Cherry’s Art Deco and Multikulti, and the final studio session by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, One For All, recorded just six months before the drummer’s death. All featured clean but very ’80s type treatments and full-color portraits of the artists, often against a white background; Taylor is seated in a leopard-print chair, wearing a sort of ski sweater with a complex blue and purple pattern over a black turtleneck and staring at the camera like a sated cat, long thin dreadlocks falling across his neck and shoulders, his trademark sunglasses missing.

The album is unlike anything else in Taylor’s catalog in that it contains 14 tracks, some of them just one minute long. Many feature him reading a few lines of his poetry (the music was recorded in June, the poetry in September), and both Bendian and Parker get solo tracks, and the final piece is an improvisation with all three members credited as co-composers. It’s a beautifully recorded album — it was taped at RCA’s studio on 44th Street — and really should be given much more consideration, within the context of Taylor’s overall body of work, than it is. Bendian’s contributions are particularly fascinating, because he functions more as a classical/new music percussionist than a jazz drummer, and this moves the music into a whole other dimension. It’s not on Spotify or Tidal, but you can find it on CD, and someone’s put it on YouTube, so check it out.

Below the paywall, I’m including a portion of an hour-long conversation I had with Gregg Bendian about this album, and his time with Cecil Taylor — not just playing in his band, but going to movies and dance performances and jazz clubs with him, too. I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did.