and how can I not?
Thursday 7 September 2006 | I like a cookie
Thanks for your feedback on our radio show of 9/7/06. The paradigm of group and collective improvisation represented by the brief passage to which you refer existed in pan-African and pre-historical African American sound production from the very beginning (viz., the New Orleans funeral march wherein polyphonic and polyrhythmic counterpoint manifested within an anti-Western methodology of collective improvisation). Since the Cecil Taylor group of 1961 was still hamstrung by the cultural forces of the day (playing “tunes,” maintaining a repetitive rhythmic motive, alternating the melody of a “tune” with extended solo statements in a “key,” staying somewhere within the scalar radius of a “tonal center”) the majority of the performance is only slightly ironic as an homage to Duke Ellington, where even the group improvisation before the final statement of the “tune” is largely derived from self-conscious “blues” tonalities. It is only Taylor’s relentless insistence on extended “harmonies” and highly syncopated rhythmic accents which herald the very beginnings of a return to the original anti-Western imperatives of African American music not determined by white aesthetic hegemony.
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