Avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor amazes

Cecil Taylor has been an integral part of the development of jazz and avant garde music since the early 1950s and he has always been somewhat of an enigma. His concert at Warner Concert Hall on Thursday night was a jigsaw puzzle of sounds, rhythms and spoken word performance that could not be put together by lining up the edges or matching up all pieces of the same color.

Oberlin residents were incredibly lucky to have the chance to experience Taylor's music. His performance was not just a concert in the traditional sense of the word, but a philosophical journey into social, personal and, of course, musical realms that carried some listeners to new realms of being.

The audience, forced to extend primordial feelers into uncharted territories, emerged from the almost two-hour concert in a collective tizzy, unable to find words to express their feelings, and yet ironically abuzz with their excitement.

Attempting to absorb such pure musical genius on a comfortable level would be impossible, and that is both the blessing and the curse of Taylor's music. Musical riddles flow out from under his fingers, screaming for individual interpretation; at the same time his music speaks with great passion.

He was playing Avant Garde music when John Coltrane was just beginning his career, Miles Davis was still playing straight ahead Bop, and Ornette Coleman hadn't even cut a record yet. It is uncomfortable to listen to Taylor's playing if one tries to relate to it on traditional levels. To understand where Taylor's music comes from, and more importantly, where it takes each individual listener, it must be dealt with on Taylor's own terms, which are cryptic at best. But that's half the fun.

On a definitive level, Taylor's musical influences include such diverse names as Ellington, Basie, Lennie Tristano, Miles Davis, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok and Iannis Xenakis. Growing up on Long Island, he learned classical and jazz piano, took percussion lessons with members of the New York Philharmonic, attended New York College of Music and, a few years later, the New England Conservatory.

Although Taylor's training definitely influenced his technical style, the core of his music - the part that left people utterly amazed as they left the concert - came from somewhere deep inside this little man with long, silver dreadlocks. A musical Yoda, he acts as a sort of spiritual guide encouraging people to recognize their individuality in a historical and communal context.

Taylor is in the midst of giving a series of master classes in conjunction with his concert. The first, held in Warner on Wednesday was a combination of spoken word poetry, social criticism and a brief question and answer session in which Taylor addressed most of his own questions. In the course of Wednesday's master class, when asked about the specifics of his own musical process, he refused to answer, saying that everyone operates on their own terms by making and living by their own rules. These rules, he continued, are born from a mixture of our own personal experiences and from each person's unique genetic makeup.

Thursday's master class, also in Warner, was of a more traditional sort in which students played for Taylor and then received feedback in the following discussion. Taylor was concerned with the performers musical intentions and improvisatory practice methods and especially with the ways in which each individual expressed his or her own unique "magic." Taylor went on to say, "In the center of the nothing is the ability to make magic - which is the opposite of logic...One must be alive...You can't get by without knowing how to improvise, how to have intimate conversations with every muscle in your body."

Many who attended the master class were frustrated by the unconventional presentation. Those musicians expecting to come and play music for a master of the avant-garde were surprised to find the hour spent caught up in a discourse by Taylor on thermodynamic skeletal structures, DNA's architectural relationship to I-beams, Quetzalcoatl, birth, creation, instinct, dance, African Mysticism and Bill Clinton.

Thursday's concert was presented in a musical language that was, at first, hard for many to comprehend. A virtual wall of sound emanated from the piano and often seemed to have no definite source and no final destination. But as the concert progressed over a period of two hours, there developed some kind of understanding between performer and audience; Taylor's performance style did not change, but the audience's way of listening to him did.

Taylor wove multiple melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and noises together in sounds that ranged from symphonic to extraordinarily delicate. His sense of balance within and between phrases seemed to be completely natural and followed some inner pendulum, constantly weighing sound against sound and matching technical prowess with spontaneity.

Taylor's energy never flagged once during the course of the performance - hard for any performer, but considering that Taylor is over sixty years old - an amazing feat. His music, while it may not have spoken to every person in attendance, carried across an unstoppable enthusiasm for music and for life.