Guidonian Hand

I’m taking a jazz history seminar class right now called “The Avant-Garde in Jazz.” Sounds pretty cool, right? For the most part, it is. However, one thing that constantly bugs me is the reactions from some of the less adventurous ears in the class. When established mainstream players like John Coltrane and Miles Davis started playing “out,” they were generally accepted, but when new musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor hit the scene when they had not already made names for themselves as mainstream players, they were rejected. People said, and some of my classmates still say, that they played crazy sounds on their instruments because they couldn’t play straight-ahead bebop.

I disagree. I think Cecil Taylor used the technique that he used because he wanted to make the sounds that he made, not the other way around. So what if Ornette Coleman couldn’t play “Giant Steps” like Coltrane? He wasn’t trying to do that. These are issues that the art world had been wrestling with for decades before this. Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian were painting representational art before they investigated abstract art, but others did not. Jackson Pollack got the same sniggers and raised the same eyebrows as Ornette. The question then arises: What does it mean to be a virtuoso? How do we measure virtuosity?

It’s not being able to play “Giant Steps” or paint a bowl of fruit better than anyone else in town. Virtuosity is having the technical facility to achieve your creative goals. Through technology, it’s becoming easier for people without advanced training to achieve their creative goals, and that is what scares traditional virtuosi so much. “Ornette didn’t pay his dues, man.” Forget the dues, he’d be playing bebop if he had paid his dues. He wants something else.

This definition of virtuosity is not without its problems. If the creative goals define virtuosity, why not set creative goals to what is readily achievable? After all the tears have been shed, the most positive result of the controversy of technique is that when virtuosity is made subjective — that is to say, considered in relation to artistic goals — the art itself becomes the primary subject of discussion. It no longer matters that Cecil Taylor can’t “play the changes,” so what do you think of his music? Virtuoso Bob Ross can paint happy trees all day, and I don’t care. Virtuoso Norman Rockwell can recreate “Leave it to Beaver” in as many permutations as he can think of, and Wynton Marsalis can relive 1940s New Orleans as long as he wants. I’m not moved. I don’t care how you say it, but please say something.

For your consideration, the music of Cecil Taylor: