| Billy Taylor Solo Years ago, Whitney Balliet of The New Yorker got to
the essence of jazz by calling it the “sound of surprise.” Not only the
listeners experience the surprises. The musicians also surprise themselves.
Or, as Bix Biederbecke told Jimmy McPartland, “One of the things I like about jazz,
kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?”
For musicians, the surprises come throughout
their careers. Pee Wee Russell was astounded that he could still play with Thelonious
Monk. And on a record date I did, Charles Mingus was delighted to find no generation
gap between him and Roy Eldridge when it came to finding a deadly swinging groove.
 This recording
is another jazz surprise — an exhilarating one. Billy Taylor, both in speech
and music, is extraordinarily and consistently lucid. That’s why, in speech, he
has long been the nonpareil jazz educator — through his profiles of musicians on
CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning, and his various appearances on National Public Radio.
As for his playing — often in a trio context
— it is unerringly logical, unfailing coherent, and always cohesive. But, as
I’ve discovered in this solo album, there is another startling dimension to
Billy’s music when he is free to plumb the improvisational depths of his imagination
in conversation with himself.
There has never been any question about
Billy’s technical capacities. But here, liberated from all constraints so that
he can be entirely himself, Billy plays with a joy of self-discovery on swingers that is
infectious. It brought to mind and feeling the “ticklers”: — the
two-handed-plus pianists who played the eastern seaboard many decades ago. Players
like Lucky Roberts and Willie “The Lion” Smith who also didn’t need support
to create memorable designs of desire, cascading pleasures and, of course, constant
surprises.
Moreover, on ballads here, Billy plays with a
subtle, gently probing romanticism that is never sentimental and thereby is all the
more penetrating.
 A key test for a solo jazz performance is
the quality of swinging. Can the player maintain the flowing pulse — however it
changes form — throughout the session? Billy — with a trio and in other
settings — has always had true jazz time; but here, in mobile space that is all his
own, he swings with more ease, liveliness, and resilience than ever before.
And having been liberated in time and conception,
he makes the standard songs in the set sound as if he were playing them for the first
time.
I know that Billy is seventy-five, but I
can’t think of him as a septuagenarian. He still has the energy of youth and
his music shows no sings of diminishing in vitality. And listening to the solo set
is being in the presence of an improvisational force that transcends any stereotype about
age.
It is worth emphasizing that, as Billy tells me,
“all the takes are totally improvised.” And that, of course, provides here the
constant excitement of these performances.
His personality, his musical personality,
— as he recognizes — come through more clearly in his solo adventures.
For this listener, the Billy Taylor that emerges here was a surprise — a daring
risk-taker who has absorbed the entire jazz tradition but now breaks through as an
immediately identifiable personal force.
I hope there will be future Billy Taylor sets on
Arkadia, including perhaps a tribute to the “ticklers” — Lucky Roberts,
Willie “The Lion” Smith and their later progeny, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington.
I can also imagine Billy, alone, in a set of Ellington compositions — and in a set of
his own works.
Billy continues to have a rich and
extraordinarily varied career, but I think that now, with this solo set, the springtime of
Billy Taylor has begun
—Nat Hentoff for Arkadia Jazz |
ARKADIA JAZZ