Posted on Marlbank Web site (read here) on July 3oth, 2015, this is the first review on the Web:
"Mike Taylor drowned in January 1969. He was just 30 years old. What the pianist achieved during his brief career, notably the albums Pendulum and Trio, continues to resound with new generations discovering his music for the first time as does the mysterious and often sad story of the part he played in the British jazz scene of the 1960s.
This is the first biography of the pianist and unearths a good deal of detail little known to today’s jazz world. The foreword deals with the harsh facts of the death of Taylor and jumps into what the book’s author Luca Ferrari terms the pianist’s “secret pain” quoting friends who begin to reveal what they thought of the mysterious pianist who relate even the “fiasco” of the funeral. A morbid tale then at the outset, at some considerable remove from sentimental fandom, Ferrari even discusses the Taylor gravestone scrutinising the poetic epitaph with its promise that “my life/Is More than my action,” something, however cryptically, history seems to have borne out given Taylor’s posthumous regard.
This book, not huge in length, is packed full of carefully gathered research, and surely will drive the legend that bit more no matter how hard the Taylor records still prove to find in their enduring position of stubborn rarity.
The first chapter sees a track back to the famous Ornette Coleman 1965 Croydon concert that Taylor’s quartet provided the support act for. Despite the sense of occasion bad luck dogged the pianist – a review in one magazine even got his surname completely wrong.
Born in Ealing in 1938, his father an accountant in the family wallpaper and paint firm who died when Taylor was just three years old, his mother Mary passing away three years after her husband, the orphaned Taylor and his siblings were brought up by their grandparents. After national service, by the early-1960s, Taylor now married, was listening to Bill Evans and Art Blakey records with friends, getting stoned a little, living in the suburban respectability of Twickenham, driving an Austin. Beginnning to jam on the London jazz scene in 1960-61 playing in places like the Nucleus coffee bar in Covent Garden improvising on standards and the blues Taylor would form a quintet, Ginger Baker becoming his first drummer. Taylor compositions would much later be performed by Cream on Wheels of Fire.
At this stage in his career Taylor was influenced by Horace Silver and Ferrari draws on the memories of friends and colleagues of Taylor’s at the time as he does throughout the book amassing a wealth of first hand accounts. Taylor’s piano and composing style, Ferrari writes, changes dramatically as it became a quartet, hard bop giving way to modal music, the modernism of the music analogous to the Paul Klee-like gig posters Taylor sometimes painted.
Chapter three deals with the making and subsequent release in 1966 of Pendulum an album that took a new look at jazz standards and mixed these with new Taylor tunes including one that was a tribute to Spanish guitarist Segovia. Lauded by Ian Carr who had introduced Taylor to producer Denis Preston as “a landmark in British jazz” the trumpeter and bandleader points to the lack of “old clichés” in the writing.
Worth reading particularly alongside Alyn Shipton’s Ian Carr biography Out of The Long Dark for more period flavour, Out of Nowhere could do with an index and a bibliography although there is a useful appendix and a slim discography. Besides Pendulum Taylor’s only other album as sole leader was 1967’s Trio an album Ferrari regards as “Taylor's masterpiece.” There are photos but they’re not brilliantly reproduced by today’s high quality standards and Ferrari gets a number of small things wrong – eg Radio 3 did not start until 1967: it was the Third programme when Jazz Record Requests played Taylor’s music – but not a lot that really jars although chapter five could certainly do with some judicious editing and there are a few too many passages where the wayward syntax makes the sense very unclear.
A sad tale, ultimately, Taylor’s life fell apart as his marriage collapsed and his consumption of LSD began to make his behaviour highly erratic, his once conventional lifestyle a distant thing of the past. “Barefoot and ragged and carrying a small drum,” was how writer Dave Gelly remembered seeing Taylor not long before his death, the decline a shock to all who knew him and loved his music so well.
Published by Gonzo Multimedia. Available from Amazon for around £10."
Details Category: Reviews Last Updated: Thu 30th Jul 2015 12:39:24
