Ben Waxman of Canadian jazz magazine "Jazz World"
reviews my book on Mike Taylor inside a bigger review also dedicated to
one other book - "Beyond Jazz: plink, plonk & scratch; the golden
age of free music in London 1966-1972" by Trevor Barre (Compass
Press).
The complete text is available at http://www.jazzword.com/one-review/?id=128886
About "Out of Nowhere" he writes:
"Out Of Nowhere, the Uniquely Elusive Jazz of Mike Taylor is an exhaustive near hagiography tracing the brief career of a British pianist whose career began and ended in the 1960s and whose particular music and short life characterized all that was good and bad about the improvised and overall music scene during that representative decade".
"(...) Pianist Mike Taylor’s will-o-wisp career intersected slightly
with the Free players lionized in Barre’s book but his career was more
mainstream and ultimately tragic. Taylor (1938-1969), was a jobbing
pianist and composer who, in the early 1960s, was working on a synthesis
of Bill Evans’ and Horace Silver’s keyboard-centric sound with European
notated music and aiming towards creating a unique sound. While he did
play at the SME and Incus Records-affiliated hangout The Little Theatre
club, it was just one of the many pubs, clubs and concerts at which he
found work until, drug dependency, mental illness and finally suicide by
drowning in the Themes river, curtailed a promising career. Besides
Taylor’s sidemen were less singular in their pursuits than the committed
British improvisers. Like teenage girls in a clothing store, they tried
many genres of music on for size – dance band, Blues, R&B, and
studio work as well as Jazz. Some, including drummer Ginger Baker and
bassist Jack Bruce who formed Cream; drummer John Hiseman who led
Colosseum; and saxophonist/organist Graham Bond; went on to a form of
Rock stardom.
Luca Ferrara’s exhaustive, if somewhat plodding, volume tries to
piece together the shards of Taylor’s life. The initially fastidiously
dressed pianist, who also had a day job as a salesman, was notoriously
uncommunicative about his art even to fellow musicians who played his
knotty compositions and arrangements. Following the breakup of his
marriage, coupled who a general lack of recognition for Jazz in what
become Beat Music obsessed London, Taylor, whose only previous deviation
from then straight life was consumption of marijuana was transformed
Jekyll-and-Hyde-like into a hippie-LSD freak. More-than-daily Acid trips
turned his standoffishness into non-communication, his appearance to
that of a tramp with unkempt hair and beard and barefoot, and his
instrument of choice a broken clay drum. Ferrara has combed through as
many of the official documents, contemporary media and interviews with
Taylor’s friends and fellow musicians, most notably Hiseman, bassist Ron
Rubin and as many others as he could find, to build this published
monument.
Unfortunately like that Gertrude Stein said about Oakland,
California, “there is no there there” could also apply to Taylor’s
non-musical life. Someone whose demand for complete control led to him
exactingly capture his own scores on self-drawn score paper – and whose
mental problems led him to toss his scores into the garbage can near the
end of his life – the pianist would brook no compromises. By
happenstance some scores were rescued by a passing friend. Taylor’s two
LP releases, now collector’s items that change hands for hundreds of
pounds, were recorded only through the enthusiasm of
engineer/producer/studio owner Denis Preston, and once the pianist
became immersed in the drug-hippie-psychosis-homeless culture it was
only Rubin who secured him a few gigs where he frequently didn’t show
up, wouldn’t play or merely mumbled at the few audience members.
Ironically, as the author points out, even though the Taylor band
opened for Ornette Coleman at one well-remembered London concert, what
renown the pianist has now is related to happenstance. Three of his
co-compositions were included in rock band Cream’s best-selling Wheels
of Fire two-LP set, making his name a footnote for obsessive Brit-Rock
collectors. Drummer Baker, who is listed as co-composer, had played with
Taylor. More crucially, the all-star British New Jazz Orchestra,
directed by Neil Ardly, recorded three of Taylor’s compositions on LP in
1968 and 1970 which fit seamlessly among the other Jazz classics on the
disc. Of course the orchestration was by Ardly from Taylor’s original
lines; with a similar job done on the dozen Taylor tunes that made up
2007’s Mike Taylor Remembered session, the scores of some were those
rescued from incineration.
Out of Nowhere encompasses the virtues of oral history: dogged
research, exhaustive detailing and reproduction of key items in Taylor’s
life and music. But it also includes most of the genre’s many faults:
repetition of too much minutia; reliance on suppositions from various
sources without strong enough editorial judgment; inflation of minor or
everyday episodes to life-altering experiences; and the usual sloppy
foot-noting, imprecise language and fear of excising extraneous details
that plagues labors of love such as this one. For what it is, the story
clips along at a racehorse-like gallop and provides details otherwise
ignored in music books dedicate to famous players. But in the end
nostalgia for, obsession with, or knowledge of that particular epoch in
British music would aid in appreciating the book".
Apart
my name wrongly written (many years ago I wrote a book with the
pseudonym of Chino Ferrara...), I really appreciate the frankness and
the depth of this review. And even if negative about some aspects
of the writing, I'm really proud the journalist states that my book
"encompasses the virtues of oral history": this was one of the aims of
this project.
The other one was to try "to
piece together the shards of Taylor’s life"...
