Canadian "Jazz World" reviews "Out of Nowhere".

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"...