Now What?: On Phil Freeman’s “In the Brewing Luminous” and J. Hoberman’s “Everything Is Now”

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At some point during Cecil Taylor’s 2016 residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Phil Freeman, critic, journalist, and author of the first ever Taylor biography, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, gifted the pianist Rihanna’s then newly released Anti. Freeman isa writer that bridges eras and styles, whether it’s on the Burning Ambulance blog he founded, or his work over at Stereogum, where, besides a monthly jazz column, one can also find him musing on the 20th anniversary of Metallica’s St. Anger. So, what could have been a cloying, empty gesture instead came freighted with purpose; one can only imagine the amount of unsolicited instrumental—and ostensibly “difficult”—music must have been proffered towards Taylor in his lifetime. 

Freeman’s Anti anecdote, deployed in the introduction of the biography, instantaneously brings the larger, contemporaneous world into focus. Taylor, born in 1929, was a titan of musical art who was still actively pursuing his interdisciplinary whims of piano, dance and poetry in the 2010s,so he very possibly did listen to “Love On the Brain” on compact disc. 

Our ideas of 20th century art, or at least how they’re packaged in our reissued boxset bonanza culture, build up its practitioners as exclusively singular entities, where collaborations and influences past and present are reappropriated to divorce a narrative from its larger movement. And when documents of a certain time and place are so woefully mangled, inaccessible, or just plain nonexistent, as is too often the case with so much of jazz,such hierarchical journalism proliferates. Freeman attempts a course-correction with In the Brewing Luminous, as does film critic J. Hoberman with his Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies and Radical Pop, a (loosely) year-by-year reconstruction of the eponymous decade’s maelstrom of independently enacted experimentation, subversion, transgression, terrorism and reactionary traditionalism. 

Hoberman, who wrote for The Village Voice for over three decades, trawls the alt-weekly archives for this latest book, a more termitic alternative to his pop/blockbuster-culture Found Illusions trilogy (Make My Day, Army of Phantoms, The Dream Life). The interconnectivity of these books—which chart various American political (d)evolutions across a midcentury history of the most superficially American industry, Hollywood!—are comparable to the muckraking fictions of, say, a Don DeLillo or James Ellroy. Hoberman’s narrative thrust as applied to criticism is admirable, but when it comes to discussing the movies themselves, the contextual erudition seems to circle an empty center. At its most disappointing, Found Illusions wields titles, directors, performers, etc. merely as guideposts.

Hoberman’s always been particularly attuned to the environment of artistic creation and presentation. This historian’s disposition is well suited for the epoch of Everything Is Now, wherein so much is instantaneous, ephemeral, and self-destructing. He gives exact addresses and crossroads for mythic happenings, cataloging a bygone city and plucking figures like Bob Dylan and Yayoi Kusama down from the rarified remoteness they may enjoy today. Among the early-60s boom of censorship-circumventing mimeographed magazines—LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima’s The Floating Bear; Ed Sanders’ Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts—he locates a 22 year old Dylan in the pages of Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen’s Broadside, produced out of the couple’s kitchen in the Frederick Douglass Houses on a mimeograph machine reputedly thrown away by the American Labor Party. Dylan uses this opportunity to satirize the fanatical John Birch Society from the perspective of a new recruit: “look out you Commies!”

That’s not until 1962, though; Everything Is Now sets the stage for the sixties in November, 1958, at the Hunter College Playhouse, where a panel held by the Brandeis University Club asks, “Is There a Beat Generation?” To signal the advent of a new underground, Hoberman wisely begins at a flashpoint for the previous generation: the Beats and coffeehouse culture (and Jack Kerouac, basking in the fame of On the Road) are introduced as to give scaffolding to the even more confrontational modes of art that are gestating, like John Cassavetes’ quasi-improvised dramatic film Shadows, or Jack Gelber’s abrasive, audience-baiting, drug-and-jazz play The Connection, staged by The Living Theater under the direction of Judith Malina. Thelonious Monk plays the Five Spot, the Beats impishly pal around in Pull My Daisy, Ornette Coleman releases The Shape of Jazz to Come on Atlantic Records. Unsurprisingly, Antonin Artaud emerges as a common denominator, his concept of a totalizing, constant art manifested in the durational and physical duress of so many of these works.

Cecil Taylor makes an appearance in this freshman class as well, credited by Hoberman, along with composer David Amram, as bringing in “painters from the Cedar,” a bar on Eighth and University that was overrun by gawkers of all slumming stripes by the late-50s. What Hoberman doesn’t mention is that Taylor inherited the Five Spot’s first official headlining slot, essentially scaring off variety show multinstrumentalist Dick Whitmore after a few nights as his accompanist, an essential detail in both the musician and the venue’s respective careers, which Freeman, like A.B. Spellman and Val Wilmer in their own miniaturized Taylor histories before him, have included (Hoberman, on the other hand, includes the potentially apocryphal tidbit of Max Roach socking Ornette Coleman on the jaw, which I’d hitherto never heard.)

Freeman, mercifully, is not exhaustive: “this book will not be a rigorous investigation into the quotidian details of Cecil Taylor’s life.” Its significance instead comes from it being a chronological study of his music, and thus, is much lighter on its feet than something like Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk doorstop. Freeman penetrates rather than envelopes; his description of Taylor’s childhood and adolescence is concise, but illuminating nevertheless, hinging on brief character studies of his parents, Percival, a source of parental love and communion, and Almeida, a proud, domineering—and even abusive—arbiter of young Cecil’s extracurricular passions, who died when he was just 14. 

Everything Is Now is similarly rapid-fire with its biographies. Hoberman’s hopscotches between subjects, enjambing  pieces of art that are at their most significant when they are also at their most haphazard. No one mentioned is exactly working towards the singular goal of a name-making gallery opening or a sold-out concert, and whatever is completed is subsequently reabsorbed into the artistic environment that produced it. Hoberman is frank when it comes to the failures and disasters, an attitude which comes to prove especially quite necessary when violence erupts, such as when The Living Theatre’s participatory Paradise Now hits its collective apex, capped by a stripping Allen Ginsberg in the audience, but devolves into literal sexual assault at later performances, as “intellectuals”, “wisecracks” and “fraternity boys,” titillated by rumors of orgiastic theater, bring the whole thing crashing down. Earlier, the most coffeehouse-crazed Beatniks can’t seem to muster up a position in rebuking the distaste of their chosen neighborhood while still acknowledging the locals (“South Village residents were not only agitated by tourists and visiting teenage hordes but publicity.”), opting for a paltry march led by singer Vardi Karni, during which they were pelted with garbage by bystanders. 

Elsewhere, the overlapping milieux are heartening. Hoberman maps how Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln premiere their Freedom Now Suite just a couple of blocks away from Bob Dylan opening for John Lee Hooker, and how Roach and Lincoln parlayed their live-performance rigor and resourcefulness into an unfortunately aborted production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks; later, he makes the obvious but nevertheless astonishing observation that for two nights, Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted Amira Baraka’s Slave Ship and Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, two gargantuan, overwhelming pieces of theater. In 1960, Boris Lurie, Ken Jacobs, Allan Kaprow, et al, reconstituted the tumbledown environment of downtown into their respectively strange confluences of painting, theater and film in half-basements and dilapidated lofts. Hoberman’s research is eager and generous in that he yields startling results from simply cross-referencing calendars and addresses. 

Freeman’s background in heavier (and whiter) music brought him first to the free jazz of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and he worked backwards from there. When he was but a neophytic free-jazz listener, Freeman published the 2001 New York underground jazz survey, New York Is Now: The New Wave of Free Jazz (everything really is Now!), and struck a posture of an eye-rolling recency-bias, using the word “tradition” as a cudgel, even if the profiles of David S. Ware, Charles Gayle, et al therein are nevertheless valuable for the time. His polemicism has since softened. He’s admitted as such, like in his Burning Ambulance piece on Charles Gayle’s, William Parker’s and Rashied Ali’s Touchin’ On Trane (1993): 

“When I first heard this album, in my mid-twenties, part of me wished the drums were louder, more aggressive—I thought a rock/metal approach would have driven the other two players into even more of a frenzy. And maybe that would have been true. But a) that wouldn’t have served the music, wouldn’t have created the suspended-in-air feeling that so much of this album has, even at its most fervid; and b) what the hell was I thinking?”

Taylor resisted the rock’n’roll critical parlance that had begun to be applied to jazz in the ‘70s and beyond, and Freeman follows suit, treating his subject with patience and love, tempering the awe that the casual listener will undoubtedly experience themselves. But as Taylor counted collaborations with Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams on his CV, mourned Bud Powell in the extended poem liner notes of Unit Structures (1966), and paid homage to the one and only Duke Ellington whenever he could, a certain basis of tradition is required. In the Brewing Luminous, wonderfully, is like a formalized expansion of a throwaway line in a list Freeman posted on Burning Ambulance in 2012, in regards to Clifford Brown & Max Roach’s self titled LP: “Not everything on this list is gonna be skronky or intense. If you can’t get with ‘Delilah,’ we can’t be friends.” Freeman welcomingly requests readers follow along throughout not only Taylor’s most far flung ventures—Baryshnikov! Free verse! Guttural chant circles! College professorship!—but his more classically-minded explorations as well. Stride piano inserted into a hurricane of percussive sound is as radical as another caterwauling noisemaker. 

Freeman has a gift of metaphor for the aurally inexplicable, even if his formula is easier to glean the more it’s employed. When describing one of Taylor’s many Berlin concerts, Freeman writes, “he seems to have beaten all the beauty out of the piano by this point, leaving shards of ivory on the floor.” When breaking down the dense, protean soundscape of Cecil Taylor Unit (1978), he describes softer unison passages as, “arising out of the overall storm of sound like rainbows arcing between thunderclouds.” Freeman singles out how on Conquistador! (1968) Taylor hovers “at the keyboard’s low end…meditating on repetitive, cellular phrases until they crack open like walnuts,” a stirring amalgamation of paradoxical simile and straitlaced music theory, which in of itself reflects the parallel paths of the pianist himself, from classical training to heretical bunkerbusting. 

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It’s fair to judge works of ambitious and impressive historical and biographical impetus by their omissions, even if both Freeman and Hoberman lobby for themselves in critic-proofing ways:the former with his disclaimer of glossing over the minutia of Cecil Taylor’s non-musical life, and the latter with the rather moving sendoff, wherein he states, “I consider [it] a memoir, although not mine.”

As Freeman is guided by a single musician, and his live and recorded output, In the Brewing Luminous doesn’t have the same pell-mell momentum as Everything Is Now, but on the other hand, there’s much less that gets lost. Hoberman’s omissions feel less accounted for, as the scope of his book opens up all sorts of avenues. Of course, the jazz obsessive writing this review wants more jazz, which isn’t exactly reasonable, but things in the realm of music get off to a shaky start when Hoberman, writing about The Connection, declines to mention that the score was commissioned from pianist Freddie Redd, who was mostly responsible for the musicians assembled in its initial run. Because The Living Theatre is tirelessly profiled throughout, Redd’s absence stings all the more. Jazz is merely ornamental to Hoberman’s nevertheless elucidating writing on experimental film and the like. And even if the MC5 and The Velvet Underground add stimulating color to some of the more gossipy intrigue originating from within and around Andy Warhol’s Factory, their respective sections won’t provide anything new for anyone who’s already read Please Kill Me or any Lester Bangs. 

The parameters of Hoberman’s avant-garde are perhaps ill-defined. He rightfully chronicles various run-ins with censorship at home and abroad, and yet Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, an outer-borough working class grand Guignol, is only referenced in passing, much less its tortured release history in the United Kingdom, effectively redefining censorship laws overseas; Selby was also a frequent visitor to the rehearsals of The Living Theatre, but you’d have to read David H. Rosenthal’s Hard Bop: Black Music 1955-1965 to know this. Manhattan is, disappointingly, the locus, so even when Grove Press is featured, Selby’s Bay Ridge neighbor and mentor, novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, isn’t—Sorrentino was the editor from 1965 to 1970 and, among other things, oversaw the publication of the unabridged The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a victory for an independent, avant-garde (!) press over cowardly corporate publishers like Doubleday. But then what about Little, Brown and Company’s gonzo subway-ad campaign for John A. Williams’ novel The Man Who Cried I Am? Not enough connective tissue with the literature of the Beats, I guess. 

While Hoberman’s book is being published by Verso in the United States, Freeman has no US publisher. In the Brewing Luminous can only be purchased from the German house Wolke Verlag, who’ve spent close to 50 years now publishing texts on experimental music and composition (among other things, they’re responsible for the most comprehensive biography of the impossibly versatile and ambitious saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton.) Wolke Verlag is not an inapt choice for the first ever Cecil Taylor biography, but that a Black American artist’s legacy seems otherwise dismissed by American publishers is impossible to ignore, and, remember, Taylor died only seven years ago. I am not suggesting that Hoberman is complicit, only that an overreliance on oft-discussed artists, however conceptually creative the framework, seems to be required for a book to actually be widely accessible in stores. 

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Everything Is Now functions as a collection of artists whose output is ephemeral and those who are securely memorialized and commemorated year after year. Many of the recurring names here—Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, are two prominent examples—have archives dedicated to their lives and work. The artistic-economic intermingling and cohabitation is charming, but the innate disparities are absent. As Freeman so affectingly points out near the end of his book, so much of Taylor’s extant physical work is in legal limbo; furthermore, there were never any written scores, and he frequently either declaimed his poetry or left written scraps behind in hotels, concert halls, bars, and so on. There were also clear incidences of parasitic elder abuse, and yet Taylor tinkered away as best he could. The play-by-play recounting of his final residency is a poignant reaffirmation of enduring, restless productivity. In keeping with Taylor’s abundant spirit, there’s so much music of his to experience, but it’s still not everything, and there’s the nagging suspicion that these projects will only be nominally extant without proper preservation or exhibition.