And why should anyone care? Biographies are the lives of others. Children read the illustrated biographies of famous musicians, who are always child prodigies, possessed by a mysterious genius. They understand the music of the birds and fall asleep to the murmur of streams. The obstacles that stand in the way of their careers are not placed there by reality but by the story’s didactic design. These lives are strikingly similar to those of the saints: persecution and martyrdom are the instruments of triumph. Because all the saints have succeeded. And not only the saints and the child prodigies: all the subjects of biographies have succeeded; they have won the competition. Of the numberless people who have lived, History saves only the winners, even when it is inspired by a humanitarian moralism. Because of their essential banality and their immutable conventions, these life stories don’t remain in the memory for long (they end up blurring into one another), but that doesn’t prevent them from distorting it, inserting definitive, iridescent slides that go from point A to point B, and then from B to C, and when the lights go out, the points are illuminated; they are the beautiful souls who have risen to heaven to make up constellations and horoscopes. How could we regard those books with anything but suspicion, especially since they were and are the fundamental nourishment of our past and future puerilities? “Before” there is the future success; “after,” its delicious rewards, all the more delicious for having been the object of remarkably punctual prophecies.
Let us examine a particular case, to refine the demonstration. For example, one of the great musicians of our time, whose existence is unquestionable. Cecil Taylor. Born into jazz, he remained faithful to its outward forms: the clubs and bars and festivals at which he performed, the instrumental groups he put together, even the odd vague (or inexplicable) declaration of an influence (Lennie Tristano, Dave Brubeck). But his originality transcended musical categories. His thing was jazz, but any other kind of music too, broken down into its individual atoms and reassembled, like one of those celibate machines that produced the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century. According to the legend, Cecil made the first atonal jazz recording, in 1956, two weeks before Sun Ra independently arrived at the same result. (Or was it the other way around?) They didn’t know each other, nor did they know Ornette Coleman, who was doing similar work on the other side of the country. Which goes to show that beyond the genius or inspiration of those three individuals (and Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy, and who knows how many others), causation was operating at some higher level.
That level is History, and History has an important role to play, because it allows us to interrupt the infinite series that are generated by the art of thinking. This is how interruption loses its false prestige and its insufferable preponderance. It becomes frivolous, redundant, and trivial, like a muffled cough at a funeral. But its very insignificance gives birth to Necessity, which makes the rule of History manifest. Interruption is necessary, though it may be a momentary necessity, and the moment itself is necessary too, and often sufficient, which is why we say that a moment is “all it takes.”
In the end, biographies are literature. And what counts in literature is detail, atmosphere, and the right balance between the two. The exact detail, which makes things visible, and an evocative, overall atmosphere, without which the details would be a disjointed inventory. Atmosphere allows the author to work with forces freed of function, and with movements in a space that is independent of location, a space that finally abolishes the difference between the writer and the written: the great manifold tunnel in broad daylight. . Atmosphere is the three-dimensional condition of regionalism, and the medium of music. Music doesn’t interrupt time. On the contrary.
1956. In New York City, there lived a man named Cecil Taylor, a black musician, not yet thirty years old, a technically innovative pianist, a composer and improviser steeped in the century’s popular and highbrow traditions. Except for half a dozen musicians and friends, no one knew or could understand what he was doing. How could they have understood? It lay beyond the scope of the predictable. In his hands the piano was instantly transformed into a free compositional method. The so-called “tone clusters” that he employed in his evanescent writing had already been used by the composer Henry Cowell, but Cecil took the procedure further, complicating the harmonies, systematizing the atonal sound current into tonal flows, producing unprecedented results. The speed of it, the interplay of different mechanisms, the insistence, the built-in resistances, the repetitions, the series, everything, in short, that contributed to the turn away from traditional harmonic structure erected majestic, airy ruins, on the far side of any recognizable melody or rhythm.
He lived in a modest sublet apartment, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The place was rife with black mice, and there was a floating population of cockroaches. Doors ajar, the routine promiscuity of an old apartment building with its narrow stairs and its radios playing. That was the kind of atmosphere. He slept there through the morning and part of the afternoon, and went out at dusk. He worked in a bar that was part of the scene. He’d already made a record (Jazz Advance) for a small independent label, which hadn’t distributed it. A date to play in the bar, which for various reasons hadn’t worked out, had given him the idea of asking for work, and he’d been there for a few months, washing dishes. He was waiting for offers to play in places that had a piano. Given the number of night spots with live music in the city at the time, and the constant turnover of famous and unknown performers, opportunities were bound to come up. It was a time of renewal; there was a hunger for novelty.
He knew, of course, that because of the demanding and radical nature of his art, he could forget about being suddenly or even gradually discovered, his reputation spreading like ripples when a stone falls into a pond. He wasn’t that naïve. But he was perfectly justified in hoping that sooner or later his talent would be acclaimed. (There’s a truth here, and an error: it’s true that now he is celebrated all around the world, and those of us who have listened to his records for years, gaping in admiration, would be the last to question that; but it’s also fairly easy — almost too easy, in fact — to demonstrate that there’s an error in the reasoning. It could, of course, be objected that such a demonstration is no more than a flight of literary fancy. Which is true, but then it’s also true that stories, once they’re imagined, acquire a kind of necessity. A strange and rare kind, whose strangeness has an influence, in turn, on the imagined story. The story of the prostitute who distracted the cat wasn’t necessary in itself, which doesn’t mean that the virtual series of all stories is unnecessary as a whole. The story of Cecil Taylor calls for the illustrative mode of the fable; the details are interchangeable, and atmosphere would seem to be out of place. But how can we hear music except in an atmosphere, since the sounds are transmitted by air?)