Evergreens - Billy Taylor

 

All The Things You Are

Evergreens

The Billy Taylor Trio

Produced by Creed Taylor

Engineering by Rudy Van Gelder

Cover Photography by Alan Fontaine

Cover Design by Bob Crozier

ABC-Paramount ABC-112

Recorded February, 1956

Billy Taylor - Piano

Percy Brice - Drums

Earl May - Bass

From the back cover: Jazz has never been a predictable music. It is not really surprising, then, that there should suddenly be more modern jazz pianists than there were heady sonneteers in Elizabethan England. Their names are legion. Their styles, however, like those of most modern jazz musicians, are not. Scratch them, and one finds, like clams in the mud, the queer, solid shells of Thelonius Monk or Bud Powell. One also finds, in discouraging measure, an iron sophistication that disguises, in varied degree, ugliness, ineptness, barreness, and timidity. Sophistication, these days, is rarely synonymous with emotion. Further, it is difficult at any time to project jazz emotion through the piano. As a result, much modern jazz piano is riblike and cold. It is, in fact, like a greenhouse in the sun: glassy and blinding, but, at the same time, hollow, transparent, and quickly conductive. Some among these mechanized gypsies are, of course, honest and highly creative souls. One is Billy Taylor.

Taylor, perhaps more than any, runs almost directly counter-stream to contemporary jazz pianistry. Where much of it is sullen and chrome-bound, he is gentle and economical. Where it dis plays a sad ignorance of piano tradition (both classical and jazz), Taylor has written deft, comprehensive piano instruction books on dixieland piano, boogie woogie, and ragtime piano. Again, where modern jazz piano is largely a ululation of Powell and Monk, Taylor's style speaks of Tatum, Waller, Hines, Nat Cole, as well as Powell and Monk. Finally, where most modern pianists consider immaterial such fundamentals as the sound of their instrument and how it should be struck, Taylor continues to study with Richard McClanahan, a pupil of Tobias Mathay and the teacher of Dame Myra Hess, who approaches the keyboard as if it were a moth's wing.

Taylor's style is deceptive. Primarily, one is struck by his delicately round sense of touch, which is equalled, perhaps, only by Nat Cole, Bengt Hallberg, and Hank Jones. Immediately apparent, as well, is his adoption, on his improvised passages, of a Tatum-Powell single-note attack. More puzzling is the fact that Taylor has been appreciated both at the Copacabana and Birdland. One reason for this is that, superficially, his style is unshouting and melodically kind to the ear, and as fresh in sound as pebbles being dropped into a fish bowel. Furthermore, his planed, cocktail-seeming attack contains for those willing to listen one of the most inventive improvisational minds in jazz. On a fast tune, for example, Taylor's creative intelligence works so rapidly that he can construct in one breath a new and uninterrupted melodic line that sometimes stretches for half a chorus or more. In itself, this would of course be a useless feat (cf. Clifford Brown, Art Tatum, Buddy Rich) if the ideas were not as cohesive and logical as the clapboards on a frame house. At the same time, his left hand, unlike the dead, dust- covered appendage that lies over so much of the landscape of modern jazz piano, continually frames countering or supportive chords, or, more rarely, a completely separate, non-contrapuntal melodic line. (This is still an experimental device, and can be heard here on All The Things You Are.) On slow tempos, Taylor's sausage-machine approach is considerably modified. The phrases are shorter, and often, because there is more time for intensity highly eloquent. (Taylor occasionally drowns in his own great good taste. For his long, exquisitely modelled lines once in a while take on a kind of garrulous, compulsive quality. Tayior's rhythmic approach is equally subtle. Although it rarely has the tobogganing drive of Tatum or Billy Kyle, it is so controlled that he can slip abruptly but without pause from a long, staccato-like series of notes into a run and back to the staccato, or from the staccato to a phrase that heel-drags at the beat, giving one the pleasant effect of having seen a perfect platoon suddenly skip, change step, skip again, and resume its step. His left hand, as well, is replete with off beats, various accents, and strong underpinning rhythms that provide a striking contrast to the creamy right hand.

Billy Taylor, at thirty-four, is a slight, handsome, well put together man who wears heavy horn-rimmed glasses, neither smokes nor drinks, has a formidable set of teeth, a noticeably well-modulated voice, and a first-rate intelligence. He has, too, an infectious sense of humor, humility and talks as he plays with ease, clarity, and knowledge. "This is something I have never been able to explain to myself," he will say typically. "I like Bartok. You'd never know it from my playing. The reason is, that as much as I like him, I have never been able to assimilate him into what I do. Yet, Bach, Mozart, and Debussy have auto- matically become a part of my jazz thinking. Don Shirly takes a block of Ravel and puts it in the middle of his My Funny Valentine and builds on it, using it as a basic motif. Sounds good, but to me, anyway, it's kind of like cheating. You've got to stay somewhere near the tradition. To do that, of course, you have to know the tradition. Until recently, Randy Weston had never even heard a Jelly Roll Morton record. But the minute you open these new avenues to a musician, it's like a stream flowing in. I saw this happen years ago to Thelonius and Bud Powell. Mary Lou Williams took them in hand. One of the things she made them aware of was touch. On some of Powell's most recent records the sound is so much better. She used to sit down with both of them and say, Now, this is the way it goes.' She's helped more young musicians than anyone."

In addition to being a mellifluous talker, Taylor is a talented and fluent composer with some three hundred tunes to his credit. He has acted on the legitimate stage and on television, lectured on music at schools and colleges, and last summer was one of the most articulate members of the second jazz panel at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Taylor, briefly, was born in Greenville, North Carolina. His father was a dentist and a choir conductor, and an uncle played the organ and sang. After trying a number of instruments, he settled on the piano, playing his first professional job when he was thirteen at a "real dive" called Harry's Bluebird Inn outside of Washington, D. C., where his family moved shortly after his birth. He attended Virginia State College, graduating with a Bachelor of Music. Shortly after this, he moved to New York. On the evening he arrived he was heard uptown by Ben Webster, and two days later was a member of his quartet at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street. Before forming his own trio, he went on to work with a Burke's Peerage of jazz that included Sid Catlett, Gillespie, Don Redman, Oscar Pettiford, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker, and so forth. (In the Forties, there was still a good deal of jamming and sitting-in going on all over New York. Taylor believes that the eventual breakdown of this custom is one reason why there is so little individuality among young jazz mus- icians; jamming, as well as big-band experience, was a trying-out where jazzmen listened to one another, learned, and separated the men from the boys.)

Half of the ten selections here, all of which are standards, are ballads, and half in medium or up tempo. The trio itself is the same with the exception of Percy Brice, who replaced Charley Smith on drums about a year ago as the one originally formed some four years ago. It is a tightly relaxed unit that uses its ensemble passages more for recharging episodes and jumping-off points than for bookends. It is also a mildly intricate group that experiments a good deal with Cuban rhythms and with, for example, 6/8 time against 4/4 (All The Things You Are). The trio, as it appears on this LP, is loose enough to allow several bass solos by Earl May and a few brush passages by Brice, who reveals himself as a sensitive, gritty drummer.

A mature, responsible musician thoroughly grounded in the techniques, history, and aesthetics of his music, Taylor is what many "geniuses" never are – a continually inspired, creative performer who plays his instrument with the understanding and beauty it deserves. – Whitney Balliett, The Saturday Review

Cheek To Cheek
It's Too Late Now
I Only Have Eyes For You
Then I'll Be Tired Of You
All The Things You Are
But Not For Me
You Don't Kown What Love Is
Satin Doll
More Than You'll Know
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea