Taylor-Made Jazz Show

If there's a sine qua non-a must-have-for any art that dares greatness, it's the artist's commitment to their endeavor. Artists may be infamous bastards, vainglorious megalomaniacs, hopelessly self-absorbed, willfully arrogant, spacey, druggy, sullen or scary. But little, if anything, of lasting value comes from half-heartedness, hypocrisy or genuinely cynicism about one's own work.

Which is one reason pianist Cecil Taylor looms so hugely as an uncompromising American artist, mostly musical in affect and of the jazz world by choice, consensus and default. At age 73, Taylor is one of America's few fully committed independents in any medium, as grandly ambitious and deeply personal as whatever film-maker, novelist, poet, architect or empire builder one would name. He intends for every public performance, such as those with his 3 AHA trio during two nights at the Blue Note last week, to further amplify his 50 years of achievement, though that may be an end in itself.

Taylor is no hit-maker. He doesn't care about involving himself with any vernacular other than what he's concocted from his own resources, with which he means to turn the world his way.

As an instrumentalist Taylor stands alone, commanding more of the keyboard's vast melodic, rhythmic, percussive, timbral and dynamic potential than anyone else in jazz now or ever, including musicians he reveres such as Tatum, Ellington and Monk. He has devised and continuously developed a personal style that sets an incomparable standard of speed and density for a ten-fingered improviser. But he doesn't use that style to give his listeners repeatedly digestible tidbits within familiar structures backed by a winning smile. In fact, it's not a style that he has, as much as a unique way of playing that functions inseparably from its content, arriving at indisputably original form.

Forget about the pianists who tout pseudo-funky ostinatos and painfully wrought flights of tuneful preciosity, flash-of-the-hands' frothiness or sublimely polished, utterly conventional retreads of tradition-Taylor will have none of that. To him, it's just showiness which promises but seldom realizes anything substantially, majestically, heroically new. Listen instead to what he's stirred up, he'd urge if he deigned to urge. Instead, he growls, groans, moans, shouts letters of the alphabet as poetry and whines like a Mongolian throat-singer, then throws himself into engagement with his keyboard-and expects us to devote attention just as engaged, informed, immediate and virtuosic as his own to the task of listening to him.

It's no small demand, yet he has followers, I among them, who will pay for it as a pleasure, the effort being so rewarding. Hearing Taylor stretches one's mind. Despite his fearsome technique, these days he typically starts one of his uninterrupted hour-long sets quietly, reflectively, laying out a few notes as if they will be a theme to focus in on and explore. Just as their echo is dying, he starts to roll out rippling figures and plunging bass posts, harmonically distant yet evocative chords, and disturbing angular figures that seem completely unrelated to what he'd begun before.

These continue to come tumbling out after each other in faster succession if not predictable sequence, muddying the passage of time so as to seem simultaneous. They accumulate as waves of action, and become oceanic as crosscurrents and contrapuntal crests, sometimes-infrequently-calming so, in the lull, he can set forth another languorous, luminous and starkly haunting line. Is it what he started with ageless minutes ago? Or just a similarly bejewelled strand of pitches, suspended in the suddenly hushed (yet in our ears, still ringing) air?

Meanwhile, Taylor's collaborators contribute parallel swells of activity. His percussionist Jackson Krall balances the resounding piano well with powerful but seldom clangorous drums and cymbals attacks, and doesn't try to anticipate or emulate the pianist's idiosyncratic phrasing, breathing, so much as respond with equal spontaneity and gravitas.

Albey Balgochian, who plays a standup, apparently hollow-bodied electric bass, has a gluey tone that isn't immediately appealing; at the show I saw he held on gamely to the overall arc and vibe Taylor created, without quite establishing a persuasive sound sphere of his own. It can't be easy playing in this ensemble-it looks to be like wrestling with a partner who's out of reach: There's nothing to hold onto. You end up wrestling yourself. Since that's the task Taylor sets for his audiences, I imagine his fellow players enjoy it even more.

He has impressed and inspired a legion of them since first emerging from Boston in the mid-'50s-Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Bill Dixon, Gil Evans, John Coltrane, Jimmy Lyons, Andrew Cyrille, David S. Ware, William Parker, the list goes on and on, including roughly 100 percent of Vision Festival musicians. I think he's our era's Beethoven, a prophet of sturm und drang and the lyricism buried within and delivered by it.

But I could be wrong. Civilization to come might decide his sound and fury signifies nothing. Taylor's never been embraced wholeheartedly by the jazz powers-that-be. He's been named a National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master, supported by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and given the nicely-endowed Dutch "Bird" Award, among many honors, but he's suffered much slagging, as recently as in Ken Burns' just-rebroadcast PBS malarky, by no lesser mortal than Branford Marsalis. That's understandable, Taylor defies categorization, and would rather be a prickly iconoclast than an elder statesman accepting his due.

I applaud that, though the only regard Cecil Taylor cares about is that people hear him, as best they can, when he appears. I go over and over, trying to grapple with what he's done, and leave each time somewhat awed, a little less mystified by the how, what and why of his art lately, but never more caught up in its all.