Indent is a live album by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, recorded in March of 1973. It was the first solo piano performance he ever released, recorded at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He taught at Antioch from 1971-1973.
I’d first heard of Cecil Taylor’s music through an enigmatic quote from Frank Zappa: “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery. You also should go out and see if you can get a record by Cecil Taylor if you want to learn how to play the piano.” You will find this quote to be all the more enigmatic once you hear Taylor’s music, wondering how one is actually supposed to learn how to play the piano from emulating Taylor’s relentless, indefatigable virtuosity, especially as it is applied to such an unconventional musical style.
Indeed, to say that Taylor’s music is not easy listening would be the understatement of the year. It is undoubtedly an acquired taste, so be forewarned before hearing any of it. If you stick with it, though, and keep an open mind, you’ll find it rewarding.
I recommend starting with an album like Indent, or Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) from 1976, for these are solo piano albums, and you can clearly hear what Taylor is doing without what will (at least at first ) seem like the chaos of saxophone wailing and endless drum rolls by players like Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille respectively, two regular members of Taylor’s “Unit.” This is why I’m analyzing Indent, apart from the fact that there is also poetry, on the back cover of the LP, which I wish to analyze.
Taylor’s music is characterized as being rushes of seemingly endless energy, eschewing conventional melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, or structure. He was part of the free jazz movement that developed in the early 1960s with players like saxophonist Ornette Coleman, so the music is generally atonal and dissonant. Strongly influenced by 20th century classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, Taylor started off as a classically trained pianist before going into jazz.
While many jazz musicians of the 1960s were getting inspiration from 20th century classical music, Taylor went beyond the more usual influences of these to create a musical style totally unique to him, with–for example–cascades of tone clusters as being a regular feature of his improvising. He once said that he liked to imitate the leaps of a dancer in his playing, and one can hear that in the way the tone clusters fly along the range of the piano keys.
His piano is a percussion instrument, in effect: “eighty-eight tuned drums,” as Val Wilmer once described Taylor’s playing. This music is demanding on the listener, who must give full attention to it. Lacking conventional rhythm, the music cannot be tapped to or bopped to; I once read somewhere that listeners tend to sway to the music instead, for it is constant, frenetic energy, like fast triplets going on almost forever. At the end of any performance, Taylor had to be exhausted.
Cecil Taylor wasn’t just a piano player: he was also an accomplished poet. As I mentioned above, he had some of his poetry printed on the back cover of Indent; these are called “Scroll No. 1” and “Scroll No. 2.” I will be going into an analysis of these, as well as of the album’s music, below. It will be clear upon reading them of how he was preoccupied with politics in the US.
He was black, with some Native American ancestry. He was also gay, though he didn’t want to be labelled as such, feeling there was so much more to him (of course) than his sexuality. Staying in the closet all the way to the 1980s (when he was outed by Stanley Crouch), because of the homophobia of the jazz world (as well as that of conservative blacks), was necessary for his survival.
These three aspects of his humanity–being black, aboriginal, and gay–left him on the margins of society, and they therefore surely affected his music and poetry, making both highly experimental and expressive of the alienation he must have felt. Being part Cherokee on his mother’s side, and part Kiowa on his father’s, he would have been close to nature, having been taught by his father to appreciate the trees in Manhattan; we can see some of his love of nature in “Scroll No. 1,” as we’ll take a look at soon enough.
The choice of a title for the album seems to represent an aspect of the ‘scrolls” presentation on the back cover. Apart from the left margins, each beginning with “Whistle into night” and “Nation’s lost diplomacy,” there are middle indentations, each starting with “blue’s history” and “crophandler,” then there are far-right indentations, each beginning with “White crucifix” and “asleep.” That the whole album is named Indent rather than the poems seems to indicate that the music on it is supposed to be linked with the poetry.
Certainly, Lynette Westendorf, in her analysis of Cecil Taylor: Indent–“Second Layer” (which by the way gives a much more detailed analysis of the musical structure of that part of the performance than I am capable of doing of any or all of it), sees a link between the ‘scrolls’ and the ‘three layers,’ as the album’s music is divided into. As she understands it, the left margin lines correspond to the First Layer, the middle indented lies correspond to the Second Layer, and the far-right indented lines correspond to the Third Layer (pages 314-319 of her analysis).
Now, apart from dividing both the music and the poems into threes, I can’t hear any other parallels to be made between their structures, as Taylor’s musical style remains quite consistent throughout (unless one were to do as meticulous and scholarly an analysis as Westendorf does). Indeed, with no intention of bad-mouthing Taylor, his pianistic style sounds quite the same more or less throughout his mature period, so it’s hard for me to differentiate.
So, what do the indentations represent? It’s interesting how the…far right…indentation begins with imagery associated with white supremacy: “White crucifix” and “White God” to represent the religion that the Ku Klux Klan, with their “White flame” and “White hood,” use to justify their racism. By way of analogy, could the middle indentations and left margins respectively correspond, in any way, if only ironically so, with the political centre and left in the US?
Not exactly, but I’d say the far-right indentations embody a hate hidden by polite society, the Third Layer. The left margins embody illusions of goodness and justice not so well disguised, and the middle indentations embody various desires, sexual and otherwise, and how those desires are frustrated.
Here is a link to the poetry, and here is a link to the live recording.
In the left margins, we “whistle into night,” and perhaps the tune we whistle is what’s heard on the piano at the beginning of the First Layer: octaves of B, B-flat, C, A-flat, B-flat, G-flat, A-flat, these then played an octave lower, all to a jerky rhythm. We seem to be in a good mood as we whistle this tune, but the feeling is illusory, given how later on down the left margin, “indignation laments.” The political world that Taylor grew up in, a superficially liberal one, was also one he was left out of as a black gay man.
In the America that marginalized him, “difference” was an “excuse” to mistreat him. These liberals, so superficially progressive, weren’t particularly kind to the environment, either. Their “city technique” resulted in a “tar flesh” that “trampled seeds.”
Almost as a kind of call and response, the next piano tune, again in octaves, and one that you could “whistle into night,” is G-flat, B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat, then lower with B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat again. Then, back to variations on the first tune, with a brief return to the second. With the jerky, irregular rhythms are also contrasts in dynamics that from time to time remind me of those in the second of Olivier Messiaen‘s Quatre études de rythme, louds and softs often divorced from conventional expressivity…that is, except for the anger of Taylor’s percussive pounding on the keys.
Just as the left margins of the poem go from illusory pleasantness to hard underlying reality, so does the music move from relatively consonant (by Taylor’s standards, at least) tunes in octaves to the more dissonant use of minor and major seconds (about a minute into the recording). And as anyone familiar with Taylor’s music knows, it will get much more dissonant very soon.
“Spring cotton answer” may seem like an answer to a problem, but the picking of cotton sounds like the opposite of an answer to black people, whose “indignation laments” their history as slaves.
A confrontation with the “duplicity” and “demagogic democracy” of Scroll No. 2 shows that matters are getting worse. One tries to be so “damned dutiful” in a country of “lost diplomacy,” with so much “white white.” A few black politicians (in recent years, think of Obama or Kamala Harris) do not do much to compensate for continued racism against blacks–hence, the sarcasm of “‘yeah bo’/I’ma Senatah!”
I can imagine the first of Taylor’s trademark cascades of tone clusters up and down the piano in this First Layer as corresponding to the line “You just sing dance unseen,” like so many invisible, marginalized American blacks and gays trying to be heard in a mainstream society that is so deaf and blind to them. Recall his words in this connection: “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.”
Later on down the left margin of Scroll No. 2, Taylor continues his sarcastic ‘Uncle Tom’ voice by saying “‘Ah is so happy/Youse mah master” to the moderate white liberal who pretends to care about blacks, but in their…whitewashing…of people like MLK, whose socialism they conveniently gloss over, they are little better than the old white slaveowners–hence, “Youse mah master”…”Kick me agin.” These untrustworthy faux progressives have “ground life out.”
Because of the white moderate, “justice [is] invisibly/impenetrable.” Why can’t the white moderate, or any liberal in general, be trusted? Because capitalism corrupts everything, or as Taylor put it, “Dry cell of money/ has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.” The love of money is a prison cell we’re all locked in.
Next, we come to the Second Layer, which on the LP is divided into two parts so the whole performance would fit on the record’s two sides almost equally, but which is really just one long, continuous performance, and which combined together would be of exactly equal length to the First Layer (13:40). Since, according to Westendorf’s interpretation (see link above), the Second Layer corresponds to the middle indentations of the two ‘scrolls,’ I’ll be examining these with this particular part of the music. As I said above, I find as a recurring theme in the middle indentations one of desire and the anatomical part-objects of such desire, sexual or otherwise.
As I also said above, Westendorf’s analysis (link above) of the Second Layer is far more thorough and capable than what I can give, so I recommend reading it. Still, I’ll do my best here.
The music starts with a ‘melody’ of succeeding B octaves in the bass register of the piano. Then, we have, in octaves played at the same time, B and F-sharps, Bs and Gs, Bs and Es, and Bs and F-naturals. So, as with the opening ‘whistled’ tune of the First Layer, here there’s no substantial dissonance…yet. There’s desire, but its frustration is soon to come.
As for the poem, “blue’s history” can be the sad history of African-Americans, or a history told through singing he blues. In all of this, there is a desire to rid themselves of the pain, to ‘exorcise’ it. This desire is the “awakened needs” of black people.
There is a desire for “recognition” (as Lacan also observed), to be acknowledged and desired by the object of one’s desire, including such part-objects as the “titty,” “ass’n” “prick.” The “bent whore’s” desire may also be desired, with her “recognition” of us.
The middle indentations have all the naughty words in them (including the aforementioned ones, and “shit”; “Damned,” from the left margins, is mild enough of an oath not to count–in fact, it could simply mean that corrupt politicians are “damned” in the religious sense for being “dutiful” to the ruling class). The desire to have fun saying dirty words is an example of how “puerility romps” and delights in breaking the rules.
Desire’s “tongue tastes,” and it moans “ooh ooh ooh” as the “prick” sprays its “sperm” where the “bent whore’s lost” and “puerility romps/unchided…in night cesspools” (brothels?). Desire isn’t just of a sexual sort, though. There’s also the sweetness that comes from “honeysucklevine” and “molasses” that one’s “tongue tastes.” (Or is the former quote a pun on Honeysuckle Divine, with her “dimples” and “sweat titty”?) There’s the desire of “scampering” children at play, with “pigtails stompin’.”
The point of all of this discussion of desire, centred in the middle, between the illusion of the ‘progressiveness’ of the politics of the liberal white moderate on the one side (the left margins) and the unreserved hate of the white supremacists on the other side (fittingly, the far-right indentations), is that the African-American in his “awakened needs” (a result of the raised consciousness of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s) is caught in the middle, controlled by the whites on either side of him. Thus, his desires and needs are never met in an America where he has no power.
The frustration of that desire is clearly expressed in Taylor’s piano playing, which of course gets very tense and dissonant in short order. Variations on that motif introduced with the low Bs, that chromatic ascension of E, F-natural, F-sharp, and G are heard (see Westendorf’s analysis above for details). The variations are often played in fast arpeggiated forms with added fifths. Soon, the upward arpeggios get much more dissonant.
I’d like to skip ahead to the beginning of “Second Layer, Part Two” beginning Side Two of the LP, because it stands out in my memory. This would be “Paragraph J–Section J-1” of Westendorf’s analysis (page 306, 9:53 minutes into the Second Layer part of the recording). To use her words, here we have “A light pattern of repeating grace-note clusters featuring C♯-B…in the high register”. It is subdued and reflective, to use her words again. For those finding his usual percussive, dissonant playing grating on the ears, this passage will feel refreshing in its softness.
It won’t take too long for the harshness to come back, though, and the Second Layer will end, with more cascading clusters, within less than four minutes of that soft passage I mentioned in the previous paragraph. More desire has been frustrated for the African-American.
The Third Layer, corresponding with the far-right indentations of the ‘scrolls,’ is about four minutes longer than the other two ‘layers.’ It begins in the bass, with a quick ascending line of E-flat, E-flat an octave lower, and B-flat, repeated several times, then with variations using other notes in ascending arpeggios. It’s softer than the beginnings of the other two ‘layers,’ but dissonances are added sooner.
This added tension is fitting as it corresponds with the poem, which is where the fascism resides, hidden under the liberal First Layer (left margins) and hiding under the frustrated desires of the Second Layer (middle indentations). This is made perfectly clear right from the beginning of the far-right indentations, with the opening allusion to the Ku Klux Klan: “White crucifix/White flame/White God/White hood.” The liberal mask is off (or rather, the hood is off), and we can see who is behind it.
The “White white” that follows is repeated in Scroll No. 2 with the opening left margin, though also pushed out to the right of “blue serge,” as if indented, too. Here again we can see the relationship between the white liberal moderate (as represented by the left margins) and the far right of the far-right indentations. “White white” represents not just white skin, but also the White Terror of conservative, reactionary forces against leftists. Recall, in the connection between the liberal moderate and the far-right, Stalin’s words about social democracy and fascism.
Blacks feel the “pains” and “shame” that come from the fascist repressions of types like the Ku Klux Klan. “Whitness” is a pun on “whiteness” and “witness,” from blacks being a witness to whiteness, to which they matter not a whit.
A “surreptitious/Seraph” of “sin sinning/Singing” a “song/Set 4 centuries long” is a white angel that has pretended to be holy while surreptitiously harming the black man over about four centuries of the European slave trade. The whites, in our posturing as racially superior, have pretended the whole time to be angels, while denigrating blacks as the descendants of Ham to justify enslaving them.
Continuing with the far-right indentations in Scroll No. 2, we have only the words “asleep” and “stranger.” The world has been “asleep” to the oppression of blacks only until recently, as of the publication of these “scrolls” (first in 1965, then republished as liner notes to Indent in 1973). The black man has been a “stranger” to the rest of the world because racism has estranged him from us.
As for the dissonance of the piano playing in the Third Layer, and how it can be said to represent the pain felt by blacks because of this estranging racism and how asleep the rest of the world has been to it, one noteworthy section of the music, towards the end of the performance of this layer, should be focused on. Taylor does a particularly thundering moment of tone clusters around the middle-to-lower register of the piano, at about 43:35 on the CD.
We can hear some applause from the audience immediately after that moment. It would seem that, through Taylor’s performance, the pain of the black man has finally received its deserved “Recognition” (line 8 of Scroll No. 2). His piano has sung and danced unseen (line 10 of Scroll No. 2) until only recently; indeed, it took forty years for Taylor to be recognized by the academy, him being named a Jazz Master by the NEA in 1990, and in the following year receiving a MacArthur Fellowship.
In the middle indentation, Taylor refers to giving “recognition” to George Washington “Carver‘s oil” (lines 8-9 of Scroll No. 1). Since Carver promoted alternative crops to cotton and promoted methods to prevent soil depletion, as well as promoted environmentalism, then his “oil” is an ironic metaphor Taylor is using to illustrate Carver’s valuable discoveries for the good of the earth, a major issue of Scroll No. 1.
Still, Carver’s recognition “estranged/outer earth’s garments” (i.e., the tar and concrete covering the ground), for the big money-making interests–typically white Americans–have little to no concern for environmentalism. Their “scorched exclusivity” alienates the earth as well as blacks, gays, and aboriginals. “Tar flesh trampled seeds.”
It’s good to give recognition to Taylor and Carver…but recognition isn’t enough, for the “dry cell of money/has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.”
Infinite Ocean 
