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technological aspect in order to get out the
sounds that he feels are suitable for the music.”
Furthermore, as Berne noted, Taborn directs
his speculative investigations toward the function
of the moment. “Even playing something
complicated, Craig simplifies it to its fundamental
components,” Berne said. “He won’t do anything
just to show he can; if one note does it,
that’s what he’ll play. He also has the guts to lay
out, to not play, when most people would feel
obligated to. He’ll always take the opposing
view. He’ll pose another question or look at
things in a way you didn’t consider.”
Potter noted that Taborn’s experimentalism
stems less from a contrarian sensibility than a
desire to explore the ramifications of the multiple
vocabularies that comprise his frame of reference.
“Craig has spent a lot of time learning
and thinking about the lessons of past masters in
the jazz tradition—and other traditions, too,” he
said. “When he improvises, he keeps the essence
of what makes his influences work musically but
takes care not to copy what they did. Perhaps
he’ll introduce elements from other sources.
He’s intellectually thorough enough to take his
own angle.”
Particularly when deploying electronics,
Taborn hews to textural imperatives not dissimilar
to those that impelled Mitchell and the members
of the Art Ensemble of Chicago—an early
Taborn influence—to incorporate “little instruments”
into the sonic flow 40 years ago.
“I’m always aware of sound,” Taborn said.
“I approach the acoustic piano somewhat as a
sound device, which it is, but my relationship
to it contains a lot of pianism. I learn the
Rhodes, Hammond, Wurlitzer and electronics
so that I can use them as devices to work with
ideas, but I don’t practice them like I practice
piano. Electronic music isn’t playing certain
scales over certain chords, or working over a
particular form. You might play with the delay,
or the rate of an echo, or modify the reverb. It’s
less about technique on an instrument, which a
lot of jazz is, and more related to visual and
conceptual art.”
But it’s also about being able to execute
almost any idea he thinks of—Taborn possesses
a surfeit of technique. He doesn’t use it, as he
puts it, “to play in one bag and then shift to
another.” Rather, Taborn prefers to borrow fluently
rendered vocabulary from the diverse
musical languages he commands to create contextual
gestures that support and augment the
flow. The architecture trumps the facade.
“Prescribing notions of the parameters of
bebop, hard-bop or avant-garde is to posit a sort
of fixed thing that was never fixed anywhere,”
he said. “It’s useful as a model to construct and
look at things, but it doesn’t have much bearing
on the creative process. I draw specific influence
from Frank Zappa, Blood Ulmer and Wayne
Shorter, not the note choices or harmony, but in
phrasing and sound. What’s interesting is that it
doesn’t translate to piano or keyboards at all, but
comes out sounding like something else.” DB
September 2008 DOWNBEAT 51