Hanah Jon Taylor Talks about Jazz and Cafe: Jazz Principles (Part 1 of 2)
Hanah Jon Taylor with his newest soprano sax, which he says he will play for the rest of his musical career.
by Jonathan Gramling
In his heart, Hanah Jon Taylor has always been an educator. When he moved to Madison in the 1990s, he opened the House of Sounds on Williamson Street where he taught music lessons. When the Overture Center was opening in Downtown Madison, Taylor opened a cultural center behind it that featured the performing arts from around the world, from jazz to classical Indian dance and even featured a Sunday night karaoke gathering produced by Heidi Pascual, a Filipina who worked at The Madison Times.
For the past seven years, Taylor has owned and operated Cafe CODA on Williamson Street across from the Willy Street Coop. Taylor remains true to the art form of jazz and himself. In some ways, Taylor is forced to use the term jazz even though he doesn’t necessarily care for the term due to its historical and sometimes contemporary usage.
“I think jazz is a nebulous term,” Taylor said as we sat in the Green Room in the back of CODA. “Actually it is a derogatory term. It is derived from an 18th century term for the movement of Black women dancing on the street for money in New Orleans, jass. It wasn’t until it moved from the streets into the brothels of New Orleans that it was renamed jazz. I don’t exactly know why. But at any rate, it has a derogatory origin. And this is why many musicians of my generation don’t use that term. We are creative artists. We are anything but jazz artists.”
Apparently the term jazz has cool connotations and so it is used in contexts well beyond the music in order to sell products and services.
“That term has been used so often,” Taylor said. “And as I said, someone asked Miles Davis about this term jazz. And he said, ‘To me, jazz is a term that white people use to describe music that they cannot play.’ It might sound kinda racist. It might sound close-minded. But think about that term. ‘I got you some eggs. Let’s put some hot sauce on it and jazz it up a little bit.’ We use that term to describe the most ridiculous behavior and the most antiquated way of looking at something or the nouveau approach to something that is so traditional that you have to jazz it up a little bit. What in the world are they talking about? I’m a musician. Sound is the movement of air. I navigate sound. But throughout the Western world, the commercial cats have renamed stuff.”
For Taylor, jazz is something that is felt and lived as an art form. Taylor got his schooling in Chcago playing with jazz artists.
“I used to be ashamed of it, but now I am kind of proud of the fact that after 50 years of playing, I still learn from listening too closely and making mistakes,” Taylor said. “That meant that I could eventually learn to refine and develop my approach to playing jazz.”
While jazz is taught in music schools including UW-Madison School of Music, Taylor feels that the formal training is only part of the lesson.
“Just like you can use notes to write language, jazz is a language,” Taylor observed. “We can notate a language. But we cannot necessarily depend upon the notation of a language to give you the meaning and essence of the language as it sounds. I think a more contemporary analogy would be how you might talk to someone face-to-face as opposed to texting. Often we can see the words, but we might lose the meaning of that word. And that’s a very crass comparison. But at the same time, I think that it offers the consideration that music is a language and language has sound, inflection, verbation, which a lot of times cannot be interpreted or appreciated. If I’m studying Charlie Parker and I’m not listening to Charlie Parker, then I’m not really studying Charlie Parker.”
One mof the values of Cafe CODA, in Taylor’s estimation, is that it is a jazz environment the induces the expression of jazz that notes on a page can never do.
“You cannot really grow as an artist unless you get the chance to be in an environment that is dedicated to the art form, something other than a classroom, something other than a church,” Taylor said. “Feeling the environment of a place that is dedicated to the art form. That’s what gives us meaning. Environmentally that gives us significance from an educational standpoint because I don’t know any music professors at UW-Madison who are putting their kids on a bus and taking them down to a real jazz venue in Chicago or Milwaukee. This is as close of an experience that the students will experience. Any education that calls itself jazz education that does not have that is really doing a disservice to the students.”
Pure jazz has not fit well into a commercial framework, “until you die,” Taylor said with a laugh.
“I hear John Coltrane being played as background to car commercials now,” Taylor continued. “But who knows who he is. They just know that sound correlates with some type of mechanical strength. And so that’s why we sell Continentals playing Coltrane motifs. It’s never had a commercial appeal and maybe that’s what saved it. If something has a commercial appeal, it has to — excuse the expression — ‘whore’ itself out to maintain itself. And that’s just the reality of the capitalist market. So if something maintains any kind of authenticity, it’s usually because it fails to meet the commercial standard or it refuses to accept the commercial standard. And thank God, there still are musicians who will stand for something like having their own sound.”
And these commercial distortions are not just limited to jazz.
“Even today, this music that they call rap, I happen to know that there are young musicians in Chicago, young poets in Chicago who feel that in order to get any type of commercial recognition, they have to talk about something that they wouldn’t talk about in front of their mothers,” Taylor said. “Check that out. So in order to be a successful commercial artist, as I said, at some point, you have to ‘whore’ yourself to the industry, where I can say proudly a lot of jazz musicians have not done. We’ll go to Europe before we’ll do that and be appreciated for what we do instead of what someone else wants us to do.”
Pure jazz just doesn’t fit the limitations of commercialism.
“You talk about how the commercial industry controls the music, even in terms of time,” Taylor said. “Everyone is going to agree that time is probably one of our most precious gifts. Coltrane had this knack of playing long solos. And when LPs were producing jazz music with 75-82 minutes on the record. Trane had this ability to play these long solos. And at one time, it was reported that Miles said to him, ‘Man, you’re playing these long-ass solos. By the time you finish playing, there’s no room on the record for anyone else.’ And Trane responded by saying, ‘Oh Miles, — Trane was only about 21-years-old at the time — I’m really sorry. But you know, I love this music so much and I’m so passionate about playing with you and playing your music that sometimes I get into it and I don’t know how to stop playing. Miles said, ‘Try taking the horn out of your mouth.’ Those were the exact words.”
Next issue: Cafe CODA and the Future of CODA Fest