1970 was a historic year at the University of Wisconsin (UW). Following recent months of on-campus protesting against America’s military industrial complex and the war in Vietnam, the climate in Madison was tense. The spring semester would come to an abrupt and early end. Classes were cancelled in early May due to riots that happened because of the US Army’s ‘Cambodia Incursion’ and four student protesters being killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University. Four months after those riots, a bombing at the UW Army Math Research Center killed a post-doctoral researcher named Robert Fassnacht. Some good things happened earlier in the year.

In January, in response to an African Student Union petition, the UW Music Department offered two courses relating to Afro-American culture. The school hired avant garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor to create and teach two Black music courses. As an artist-in-residence, Taylor formed and led a student jazz ensemble. He also developed and served as lecturer for a black-music history course.

As a freshman at UW, I lived in a school dormitory with students from varied backgrounds and cultures. It was in that dorm that I met Les Edwards, a sophomore transfer student from New York. With many common interests and similar values, Les and I quickly became friends.

Before coming to UW I had seen a few jazz giants in concert, but Les knew more about jazz than I did. He was a Cecil Taylor fan. With the backing of the African Student Union, Les took it upon himself to propose and arrange a Cecil Taylor Unit concert. The concert took place on 10 April. That spring, the only available campus venue for the Unit was the less than ideal Stock Pavilion in the School of Agriculture.

I went to the concert with Les. The dirt-floored arena was as dark as it could be except for the harsh white spotlights on the Unit, Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons, Sam Rivers and Taylor. I was quickly caught up by the intensity and challenge of the sounds produced by the ensemble. I went up to the edge of the stage with my camera and started snapping pictures of Taylor as he played. With no flash, I relied on the stage lighting.

With my camera hanging from my neck, I climbed up on the raised stage and started taking more pictures of Taylor. It was the middle of his solo performance and I was crouching beside the keyboard-end of his piano. There was no permission in place for me to take any pictures and there I was clicking and winding a series of about five or six photos. Nobody tried to stop me from getting on the stage or even suggested that I return to my seat. Cecil was unfazed.

I certainly didn’t feel like I was entitled to share the stage with the Cecil Taylor Unit in concert. I was just an inspired fan, a nervy teen trying to capture an ounce of Cecil Taylor’s charisma on film. After maybe 20 seconds, I was hastily skulking my way back to my seat. Once seated, I began hoping that there were some decent photos of my new idol in my camera. As a rather inexperienced photographer, I could not be certain that I had any images worth keeping.

In the few weeks left of the school year after the Stock Pavilion concert, I started sitting in on Taylor’s lectures. As soon as I could, I signed up for his class (Black Music 300) offered in the upcoming fall semester.

On the streets of Madison and in class, Taylor dressed impeccably. He always wore sunglasses and one of a variety of hats. Most often he wore some style of fitted knit cap.

In public, he presented a somewhat understated and aloof persona that I saw as coolness. It was very different from the relaxed and down to earth Cecil that I only rarely saw when he was around his old friends from the music world.

The classroom atmosphere of Taylor’s lectures was exciting and a bit intimidating. The dynamics and tempo of his speech were measured. His articulation and tone always seemed carefully controlled. His gestures may have been in the moment, but they were likely not random. Interactions between Taylor and his students during the class were rare. The lectures began quickly when he entered the room and continued for about 40 minutes.

As articulate and thoughtful as he was in those days, Taylor provided the class with a broad spectrum of intellectual challenges related to music history, African history, music theory and current social changes. Lectures were usually delivered as Taylor paced in front of the seated students or while he sat on a piano bench. Occasionally, he’d address the class unseen or partly visible from the lecture hall balcony, above and off to the side of the room. There were usually 50–75 students in the class.

During lectures, Taylor would sometimes read his highly personalised and often abstract poetry with dramatic pronunciation, clipped sounds and an occasional angry attack at or a hint of haughty disdain for fools in general.

At the first class that I attended as an enrolled student, Taylor came in and cued up an LP on a first-rate turntable stereo system. The tune was Thelonious Monk’s “Mysterioso” with Charley Rouse on sax. I was transfixed by the initial simplicity of the piece and by everything that Taylor said about the piece after the track ended.

Sometimes he would read an article from the New York Times to start a lecture and then proceed to offer his commentary on the described situation before heading off to some related tangent. He was maybe five foot six inches tall (1.5 metres), but larger than life when offering perspectives that seemed irrefutable. Occasionally, Taylor would sit at the piano in front of the class and play a musical snippet to make a point.

My memories must be somewhat coloured by the passage of time, but I remember the lectures as feeling improvised and inspired by the moment. I doubt they were the product of a rigid, proscribed lesson plan. What one could take away from those classes were insights into Taylor’s thoughts of the day. He did offer numerous personal and revealing perspectives into a jazz player’s thinking and into the history of many important musicians.

My most vivid memory of a Cecil Taylor lecture began with him arriving to class about ten minutes late. He took a seat in the balcony, unseen by most of the students. After a few minutes of silence, Taylor read aloud from The New York Times. The article addressed the sad news that jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler’s lifeless body was found in the Hudson River. At that time, foul play was suspected. Barely visible and obviously shaken, Taylor recited a poem he had written as a eulogy for Ayler. After an intense and emotional reading, he stood and left the balcony. The room was quiet. As soon as the students realised Taylor was not coming back to class, they too left the lecture hall.

In the late fall of 1970, Les Edwards invited me to join him, Taylor and some ensemble members for a casual dinner at the nearby Porta Bella Italian restaurant. In the months that followed, I went to a dozen such dinners, mostly at the same restaurant.

Porta Bella dinners generally started with an antipasto platter appetizer and drinks. Soon a string of Taylor’s anecdotal monologues began. While he usually maintained his persona at the dinners, his stories, theories about creativity and occasional diatribes were more personal than what students heard at his lectures. The dinners afforded me and his student entourage insights into his past. He gave a slew of opinions, reminisced about interactions with people in New York and the world. Topics ranged to Fletcher Henderson, Art Tatum, Tiny Tim, George Wien, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and the New England Conservatory of Music. Two recurring themes were white snobs he had encountered who knew less about their own culture than he did and how he thought little of Janis Joplin. Taylor kept me thinking about unfamiliar subjects at a mile a minute.

One winter day I went to Taylor’s campus office to pitch the idea of making a documentary film. I was justifiably nervous. I explained that I wanted to create a 16 mm record of Cecil the artist, his music and his thoughts in a movie. I had no budget in mind and had never made a movie, neither issue came up. Whether it was over confidence, naivety or a mixture of those two potential stumbling blocks, I was not considering it an obstacle that I had no film making experience. With nearly 50 years of hindsight, it seems very odd that Taylor never asked me about my qualifications as filmmaker. In high school, I wrote a never staged play and had some experience as a photographer. That is not film making. Nevertheless, Taylor liked the idea and agreed to proceed with me in a partnership that promised only a 50/50 split of profits from the proposed film.

The proposed finished project was going to be a black and white 16 mm film with sound. The rough concept included three related themes. One would have Taylor addressing the camera, free to say whatever crossed his mind. Next, we would have Taylor playing solo piano. The closing section of the film would feature a recording of him directing his student ensemble as they performed one of his original orchestral compositions.

With the film project in mind, I continued to attend rehearsals with my camera. Some of the photos taken worked out well. I developed the film and printed the pictures in a make-shift darkroom located in the narrow pantry of my student flat. The photos were shot with B&W 400 ASA film. Except for my 1962 Contaflex Super B-SLR, all my photo equipment was borrowed.

Many of the photos were taken in the UW Humanities building during Black Music Ensemble (BME) rehearsals. If the photos turned out, I dry-mounted them on any spare mat board that I had. At a house party given by ensemble saxophonist Herman Milligan, I offered a number of my finished pictures to Ensemble members. Copies of some of the snapshots gifted at that party are included in this article.

Near the end of the 1971 spring semester Taylor took the students in his Black Music Ensemble to New York to perform in a concert at Hunter College. It was going to be the first concert he had played in New York City for several years. Due to the expected high profile of the performance, the student ensemble was renamed and appeared in New York as The Mendota Players. BME alto saxophonist Bobby Zankel said that Taylor came up with the name as some sort of nod to Lake Mendota whose southern shore borders the University of Wisconsin campus.

Rehearsals for the Hunter College concert were held in a studio on 57th Street in Manhattan. Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons and Sam Rivers were there. So were Taylor and his student musicians from Madison. The room was painted white, brightly lit and the windows were covered by long heavy drapes. The walls had raised decorative plaster accents and the ceiling was probably 12 feet (3.5 metres) high. There was a floor lamp beside a Steinway & Sons baby grand piano that Taylor played.

At the rehearsal, he wore a hat not seen at the University and at times his sunglasses came off.

After that rehearsal, most of the rehearsal participants went for a casual dinner at a nearby diner. Later, several of us went to Taylor’s apartment. I was told that Larry Rivers’s sons lived next door. On the wall near the top of the stairs, outside Taylor’s place, I saw the word AIR stenciled in block letters. I thought it might have had a relation to his album with Air as its title. Even though I felt welcome when I entered the living room, the situation was a bit much for a 21 year old from Milwaukee in New York City for the first time. It was a heady experience and a lot to take in. One calming factor was the familiar sounds of “Lonnie’s Lament” coming from the stereo. I knew The John Coltrane Quartet LP Crescent very well and that cut was one of my favourites.

The following night, during the soundcheck at Hunter College, I was on stage taking pictures. Taylor was sitting out in the middle of the concert hall listening to the rehearsal. At one point, he told me to go to the piano at stage left and play while the ensemble ran through a piece. I knew that he just wanted to hear the piano in the mix. Reluctantly and not a pianist, I did what I could on the keyboard and as quickly as possible went back to taking pictures.

Among the candid photos that were taken before the concert, a favourite is a group shot of ensemble members milling about on stage with Taylor. There is an interesting effect produced by the spotlights in the background, the faces looking in different directions and Taylor centred with a cigarette (see above).

Mendota Players at the concert and not individually included in any of these photos were: Jeff Crespi, Doug Harris, Estelle Katz, Tom Lachmund, Steve Levi, Sam Lobel, Carla Poole and Daryl Wolfe.

Taylor’s stay in Madison ended that spring, soon after BME concerts to New York and Dayton, Ohio. Even with the significant accomplishments of his first university gig, it was common knowledge that Taylor left Wisconsin with considerable dissatisfaction. His bad feelings were in part caused by dealing with the academic bureaucracy that he encountered in the UW music department.

It was not only the university administration that got under his skin. At one lecture near the end of the semester, he expressed considerable anger with the students in Black Music 301. Composer John Cage had come to Madison and gave a presentation on campus. Taylor said he was shocked to see no one from his class at the event. As composers, Cage and Taylor had very different approaches to music, but clearly Taylor thought his students should have shown more interest in contemporary music and not passed up the opportunity to learn something from John Cage.

I believe that it was at that post-Cage event lecture that Taylor announced there would be a final exam. An end of semester cumulative test in his Black Music course was a new idea and not expected by the students. One might have expected there to be questions related to the one seldom used textbook for the course, but the scope and format of the final was never fully explained.

One question on the exam paraphrased here was “What is the line of the saxophone after Charlie Parker?” The meaning of a “line of the saxophone” was not presented in lectures. There were a few questions related to topics covered in the assigned reading. A majority of the students were ill-prepared for the final and the result was that Taylor was able to give failing grades to a reported 70 percent of the students enrolled in the course.

After the end of the 1971 Spring Semester, my one credit F and the failing grades given to so many of my fellow Black Music 301 students were officially changed by the university to a zero-credit Pass.

Over the years my taste in music changed dramatically, but my respect and admiration for Cecil Taylor remains. My world view and my approach to music as a musician/music historian were deeply influenced by him. For a time, he let me into his unique world and his music stirred me like no other.

A day after Cecil Taylor’s death in April 2018, I called Les Edwards in New York. He had remained a close and devoted friend to Cecil. Les and I agreed, now that he was gone we wanted to do what we could to advance Cecil Taylor’s legacy. I had my photo collection and had written down an early version of these biographical snapshots. Les had decades of Taylor related memories and he was excited about my photographs.

In a phone call, Les told me how he worked on getting the Stock Pavilion concert staged, what he experienced at the far-reaching Cecil Taylor retrospective exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of Modern Art (2016) and how he visited the great man at the hospital only days before Cecil passed.

Les and I last talked and exchanged emails in February of 2019. He did not respond to my emails, texts or phone messages in early April and at the beginning of May. Through a mutual friend, I soon realised that my worst fears were justified. On 28 May 2020, Les Edwards lost a long battle with the novel coronavirus. Sadly, with Cecil and Les gone, there are fewer people to share firsthand perspectives on Cecil Taylor’s impactful three semesters at the University of Wisconsin.

Thanks to Herman Milligan, Ben Young and Bobby Zankel for their helpful input.

All the photos in this article were taken by Paul Ruppa in 1970 or 1971. The images were scanned and digitised in 2020.