The Ethereal Genius of Craig Taborn

This, I realized, was the condition of his creativity, and I grew to respect it. James Baldwin wrote that “perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” Taborn has embraced this state, which echoes powerfully through his probing, introspective music. He replies to email erratically; “sent on the fly from God knows where,” reads his signature. His girlfriend, a composer, lives in the Bronx, on the other side of the city; when he isn’t on tour, he can go for days without socializing. Years into our acquaintance, he briefly dated a relative of mine, but we never spoke of their relationship, during or after it. (They remain friends.) He is so fugitive a presence, and so difficult to track down, that some of his musician friends refer to him as “the Ghost.”

Taborn claims to be unaware of this nickname, but he often invokes ghosts in his song and album titles: “Love and Ghosts,” “Phantom Ratio,” “Silver Ghosts,” “Daylight Ghosts.” He believes that “creative endeavors are informed by the interaction with metaphysical forces,” and that this dialogue with ghosts and spirits is what distinguishes “the black improvisational tradition” — a term he prefers to “jazz” — from Western art music. “Music functions as a means to ‘call down’ those spirits,” he says, “so in a very real sense I am not doing anything when the music is truly being made. It isn’t really me doing it.”

This doesn’t mean that Taborn isn’t supremely focused on his instrument. He has refined a technique of using the piano’s sustain pedal and his attack in order to bring out the upper partials of a note, so that when he strikes a key, he can control the “cross-talk” between two notes, throwing into relief what he calls “the entire shape and bloom of a note,” from its inception to the moment when “it ceases to be audible and becomes imaginary” — ghostlike, you might say.

Musicians often describe their work as surrender to a superior force, but Taborn does so with a self-effacing insistence that is all the more striking coming from such a virtuoso. He calls this force “the process,” and his ability to give himself over to it has, in turn, made him one of the popular sidemen in jazz. He has been a member of at least 20 groups led by other people, as well as five of his own. He has appeared on more than 80 albums, but only half a dozen or so under his own name, because he hasn’t felt “much of a compulsion to document process.” In an “age of almost profligate documentation,” he told me in an email, “I see it as almost a discipline to be more selective about releases.”

Taborn’s habit of vanishing, both literally and figuratively, has perplexed, if not frustrated, some of his friends. They wonder why he still performs as a sideman and why he doesn’t take longer, or more fiery, solos; they fret over the long pauses between his recording projects as a leader. The pianist Ethan Iverson, of the popular jazz trio the Bad Plus, speaks of Taborn’s control of harmony with something like awe but complains that Taborn “serves the music to a fault,” disappearing into the music when he could be “playing some burning piano.” Another admirer, the pianist Matthew Shipp, who produced two of Taborn’s early records, wonders whether “he is creating a name for himself as the ultimate sideman or as a leader.” The saxophonist and MacArthur genius fellow Steve Coleman has urged Taborn, who used to play in his band, to focus more on his own work and to document it more consistently. “If he wants to make music, go out to the desert and never have it documented, I’m fine with that, but Craig wouldn’t have heard a lot of the people he likes if they hadn’t documented their work. Documenting the music is a part of the process, because if you’re the only one who knows about it, why even go out and perform?”

I first approached Taborn about a profile in the fall of 2015. I felt somewhat reluctant about it: Taborn’s father had died that summer, and he was still in mourning. I proposed that we try our own process, a series of informal, open-ended conversations that I thought might put him at ease. We could meet up whenever he was in town and correspond by email when he was on the road. Sometimes we met at museums, where he would freely muse on the relationship between visual art and music. Tim Berne speculated that Taborn might secretly be “dreading” the article, but I never saw any sign of it. As long as we were talking about the process that informs his music, that is. Whenever I tried to talk to him about his personal life, he would quickly steer the conversation back to topics that feed his art: cinema, contemporary painting, Javanese shadow plays, Egyptology, the survivals of ancient African practices in black American culture and, of course, music.

On a sweltering day in August, we went to the Museum of Modern Art with Dave King, the drummer in the Bad Plus and a member of the quartet on “Daylight Ghosts.” Taborn was wearing a black polo shirt and Top-Siders; King, who was in town from Minnesota, looked more like a retired punk rocker, in a T-shirt that exposed a riot of tattoos all over his arms and neck.

Taborn and King grew up together in the Minneapolis suburbs, and they have been playing together since they were teenagers. With Reid Anderson, now the bassist in the Bad Plus, they gigged at house parties, watched Hüsker Dü and the Replacements at local rock clubs and studied visiting jazz musicians at the Walker Art Center. Taborn was “effortlessly mysterious,” King recalled. “He appeared to toss things off, but his aesthetic was dialed to the smallest particle.”

Taborn grew up in Golden Valley, just a few minutes by car from downtown Minneapolis, not far from the childhood home of the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. His father, John Marvin Taborn, was an academic psychologist and chairman of the African-American and African studies department at the University of Minnesota. His mother, Marjorie, who still lives in Golden Valley, was a social worker in the Minneapolis public schools. The Taborns moved to Golden Valley shortly before the birth of Craig’s older brother, John Gregory, a psychologist who works as a career counselor at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and they became part of the small, tight-knit community of black professional families who integrated the Minneapolis suburbs. (One of Marjorie’s acquaintances was Mattie Della Shaw, the mother of Prince.)

Race, roots and identity were frequent topics at the dinner table. John Marvin was raised in Carrier Mills, a township in Southern Illinois that provided a sanctuary for freed slaves (and later runaways) who had fled the South. A quiet yet very determined academic who also served as a captain in the Navy Reserve, he specialized in the study of institutional racism and instructed his children, Taborn told me, not to be “dominated by anyone’s attempts to limit your identity based on their own crises or failures of imagination.” Craig inherited his father’s shyness and his passion for learning; he also inherited his father’s pale skin tone. “We come in all shapes and colors,” Marjorie explained to her son. “Some of us look white, but we are not.”

His appearance, however, created no small amount of cognitive dissonance for whites in Minnesota who had never seen a black person who looked like him. Although Golden Valley was “quite a liberal place,” kids asked him if he was black or white; strangers stared at him. Worried that he might be traumatized by these encounters, Taborn’s mother had her hair dyed red so that it would look just like her son’s. “When kids saw me picking up Craig from school,” she told me, “they would say, ‘So that’s where you got your red hair from,’ and Craig would say, ‘Yeah, right.’ And I’d say, ‘His is from his father; mine is from a bottle.’ ”

His father did not read music, but he could play piano by ear and had a talent for improvising. After dinner he would repair to the basement and relax by playing blues, mambo tunes and songs by Ray Charles and Horace Silver. When Taborn was around 9 or 10, he asked his father to teach him the basics. A few years later, Majorie heard someone playing Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” a tricky piece from his classic 1959 album “Time Out.” She went downstairs, expecting to see her neighbor, who was a musicologist at the University of Minnesota, at the piano, and instead found her son. “I grabbed him and hugged him and said, ‘My baby can play!’ ” She never had to tell him to practice.

In high school, Taborn took lessons with a classically trained jazz pianist, Peter Murray, whom he credits with shaping how he thinks about music. Murray stressed the importance of melodic ideas, expressiveness and musicality over ostentatious displays of technique. Taborn went through a brief Bill Evans infatuation, like many young pianists, only to become disillusioned with Evans’s impressionist lyricism. “It’s the first thing that’s easy to do,” he said of Evans’s widely imitated style, based on chord voicings that owe much to composers like Debussy and Ravel. “You can play it, and it sounds right; it’s the jazz equivalent of a Hemingway sentence. But what Evans did, a lot of other players were doing, pianists like Wynton Kelly, who don’t get credit for these innovations.”

While he admired Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea as much as the next young jazz pianist, he was even more drawn to mavericks like Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, the psychedelic bandleader from Birmingham (born Herman Poole Blount) who claimed to be from another planet and helped invent the surreal, off-kilter sensibility known today as Afro-futurism. Ra, who led a carnivalesque big band he called the Arkestra, fashioned himself as an explorer of what he called “other worlds they have not told you of, that wish to speak to you,” and Taborn was eager to join him.

What he wanted to explore was not so much new techniques as new sounds, the weirder the better. He had been dabbling in electronic music since he was 12, using tapes and an old Moog synthesizer his parents gave him for Christmas. He was fascinated by work that laid siege to conventional understandings of music: postwar avant-gardists like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen; German kraut rock and musique concrète; and the experimental jazz of the A.A.C.M. (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a Chicago-based collective whose slogan was “great black music, ancient to future.” In high school, Taborn became a kind of long-distance student of the A.A.C.M.; he would go on to play with several of its greatest figures.

“I think the complexity of finding an identity in Minneapolis in the early 1980s, as a black kid in a very white place, fed into my aesthetic life,” Taborn said. “It was an active choice to embrace anything that interested me, whether it was the Replacements or Anthony Braxton, and to seek my identity in inclusion and eclecticism rather than exclusion. So practicing bebop and then going to see an almost anti-technical punk-rock band did not faze me at all. I think all of these things were ultimately connected, that my enjoyment of them unified them enough for me, and I came to crave this kind of aesthetic diversity. It is still hard for me to listen to one kind of music for extended periods. I am always hearing strange connections that make me want to listen to music from different perspectives.”

In 1988, Taborn enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he took classes in “cultures and arts largely related to the African diaspora.” He was attracted by Ann Arbor’s rich tradition of experimental music and punk rock (Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma and Iggy Pop had all been residents) and, even more so, by its proximity to Detroit, where some of his favorite pianists (Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Geri Allen) got their starts. It was in Detroit that Taborn met the saxophonist James Carter, whose band he joined in the early ’90s. The men had been hired to play in a band led by Darryl Duncan, a local trumpeter. On one tune, “Craig and I started dialoguing, and I realized this wasn’t the usual ‘I’m soloing and you’re gonna comp,’ ” Carter recalled. “It just built up to a lather with Craig, and Darryl saw that the rhythm section was in the way, so he waved at them to back out of it.” Taborn played in Carter’s various groups for nearly a decade. In 1994, he released his debut as a leader, “Craig Taborn Trio,” with the drummer Tani Tabbal and the bassist Jaribu Shahid, Carter’s rhythm section, to admiring reviews.

Taborn seemed headed for a career as a leader, but not for the last time, he revealed an unusual hesitance. He waited seven years to release his next trio album, “Light Made Lighter,” and his third album, “Junk Magic,” was a radically fractured piece of electronica. Taborn told me he has been tempted to make more albums like “Junk Magic” — the title is a line from Sam Shepard, who once described the rusted old Southern California towns of his youth as having “a kind of junk magic” — but it’s hard to imagine him abandoning the piano. He has always been drawn back to its physical majesty, the power and variety of its sound.

More than any musician of his generation, Taborn knows how to turn the piano into an 88-key drum, as Cecil Taylor called it, and drummers have always been particularly keen to play with him. At MoMA, while we were admiring “Glenn,” an enormous canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a bald, muscular black man in his early 70s walked up to Taborn. “You a pianist?”

Taborn nodded, sheepishly; he vaguely recognized the man but couldn’t quite place him.

“Craig, it’s William Hooker!” the man exclaimed, with a wide smile. Hooker is a free-jazz drummer, celebrated in downtown circles for his high-energy style; he was practically bouncing in the air. “Let’s play! How can I find you?” They exchanged email addresses.

On a freezing day in December, I met Taborn at the Guggenheim. He apologized for being a few minutes late; he had run into an old friend, the avant-garde harpist Zeena Parkins, in the lobby.

Taborn had suggested that we see the Agnes Martin retrospective, and soon I understood why. Her pale, austere, meditative canvases, based on slight variations of the grid, exhibited a faith, very much shared by Taborn, in the radiant effects that can be achieved by the subtle play of repetition and difference. In Taborn’s account, Martin emerged as a kindred spirit: an unclassifiable artistic loner who had placed her trust in patience, precision and process. He looked worshipfully at her rendering of the pencil line in a 1979 series called “The Islands.” “She used different rulers to get different lines, but if you step back, you wouldn’t notice this. There’s an infinity of details, but you have to get very close to see them.” He walked up very close to a 1958 painting called “This Rain,” in which two square forms, one violet, the other cream, float upon an off-white backdrop — so close I thought we might attract the attention of the Guggenheim guards.

“There’s so much evidence of the hand here, and I’m sure it’s intentional,” he said, admiring her brushwork. “It’s not performative, or only in a very subtle way, not in some swaggering Abstract Expressionist way. The colors aren’t ultravibrant, but the varieties of shading are so subtle.” I asked him if he saw any parallels between her work and his own. “Martin thought of music as the ultimate art, because it’s so nonreferential, and there are similarities in terms of process. When you improvise, you’re observing and creating at the same time. To make the next move, you have to really get close to what’s going on. A lot of jazz musicians never get close enough to find out.”

In 2003, Taborn made a discovery that helped him to get closer than he’d ever gotten to his own process. While preparing for a solo concert at a club on the Lower East Side, he decided to improvise the entire performance from scratch, rather than on the basis of scores. He recorded the concert and compared it with previous performances of his compositions. (Taborn is sparing in his releases, but he documents much of his work for the sake of his own private research.) What he found was striking: “When I was improvising, I was able to really play in the moment, away from any preconceived notions. The improvised performances sounded as organized as any of my composed pieces, and they had so much more life.” Now whenever Taborn performs solo piano, he improvises freely, or, to put it another way, he composes in real time, drawing in part on motifs and structures he has developed while practicing.

In giving evening-length recitals with little more than a mental map, Taborn invited comparison to pianists like Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley and, above all, Keith Jarrett, who made history with his 1975 solo concert at the Cologne Opera House. After dinner at an overheated Italian restaurant, Jarrett was in a foul mood (this wasn’t unusual for him), and he wanted to cancel. Instead, he took the stage and, on a tinny-sounding Bösendorfer, gave a performance of disarmingly lyrical, almost folkloric simplicity. With its gospel chords and hymnlike melodies, “The Köln Concert” became the best-selling solo piano record of all time. For the next decade or so, it would inspire other pianists to take up the challenge of a fully improvised concert, as the ultimate test of their melodic resources and imagination.

By the time Taborn entered this daunting arena, it was all but empty, aside from a handful of obscure avant-garde pianists and Jarrett himself: “The Köln Concert” had become a somewhat quaint symbol of ’70s sprawl and flowery romanticism. Taborn’s solo concerts announced the birth of an original aesthetic, long in gestation. They were often as lyrical as Jarrett’s, but they were also fierce, concentrated and erudite. “When you hear Craig play solo, you hear a whole history of music: heavy metal, jazz, classical music, the whole tradition from Bach to Schumann to contemporary music,” Derek Bermel, a composer friend, points out. “It’s like you’ve just gotten a history lesson with a great sense of form, and it’s not didactic, it’s expressive.”

Taborn’s solo concerts, which his fans began posting on YouTube, were as sensuous as they were cerebral. He used repetitive loops that felt as if they’d been imported from electronic music, and contrapuntal rhythmic patterns that made the mind whirl. Without using the sustain pedal, he would hold chords, minor seconds and thirds, with his right hand, then pop single notes really hard with his left hand in the lower registers of the piano. The harmonics of the right-hand chords would swell continuously in a cloud of color, punctuated by dark, staccato left-hand jabs. Not unlike Agnes Martin, Taborn would stay with a pattern, a sound, even a single note, and just keep digging.

One of those who took notice of Taborn’s solo concerts was a fellow admirer of Martin’s work: Manfred Eicher, head of ECM Records, the Munich-based label that has recorded Keith Jarrett since the early 1970s. Eicher and Taborn met in the late 1990s, when Taborn played on another recording for ECM, “Nine to Get Ready,” by the avant-garde saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell. Eicher was impressed by Taborn’s touch and “his ability to listen and react in very unforeseeable ways.” In 2010, Taborn recorded his ECM debut, the solo album “Avenging Angel,” in Lugano, Switzerland, in an auditorium where Eicher remembered hearing the great classical pianists Martha Argerich and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. (The piano Taborn played at the session is said to have been one of Argerich’s favorites.) He warmed up with a Bach prelude and, after a long pause, began improvising. “There was so much dedication and concentration in every note, and his use of color contributed to a very personal music,” Eicher recalls.

“Avenging Angel” is now seen as a benchmark of solo jazz piano, and Eicher calls it “one of the dearest solo records I’ve made.” It is not simply the range of expressive forms on this album — ballads, fugues, minimalist dirges, wispy atmospheric statements — that beguiles, but the powerful inner coherence that governs the 13 tracks, their exacting sense of narrative arc. (Before the recording, Taborn listened to three of his favorite solo piano records: Sun Ra’s “Monorails and Satellites,” Cecil Taylor’s “For Olim” and Keith Jarrett’s “Dark Intervals,” all of them composed of terse, rigorous pieces that examine “a few simple elements,” like ostinatos, or tone clusters.) It has the feeling for rapture, the sensitivity to space and silence, that have marked the so-called ECM sound, but it evokes an inner landscape, gloomily introspective and darkly elusive, that might be called Tabornian.

At the Lugano session, he recorded more than enough material for a sequel to “Avenging Angel,” which Eicher would have been happy to release, but Taborn chose instead to shelve it, perhaps for a retrospective release later on. “My concept and playing had moved on,” he said, and he wanted to develop his ideas further in live performance.

In April 2016, I traveled to Cambridge to hear him give a solo concert, also titled “Avenging Angel,” at Harvard, where his friend Vijay Iyer had organized a festival. Taborn had been preparing for the concert for weeks. He practiced compositions by Bach, Shostakovich and Thelonious Monk, and wrote passages that he could invoke in a moment’s notice in performance. He read poetry, watched old avant-garde films by Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger and kept a record of his ideas on a chalkboard that he couldn’t avoid looking at. For several hours a day, he conducted a grueling set of exercises designed to cultivate finger independence and dexterity. In one of those exercises, he held down one finger while playing a series of notes with another, a move that can be very damaging if executed too quickly. The purpose was to improve his command of dynamics, attacks and releases, something he admires in Cecil Taylor, a pianist with “complete control.”

His final form of preparation was listening to his iPod in the rental car he drove to Cambridge. It contains about 45,000 tracks, and Taborn prefers to listen to it on shuffle. “Moving from Xenakis to some metal thing creates a space where you don’t know what you’re listening to anymore,” he told me in his dressing room. “You’re making inferences and connections, and that’s really what composition is. So I don’t worry what I’m listening to. I just like the experience, the change in moods, the feeling of going from a 20-minute composed track to a 30-second blast of metal. Even the discontinuity creates its own logic.”

At the John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Iyer introduced Taborn as “one of the greatest living pianists.” Wearing a blue suit and red Uniqlo socks, Taborn sat down at the piano, struck two high notes with his right hand and pounded a chord with his left, creating a stop-start minimalist groove. He played for more than 40 minutes, without pause. At times, he seemed to be battling the piano (Taborn is a man of medium build but has very powerful forearms); at others, to be caressing it. He was inspired, he told me later, by the “beauty of the instrument,” and “things just flowed,” leading him to linger for longer than usual in “a more romantic space.” Young people in the audience bobbed their heads as Taborn concluded his performance with a fast, jagged sequence of dancing, interlocking rhythms — a variation on a theme I’d heard him use before in concert.

By the time Iyer returned to the stage to sing his praises again, Taborn had vanished into the night.

A month after his concert at Harvard, Taborn was at a studio in Hell’s Kitchen, recording “Daylight Ghosts,” his third album for ECM. For this record, Taborn had put together a quartet with the drummer Dave King, the bassist Chris Lightcap and Chris Speed, who plays tenor saxophone and clarinet. Four years had passed since “Chants,” his previous album as a leader, was recorded, and after the death of his father, he wanted to make a more direct and melodic statement, something “simple and clear.” The sheer beauty of his playing is abundantly present — the clarity of touch, the rhythmic invention, the mastery of harmonics — but Taborn hardly takes a solo. It is the interplay of the quartet that interests him: The music on “Daylight Ghosts” highlights the process of mutual creation, rather than any single voice, including his own. In “Ancient,” for example, the quartet snakes around a bass vamp in C, in a series of contrapuntal variations, before (in Taborn’s words) “falling together,” as if the four instruments had fused into one.

Except for Roscoe Mitchell’s “Jamaican Farewell,” a slow, plaintive waltz in 3/4, all of the songs are Taborn’s, and they feel at once unpredictable (composed in distinct sections, often moving between different time signatures) and inexorable. Their taut energy and brooding propulsion imbue them with a diamondlike beauty. Illuminated by discreet, painterly touches of electronics — Taborn also plays the Farfisa organ and synthesizer — the music reflects an imaginative quilt of influences: minimalism, African rhythms, punk and kraut rock, among others. Yet it never feels contrived.

On the day that I visited Taborn at the studio, the band was working on a floating, ruminative ballad called “The Great Silence.” Speed began with a swirl of long, sustained tones on clarinet that reminded me of French Impressionist composers like Francis Poulenc. Taborn played piano with his right hand and the Prophet 6 synthesizer with his left, creating firefly effects as King and Lightcap joined them in a lush, atmospheric melody.

“The bandleader has found his glasses!” Manfred Eicher declared in the sound-check room. “That reminds me of Arvo Part, the tintinnabuli!” This was high praise coming from Eicher, who introduced Western audiences to the Estonian composer’s mystical minimalism. Eicher is a sometimes-tempestuous producer, with very strong views of what he wants from his artists, but he was tender, even humble, in his dealings with Taborn. Later that afternoon, the two men listened to the playback of another section of “The Great Silence,” a gorgeously spectral piano solo that did not make it onto the record. “Is that piano or synthesizer?” Eicher asked. “I left the room when you were playing the cadenza.”

“Piano,” Taborn replied.

“It sounded so remote, like it was coming from a different perspective, so I couldn’t tell if it was piano or synthesizer. It was like a slow falling star, hitting the ground and blinking!”

Eicher, who seemed almost giddy, revised the metaphor. “Like a distant star that falls and then disappears.” He then suggested they try a “sparse improvised piece based on listening.” Taborn led the band in a sublime short piece that had the quiet intensity of the best chamber music, with Speed’s tenor evoking memories of Wayne Shorter’s work with Miles Davis. (It didn’t make the cut, another casualty of the process — Taborn told me it would have “unbalanced the architecture of the album.”) “Good form, good length, and the ending was beautiful,” Eicher said.

When Eicher left the room, Taborn said, “Manfred isn’t often that cheerful, so I’m really pleased he’s glad.”

Craig Taborn’s friends often described him to me as a mystery, but this usually turned out to be a polite way of expressing their frustration that he has chosen not to be better known than he is, or ought to be. Many of them told me how relieved they were that someone, at last, was profiling him, as if he were being forced out of hiding.

Steve Coleman, his former employer and still a great admirer, remembers hearing Taborn play at the Village Vanguard, where he was leading a trio with Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Morgan. He was astonished by the degree of innovation that he was hearing. “It’s finally going to happen for Craig,” he recalled thinking. “He’s making a real contribution, he’s not just doing a gig, and you can say that about only a small handful of people.” The trio toured widely and made a brilliant album, “Chants,” but Taborn soon went back to his work as a sideman, joining the bassist Dave Holland’s band. “Momentum is the real thing, and you can gain momentum in a situation, like he had with Gerald and Thomas,” Coleman said. “But you can’t recreate something once the time is past.”

When I mentioned this argument to Taborn, he conceded that Coleman had a point about focusing on your own work, and said he “might be on the verge of doing just that.” But he added: “I’m not always sure what momentum is, exactly. I’m not always sure where people think they’re going and if they ever get there, anyway. To some extent I think it’s all an illusion.”

What Taborn means, I think, is that he is deeply involved in his process, no matter what music, or rather whose music, he’s performing. As he sees it, his body of work includes the music he has made as a sideman as much as his music as a leader. What matters — all that matters, really — is his presence in the moment of musical creation; the rest is commentary. If this attitude seems a little perplexing to some, it’s because we live in an age of incessant commentary, when instrumental music invariably is discussed in relation to personality and worldly ambition, or some nonmusical experience, culture or history that it supposedly reflects or expresses. As if music without words weren’t enough; as if it could refer to something beyond itself.

I still had trouble imagining that Taborn’s process could be so simple, so pure and self-​sacrificing. After all, a lot of musicians pay lip service to these ideas. Was it really possible to live them? Surely there must be some secret, a story that might expose, or at least account for, this surrender to the process of music making. Yet I’ve come to believe that if Taborn has a secret, it’s hiding in plain sight: his faith in what Stravinsky called music’s “essential being,” its radical self-sufficiency, its nonreferential nature. Taborn has remained loyal to this principle, sometimes at the expense of his own career. His apparent selflessness may seem strange, but the whole point of his process has been to avoid projecting “a self,” for the sake of a higher musical goal. This is what other musicians find so compelling and yet so peculiar — so mysterious — about him. It’s what makes Taborn’s musician friends highly protective of him, as if to speak about anything other than his music would be tantamount to betrayal.

Taborn’s musician friends were, in fact, so unforthcoming about (or simply unaware of) his life offstage that I asked a fellow writer, his friend Wendy Walters, whether she could tell me something about him that didn’t pertain directly to his music. She thought about it for a minute. Several years ago, she said finally, when Walters was going through a difficult divorce, Taborn sent her a witch-hazel tree, a breed that blooms in winter. The tree reminded her of Taborn’s relationship to his practice, and his need for solitude. “Music is almost life-giving for him. It’s the way he survives the things we’re trying to deal with.”

A few days later, I asked Taborn what he meant by the gift.

“Wendy’s house was beginning to feel like a cell in many ways, and it was uncertain when or if she would be in a position to move,” he remembered. “I thought it would be good to have something in the yard that would blossom with color. It was symbolic of hope, renewal and healing.” He paused. “But Wendy is, I think, hitting on something deeper about why I make music. All the things people say when they talk about music have to do with entertainment, or some kind of aesthetic advancement. Yet when they talk about how music moves them, they talk about other things: feelings, times of life, etc. So I suppose that for me, music is one of the things we use to get ourselves through life.” By giving Walters a tree that had not yet blossomed, he was giving her not so much a thing as a process, and waiting for it to reveal itself, to blossom with color over time, was central to realizing its mysterious power. “The witch-hazel tree was doing the same thing that a piece can do. Just saying: Here is this piece of music that you can have and listen to, and enjoy. Some day it may blossom for you, and you may find that it gives you something that you may not even know you need.”

from www.nytimes.com