From the
Munich Piano Summer in
1984
Cecil Taylor -
Solo Piano Performance
1:08
Free Improvisation I
51:13 Free Improvisation II
Cecil Percival Taylor (born in March 25, 1929) is an
American pianist and poet.
Classically trained,
Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His piano technique has been likened to percussion, for example described as "eighty-eight tuned drums" (referring to the number of keys on a standard piano)
. [...]
Taylor was born in
New York City. He began playing piano at age six and studied at the
New York College of Music and
New England Conservatory. [...] Taylor's first recording,
Jazz Advance, featured
Lacy and was released in
1956. [...] Taylor's
Quartet featuring Lacy also appeared at the
1957 Newport Jazz Festival. He collaborated with saxophonist
John Coltrane in
1958 (
Stereo Drive, currently available as
Coltrane Time).
Throughout the
1950s and
1960s, Taylor's music grew more complex and moved away from existing jazz styles. Gigs were often hard to come by, and club owners found Taylor's approach to performance (long pieces) unhelpful in conducting business.
Landmark recordings, like
Unit Structures (1966), appeared. [..
.] In the early 1960s, an uncredited
Albert Ayler worked for a time with Taylor, jamming and appearing on at least one recording, Four, unreleased until 2004.
By
1961, Taylor was working regularly with alto saxophonist
Jimmy Lyons, one of his most important and consistent collaborators. Taylor,
Lyons and drummer
Sunny Murray (and later
Andrew Cyrille) formed the core personnel of
The Unit, Taylor's primary group effort until Lyons's premature death in
1986. Lyons's playing, strongly influenced by jazz icon
Charlie Parker, retained a strong blues sensibility and helped keep Taylor's increasingly avant garde music tethered to the jazz tradition.
Taylor began to perform solo concerts in the second half of the sixties. The first known recorded solo performance (by
Dutch radio) was '
Carmen With
Rings' (59 min.) in
De Doelen concert hall in
Rotterdam on July 1, 1967. Two days before Taylor had played the same composition in the
Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Many of the later concerts were released on
album and include
Indent (
1973), side one of
Spring of Two Blue-J's (1973),
Silent Tongues (
1974),
Garden (
1982),
For Olim (
1987),
Erzulie Maketh Scent (
1989) and
The Tree of Life (
1998)
.[...]
Following Lyons's death in 1986 Taylor formed the
Feel Trio in the early
1990s with
William Parker (bass) and
Tony Oxley (drums); the group can be heard on
Celebrated Blazons,
Looking (The Feel Trio) and the 10-CD set 2 T's for a
Lovely T. [...] His extended residence in
Berlin in
1988 was extensively documented by the
German label
FMP, resulting in a massive boxed set of performances in duet and trio with a who's who of
European free improvisors, including Oxley,
Derek Bailey,
Evan Parker,
Han Bennink,
Tristan Honsinger,
Louis Moholo,
Paul Lovens, and others. Most of his latter day recordings have been put out on European labels, with the exception of
Momentum Space (a meeting with
Dewey Redman and
Elvin Jones) on
Verve/Gitanes. The classical label
Bridge released his 1998
Library of Congress performance
Algonquin, a duet with violinist
Mat Maneri. Taylor continued to perform for capacity audiences around the world with live concerts, usually played on his favored instrument, a Bösendorfer piano that features nine extra lower-register keys. A documentary entitled "All the
Notes", was released on
DVD in
2006 by director
Chris Felver. Taylor was also featured in an earlier documentary film
Imagine the Sound (
1981), in which he discusses and performs his music, poetry and dance.
Taylor recorded sparingly in the
2000s, but continued to perform with his own ensembles (the Cecil Taylor
Ensemble and the Cecil Taylor
Big Band) as well as with other musicians such as
Joe Locke,
Max Roach, and the poet
Amiri Baraka. In 2004, the Cecil Taylor Big Band at the
Iridium 2005 was nominated a best performance of 2004 by
All About Jazz, and the same in 2009 for the Cecil Taylor Trio at the
Highline Ballroom in 2009. The trio consisted of Taylor, Albey Balgochian, and
Jackson Krall. [...] Taylor is a poet, citing
Robert Duncan,
Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka as major influences. He often integrates his poems into his musical performances, and they frequently appear in the liner notes of his albums. [...] In 1982, jazz critic
Stanley Crouch outed Taylor as being gay, prompting an angry response. However, Taylor never denied it. In
1991, Taylor told a
New York Times reporter "someone once asked me if I was gay. I said, 'Do you think a three-letter word defines the complexity of my humanity?' I avoid the trap of easy definition."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Taylor
- published: 09 Dec 2015
- views: 857