Cecil Taylor
Taylor struck the keys like drums, and with that sound walked to the farthest place jazz could go.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those who played alongside him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAlmeida Taylor
The mother who began teaching Taylor piano at around age five and awakened a love of the arts as a whole; she died when her son was in his early teens.
- InfluenceDuke Ellington
The composer Taylor named throughout life as the wellspring of his own music; Taylor's first album included a performance of Ellington's "Azure."
- InfluenceThelonious Monk
With angular rhythms and unexpected silences, Monk left a deep mark on Taylor's early idiom, and the first album opens with Monk's "Bemsha Swing."
- ColleagueJimmy Lyons
The alto saxophonist who stayed at Taylor's side for 25 years, from 1961 until his death in 1986.
- ColleagueAndrew Cyrille
From 1964, for more than a decade, he held down the drums in the Unit, breathing in step with Taylor's tone clusters.
- ColleagueMax Roach
On a 1979 duo stage, together they forged a historic dialogue in which bebop met free jazz.
I. The boy from Queens · 1929–1951 (age 0–22)
(Queens) He was born in March 1929 in Long Island City, Queens, New York. His given name was Cecil Percival Taylor, and he grew up in a Black middle-class neighborhood in nearby Corona. Almost no record survives of any siblings. His father, Percy Taylor, made a living as a cook. Taylor later recalled that his father told him the work songs, blues and old tales of the Black South. He came to regard those stories as the invisible roots of his own music. (Mother) It was his mother, Almeida, who put the piano in his hands. She had her son take piano lessons from around the age of five. She is also said to have taken him to dance, theater and the movies, opening his eyes to the arts as a whole. But she died when Taylor was in his early teens. All his life he remembered her as his first teacher and his most exacting patron. Later he would bring piano, dance and poetry onto a single stage, and many critics believe the seeds of that were sown in the childhood he shared with her. (Swing) What the young Taylor heard on the radio and in theaters were the big bands of the swing era. He was captivated by the sound of the Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Chick Webb orchestras, and he studied percussion alongside the piano. Recalling the way he would later treat the keyboard like a drum, it is a telling detail. After finishing high school, he began formal training at the New York College of Music. Between classical études and the big-band sound of Harlem, he was already holding two worlds at once.
II. A school outside the conservatory · 1951–1958 (age 22–29)
(Boston) Around 1951 he entered the New England Conservatory in Boston to study arranging and composition. But he was deeply disappointed by a curriculum that took only European classical music as its canon (正典). In many interviews he recalled his anger that Black music was never treated seriously in the classroom. He learned more from Boston's clubs and records than from his lessons. (Role models) Where he turned his ear was clear: Duke Ellington's thick, richly colored harmonies, Thelonious Monk's angular rhythms and unexpected silences, Bud Powell's headlong runs. Early on he also took an interest in Horace Silver's weighty left hand. He absorbed Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano as well, and even the percussive piano music of Bartók and Stravinsky. The wall dividing jazz from contemporary music meant nothing to him from the very start. (Sideman) Around 1955 he returned to New York. He worked briefly as a sideman in the small bands of trumpeter Hot Lips Page and of Johnny Hodges, the star saxophonist of the Ellington orchestra. It was a short course in which he lived the world of straight-ahead swing in his own body. (Five Spot) Soon he formed his own quartet, with Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone, Buell Neidlinger on bass and Dennis Charles on drums. In late 1956 he played a long-running engagement (a residency) at the Five Spot, a small bar in the East Village, and helped put it on the map as a jazz club. That same year he recorded his first album, “Jazz Advance,” and in 1957 he took the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1958 he also recorded a session with John Coltrane and Kenny Dorham.
The first album on which he began turning the Monk and Ellington he had absorbed in Boston into a language of his own. It captures the sound of his Five Spot–era quartet.
- The opening track is Thelonious Monk's “Bemsha Swing.” Pushing Monk's signature angular melody into thicker, rougher harmonies, it shows both reverence for the older generation and a break from it.
- In his take on Ellington's “Azure,” he repaints the original's soft colors with clusters of notes struck all at once (tone clusters).
- Steve Lacy's soprano saxophone appears on only two tracks. His clear, straight tone stands in contrast to Taylor's dense piano.
- The bass and drums still keep a traditional beat (swing). Above them the piano alone rushes and twists the meter, and you can hear where his later liberation began.
- The producer was Tom Wilson, founder of the Transition label, who would later produce Bob Dylan's records.
III. The dishwashing years · 1959–1967 (age 30–38)
(Hardship) Critical attention grew, but the work did not. Club owners shied away from music their customers couldn't hum along to. Taylor got by washing dishes, working as a kitchen assistant, clerking in a record store and making deliveries. In his 1966 book “Four Lives in the Bebop Business,” the poet and critic A. B. Spellman made him one of its four subjects. The book vividly records a daily life in which talent and poverty lived side by side. (Lyons) In 1961 the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons joined him. Lyons would become his longest-serving colleague, staying at his side for the next twenty-five years. Drummer Sunny Murray, instead of marking a steady beat, scattered his cymbals like waves, breathing new life into Taylor's music. In 1962 the three played without a bass at the Café Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark. The recordings from that stand remain a landmark of improvisation freed from set chords and meter (free jazz). (Guild) In 1964 he founded the Jazz Composers Guild with trumpeter Bill Dixon and others. It was an attempt to let musicians manage their own concerts and earnings without being at the mercy of clubs and labels. The Guild did not last, but its spirit of self-reliance endured. That same year drummer Andrew Cyrille joined and became the rhythmic axis for more than a decade. (Blue Note) In 1966 he recorded “Unit Structures” and “Conquistador!” for Blue Note. He called his band the Unit. The harder he was pressed to compromise for a living, the firmer and more complex his music became.
A live recording made with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray at a Copenhagen club, in the years when he could find no work at home. It is a trio without a bass.
- With the bass gone, there is no sound holding up the floor of the beat. So the pianist's left hand takes on the roles of both bass and percussion.
- Sunny Murray does not mark a steady beat. He creates a pulse (a heartbeat-like flow) of scattered, ringing cymbals, so that the music seems to float rather than walk.
- Lyons's alto carries the bebop idiom handed down from Charlie Parker. Its singing lines are paired with Taylor's explosive harmonies.
- The standard “What's New” is also included, so you can compare how he takes apart and reweaves a familiar tune.
A large-ensemble work recorded for Blue Note after the experiments of the Jazz Composers Guild. Here his vision of improvisation and composition locked together is realized at its most refined.
- There are two basses. Henry Grimes and Alan Silva weave a double layer of texture in the low register.
- On “Enter Evening,” Ken McIntyre plays oboe and bass clarinet. It is the quietest, most chamber-like moment on the album.
- Rather than keeping time, Andrew Cyrille's drums erupt and subside together with the piano's tone clusters. The whole rhythm section breathes as one body.
- In each piece, short composed passages alternate with improvised ones. Instead of a fixed order (head–solos–head), the parts stack up like blocks.
- It was recorded at Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey. Taylor contributed a poetic essay of his own as the liner notes.
IV. The lectern and the solo stage · 1968–1977 (age 39–48)
(Europe) From the late 1960s on, he was welcomed more warmly in Europe than in America. Festivals and broadcasters in Paris, Berlin and Scandinavia invited him again and again. Across the ocean he found the respect and pay that the clubs at home had denied him. (Teaching) From 1970 he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Antioch College and Glassboro State College. His courses placed the history of Black music at the center of American culture. He demanded that students learn music through their ears and bodies. At Wisconsin he clashed with the university over grading it considered too harsh, and he left after little more than a year. This is confirmed by records from the time. (Solo) In 1973 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. From around then, solo recitals became the center of his work. After “Indent,” recorded at Antioch in 1973, and a solo album recorded in Japan the same year, he left “Silent Tongues” in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1974. With no colleagues and a single keyboard, he conjured an orchestral density. Some critics believe that the modest stability he found after long years of want made such long-breathed solo works possible. (Mary Lou) In April 1977 he played a two-piano concert at Carnegie Hall with the pianist Mary Lou Williams. Williams had proposed it as a chance to link the whole history of jazz on a single stage. But the two idioms never meshed. The concert failed, yet it is remembered as a meaningful attempt.
The summit of his solo work, completed amid the modest stability that teaching and European tours had brought. It was recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
- A single suite unfolding across several movements. Short motifs recur and are gradually transformed, so that even within a flow that sounds like chaos there is a clear design.
- Tone clusters, many notes struck at once with palms and forearms, are used like a drum. The piano sounds at once like a melodic instrument and a percussion instrument.
- Lyrical stillness slips in between the stormy passages. That contrast gives a performance of nearly an hour room to breathe.
- The audience's rapturous response drew two encores. Those encores briefly call back the themes of the main concert.
V. Dance and poetry, and a farewell · 1978–1988 (age 49–59)
(The White House) In June 1978 he was invited to the jazz festival President Jimmy Carter held on the White House lawn. The pianist who had once washed dishes was, twenty years later, playing before a president. When he finished, Carter is said to have come over to greet him. (Dance) He thought of the piano as an extension of dance. In 1979 he wrote music for the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, and at his own concerts he would walk slowly across the stage and dance before he played. He often recited poetry aloud, too. In 1987 he released "Chinampas," an album made up solely of his own poems and percussion. For him, sound, body and word were a single current. (Roach) In December 1979 he played a duet with the bebop drummer Max Roach at Columbia University. On that stage two masters of different generations and idioms traded phrases as if testing each other, and the performance was released as "Historic Concerts." (Lyons) In May 1986 Jimmy Lyons, his partner of twenty-five years, died of lung cancer. Lyons's singing alto had always dropped a melodic anchor beneath Taylor's stormy piano. After losing him, Taylor moved away from a fixed unit toward meeting new collaborators each time. (Berlin) In the summer of 1988 the Berlin independent label FMP staged a month-long Taylor festival. He played every day in a different lineup with masters of European free improvisation such as Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. The record survives as an eleven-CD box set.
A duet with Max Roach, the master drummer of bebop. Two men of different generations and idioms test each other as they search for a common language.
- Roach never lets go of the clear pulse and structure of bebop drumming. Taylor pushes and pulls against that frame. The tension between them drives the conversation.
- With only piano and drums, neither player has anywhere to hide. The give-and-take (interplay), in which one player catches a rhythmic motif the other has thrown and transforms it, comes through vividly.
- There are passages where Roach plays melodically, shifting the pitch and timbre of his drums. In those moments the drums sound like a voice on equal footing with the piano.
- A live recording made in an auditorium at Columbia University. It captures one long improvisation almost without edits.
VI. Brooklyn's last song · 1989–2018 (age 60–89)
(Trio) He formed the Feel Trio with the English drummer Tony Oxley, whom he had met in Berlin, and the New York bassist William Parker. The trio became his signature lineup of the 1990s. It was the new conversational partner he found after losing Lyons. (Honors) Belated recognition followed. In 1990 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1991 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he won the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. Music the clubs had once shunned was now judged an achievement of twentieth-century art. (Daily life) For decades he lived in an old row house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He never married. He was gay, but kept his distance from being defined by that label. He wrote and read poetry late into the night. His rehearsals were long and relentless, and he was also famous for starting concerts late. He always placed his music within the tradition of Black culture. Rather than the tag of avant-garde, he wanted to be understood as part of a lineage running from Ellington and Monk. (The end) In 2016 the Whitney Museum in New York mounted an exhibition on his life and work, and he took the stage there. It proved, in effect, his last public performance. On April 5, 2018, he died at his home in Brooklyn at the age of 89.
A solo recital given by the seventy-one-year-old Taylor at the Willisau Jazz Festival in Switzerland. The idiom he had honed all his life is distilled here into its mature form.
- The explosive force of his youth is still there. But the quiet passages grow longer and deeper, so the balance between lyricism and ferocity seems to have shifted.
- His use of a wide range, ranging between the very bottom and the very top of the keyboard, stands out. A single piano rings out like an ensemble of many instruments.
- Throughout, he repeats a figure while twisting it little by little. Following these makes it easier to hold on to the flow of the long performance.
- The independent label Intakt released it just as it was performed live. The resonance of the hall and the breathing of the audience are captured along with it.
Lesser-known stories
The Five Spot is the club that became legendary for Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane's extended engagement in 1957. Yet one of the players who first put it on the map as a jazz venue was Taylor, who held a long residency there in late 1956. The story of Monk and Coltrane is so famous that Taylor's earlier time there usually survives only as a footnote. Tom Wilson, who produced his first album, "Jazz Advance," was a Harvard-educated Black producer. Wilson founded the small label Transition to release it. A few years later he moved to Columbia and produced Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." That a man who stood at a great turning point in American popular music was the first to record jazz's most radical pianist rarely gets connected, because the histories of the two fields have been written separately. Taylor wrote poetry all his life, and in 1987 he released an album without piano, made only of his own poems and percussion. He also often walked slowly across the stage and danced before a performance. Critics wrote mostly about his keyboard. So his side as a poet, and as a performer who drew sound with his body, remained comparatively little known until the 2016 Whitney Museum exhibition brought it to light. When he took up teaching at universities in the early 1970s, he sought to teach Black music as the center of American art. He asked his students to learn by ear and body rather than from the score. Contemporary records note that he clashed with the University of Wisconsin over grading deemed too strict, and left. The episode was often served up as an anecdote painting him as a prickly eccentric. But what that strictness was trying to protect has been talked about far less.
Glossary 📚🔎
Free jazz
(In jazz) Jazz in which the players set aside agreements such as a fixed chord progression, a steady meter and a form of so many bars, and make the music on the spot by trading sounds. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Taylor, Ornette Coleman and others led this movement. It may look as if there are no rules, but in fact the players must listen and respond to one another with great sensitivity. It is like improvising a role-play with friends without a script. Say just anything and the story falls apart; only by picking up well on what the other person says does the story keep rolling. (Elsewhere) In everyday use free can also mean costing nothing, but the free in free jazz means free not of money but of form.
Tone cluster
(Literal meaning) Cluster is an English word for a mass bunched together, like a bunch of grapes. A tone cluster is a mass of tones. (In jazz) A clumped chord made by pressing several adjacent keys at once with the palm or forearm. Where an ordinary chord is stacked with gaps, like C·E·G, a cluster presses C·D·E·F all at once to produce a heavy, rough sound. Taylor used this sound like a drum, turning the piano into a percussion instrument. It is like the way many objects rattle together when you bang a fist on a desk instead of pressing a key with one finger.
Sideman
(In jazz) A musician who is not the bandleader but is hired to play in a band carrying the leader's name. Young players usually gain experience and make a name for themselves working as sidemen for famous leaders. Before forming his own band, Taylor too worked briefly as a sideman in bands such as Johnny Hodges's. It is like a backup dancer beside the lead in a school festival show, who builds skill as a backup dancer until one day stepping into the center of the stage.
Residency
(Literal meaning) Residency comes from reside, to stay or dwell. It means staying in one place. (In jazz) An extended engagement in which a band plays regularly at the same club for weeks or months. Patrons begin to come specifically to see that band, and the band refines its music by playing night after night. Taylor's 1956 residency at the Five Spot was the starting point for the club becoming a jazz landmark. Just as you improve by going to the same after-school academy every day, a band grows tight by playing the same stage every night. (Elsewhere) In medicine, residency means the training a doctor fresh out of medical school undergoes at a hospital.
Rhythm section
(In jazz) The group of instruments in a band responsible for the foundation of meter and harmony. Usually this means piano, bass and drums. Solo instruments such as saxophone or trumpet spin out melodies on top of it. In Taylor's music the rhythm section, rather than keeping time, became a conversational partner that erupts and subsides along with the soloist. It is like soccer, where defenders and midfielders must back up the forwards so they can run freely. (Elsewhere) At school or work, section means a department or area.
Interplay
(Literal meaning) Inter means mutual or between, and play means to perform or to play. It means playing by giving and taking. (In jazz) Making music as the players listen to one another and respond on the spot, as if answering. One player throws out a short rhythm, and another catches it, changes it and sends it back. The duets of Taylor and Max Roach are the example in which interplay can be heard most clearly. It is like table tennis, where you return the ball on the spot, matching the speed and spin your opponent put on it. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, it refers to the interaction of several factors influencing one another.