Taylor, Cecil

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Cecil Taylor

1929—

Musician

Pianist Cecil Taylor was one of the pioneers of avant-garde jazz, often called free jazz, along with the saxophonists John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Known for masterful leadership of his ensembles, Taylor demonstrated stupendous physical stamina on stage, often playing for more than two hours without a break. "Taylor doesn't play other people's music or lean on a marketing concept. The idea is that he is a once-and-forever new concept," wrote Ben Ratliff in the New York Times, adding, "His music is an eruption…. [I]t comes from as broad a consciousness and as deep a commitment to beauty as we have in American culture."

Taylor was born in 1929 in New York City and grew up in Queens, the same borough that was home to the Rivercrest Sanitarium, a mental health facility where his father, Percy, worked as head chef. His mother, Almeida Ragland Taylor, who was a dancer and an actor in some of the earliest black silent films, taught her son a little French and German as well as the piano. Both she and Percy hoped their son would become a professional, perhaps a doctor or lawyer. His mother died before he reached his teens, however, so Taylor's passion for music was stoked at an impressionable age by his uncle, a professional musician who lived with the family. He took the young Taylor to live jazz shows in the city. Although Taylor studied classical music at the New York College of Music and theory and composition at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music, he was also intrigued by several new currents in jazz music that emerged during the 1940s and the post-World War II years, including bebop. After graduating in 1953, he moved back to New York and began playing jazz at a variety of venues.

Broke from Bebop Pack

Taylor recorded his debut record, Jazz Advance, in Boston. Three other musicians—Steve Lacy on saxophone, Buell Neidlinger on bass, and Dennis Charles on drums—joined Taylor in his first ensemble, whose sound was dubbed post-bebop by puzzled music critics. In an article about jazz trends, New York Times writer John S. Wilson called the record "a fascinating, if sometimes unnerving, sampling of a jagged but thoroughly articulate style made up of slivers of Thelonius Monk, Béla Bartók and Jelly Roll Morton, mixed with precise technique by an adamant individualist."

Around that time Taylor began playing regularly at the Five Spot Café, a tiny but legendary jazz venue in the Bowery, then a seedy part of Manhattan. His playing was reportedly so hypnotic that nobody ordered drinks for fear of breaking the spell. During this period Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were also Five Spot regulars and sometimes played with Taylor. Collectively they were hailed as creators of a new, thoroughly modern sound in jazz. Coltrane and Taylor recorded together once, in 1958; the session was issued under various titles, including Coltrane Time and Hard Driving Jazz.

After nearly a decade as a professional musician, Taylor began to find his own style as a composer, exemplified by his 1961 recording Into the Hot. It included three original compositions in which Taylor "first fully revealed his gifts as a composer," wrote Stanley Crouch in the New York Times. "Call-and-response, tension and release, metric shifts and the orchestration of both bluesy and unconventional effects come off marvelously." The record, made with saxophonists Archie Shepp and Jimmy Lyons, marked the beginning of a long collaboration between Taylor and Lyons that endured until Lyons's death in 1986.

Formed the Cecil Taylor Unit

Taylor and Lyons soon joined with Sunny Murray, a jazz drummer whose pioneering percussion willfully departed from the traditional function of keeping time in a piece of music. Often billed as the Cecil Taylor Unit, the combo broke from standard Western musical traditions, creating free-jazz compositions that "featured muscular improvisations of such challenging techniques and structure they bewildered listeners and most fellow musicians alike," Crouch wrote in the New York Times.

Releases from this period include Unit Structures (1966) and an epic three-volume set, The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (1969), which was recorded live in Paris. For many years Taylor's new style, sometimes referred to as black classical music, seemed to be shunned by the more mainstream jazz music industry. Oftentimes Taylor's releases were issued on independent labels, and gigs took place at private gatherings in New York City. In Europe, however, the sound found more appreciative audiences. Nevertheless, Taylor's works influenced a generation of musical innovators on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the 1970s Taylor began to perform as a solo pianist, and two releases showcased his concert style, Indent (1973) and Silent Tongues (1974). His occasional collaboration with traditional jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams culminated in a two-piano performance at Carnegie Hall in April of 1977. A year later he performed on the South Lawn of the White House at an event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. The concert, with its all-star lineup, was considered a pivotal moment in the history of jazz, marking its acceptance into mainstream culture.

Feted in Berlin

Taylor, however, continued to work outside the mainstream. In 1979 he played a series of gigs with Sun Ra, an equally original American jazz artist, whose recording "Arkestra" helped define a new subgenre, other-worldly sounds, that paved the way for electronic-music pioneers. That same year Taylor performed with drummer Max Roach; the events were recorded as Cecil Taylor & Max Roach: Historic Concerts. The two performed together on occasion for the next twenty years.

In the 1980s Taylor spent time in what was then West Berlin, which was known for its flourishing arts scene. He made scores of recordings with European and American expatriate free-jazz musicians who had come of age in the 1960s, just as he was releasing his first compositions. In the mid 1990s he played frequently with another member of that generation, Finnish saxophonist Harri Sjöström. Among their joint releases was the two-volume set Qu'a: Live at the Iridium (1998). In 2005 Taylor was the subject of a documentary, Cecil Taylor: All the Notes, which showed the musician at his favorite piano—a Bösendorfer with ninety-seven keys instead of the standard eighty-eight.

"We can hear more of the world's music than ever before," Taylor reflected in a 1991 interview with Peter Watrous in the New York Times. "If Debussy can hear a Balinese gamelon orchestra at a Paris world fair and change his concept, I can learn from [Iannis] Xenakis, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.… Literature, theater, it's all important. You want to create the utmost that is possible, to continue the ideas of certain people who have enriched your life."

At a Glance …

Born Cecil Percival Taylor on March 25, 1929, in New York, NY; son of Percy Clinton (a chef) and Almeida Ragland (an actress) Taylor. Education: Attended New York College of Music; graduated from New England Conservatory of Music, 1953.

Career: Composer, solo musician, and leader of ensemble jazz groups since 1953; recording artist since 1956.

Memberships: Jazz Composers Guild, founder, 1964.

Awards: Guggenheim fellow, 1973; designated Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, 1990; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow, 1991.

Addresses: Record label—Enja Records, PO Box 190333, D-80603 Munich, Germany.