Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929 – April 5, 2018)[1][2][3] was an American pianist and poet.[4][5]
Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex improvisation often involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His technique has been compared to percussion. Referring to the number of keys on a standard piano, Val Wilmer used the phrase "eighty-eight tuned drums" to describe Taylor's style.[6] He has been referred to as being "like Art Tatum with contemporary-classical leanings".[7]
Early life and education
Cecil Percival Taylor was born on March 25, 1929, in Long Island City, Queens,[8] and raised in Corona, Queens.[9] As an only child to a middle-class family, Taylor's mother Almeda Ragland Taylor encouraged him to play music at an early age. He began playing piano at age six and went on to study at the New York College of Music and New England Conservatory in Boston. At the New England Conservatory, Taylor majored in popular music arrangement. During his time there, he also became familiar with contemporary European art music. Bela Bartók and Karlheinz Stockhausen notably influenced his music.[10]
In 1955, Taylor moved back to New York City from Boston. He formed a quartet with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Dennis Charles.[10] Taylor's first recording, Jazz Advance, featured Lacy and was released in 1956.[11] The recording is described by Richard Cook and Brian Morton in the Penguin Guide to Jazz: "While there are still many nods to conventional post-bop form in this set, it already points to the freedoms in which the pianist would later immerse himself."[12] Taylor's quartet featuring Lacy also appeared at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, which was made into the album At Newport.[13] Taylor collaborated with saxophonist John Coltrane in 1958 on Stereo Drive, now available as Coltrane Time.[14]
1950s and early 1960s
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 that Taylor's approach of playing long pieces tended to impede business.[15] His 1959 LP recordLooking Ahead! showcased his innovation as a creator as compared to the jazz mainstream. Unlike others at the time, Taylor utilized virtuosic techniques and made swift stylistic shifts from phrase to phrase. These qualities, among others, still remained notable distinctions of his music for the rest of his life.[16]
Landmark recordings, such as Unit Structures (1966), also appeared. Within the Cecil Taylor Unit (a distinction that was often used at performances and recordings between 1962 and 2006 for a shifting group of sidemen), musicians were able to develop new forms of conversational interplay. In the early 1960s, an uncredited Albert Ayler worked with Taylor, jamming and appearing on at least one recording, Four, which was unreleased until appearing on the 2004 Ayler box setHoly Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–70).[17]
By 1961, Taylor was working regularly with alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who would become one of his most important and consistent collaborators. Taylor, Lyons, and drummer Sunny Murray (and later Andrew Cyrille) formed the core personnel of the Cecil Taylor Unit, Taylor's primary ensemble until Lyons' death in 1986. Lyons' 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.[18]
Taylor continued to perform for capacity audiences around the world with live concerts, usually playing his favored instrument, a Bösendorfer piano featuring nine extra lower-register keys. In 1987, he toured England with Australian pianist Roger Woodward, presenting recitals on which Woodward played solo works by Xenakis, Takemitsu, and Feldman, followed by Taylor, also playing solo.[27] A documentary on Taylor, entitled All the Notes, was released on DVD in 2006 by director Chris Felver. Taylor was also featured in a 1981 documentary film entitled Imagine the Sound, in which he discusses and performs his music, poetry, and dance.[28] In 1993, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[29][30]
In 2013, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for Music.[35] He was described as "An Innovative Jazz Musician Who Has Fully Explored the Possibilities of Piano Improvisation".[36] In 2014, his career and 85th birthday were honored at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia with the tribute concert event "Celebrating Cecil".[37] In 2016, Taylor received a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art entitled "Open Plan: Cecil Taylor".[38]
In addition to piano, Taylor was always interested in ballet and dance. His mother, who died while he was young, was a dancer and played the piano and violin. Taylor once said: "I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes."[42] He collaborated with dancer Dianne McIntyre from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.[43] In 1979, he composed and played the music for a 12-minute ballet, "Tetra Stomp: Eatin' Rain in Space", featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts.[44]
Poetry
Taylor was a poet, and cited Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Amiri Baraka as major influences.[45] He often integrated his poems into his musical performances, and they frequently appear in the liner notes of his albums. The album Chinampas, released by Leo Records in 1987, is a recording of Taylor reciting several of his poems while accompanying himself on percussion.[46] His poetry was likened to his music primarily by the ways in which Taylor alteres and transforms material both linguistic and musical.[47]
Taylor's style and methods have been described as "constructivist".[50] Despite Scott Yanow's warning regarding Taylor's "forbidding music" ("Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone"), he praises Taylor's "remarkable technique and endurance", and his "advanced", "radical", "original", and uncompromising "musical vision".[5]
This musical vision is a large part of Taylor's legacy:
Playing with Taylor I began to be liberated from thinking about chords. I'd been imitating John Coltrane unsuccessfully and because of that I was really chord conscious.
— Archie Shepp, quoted in LeRoi Jones, album liner notes for Four for Trane (Impulse A-71, 1964)
Personal life and death
Taylor moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1983.[9] He died at his Brooklyn residence on April 5, 2018, at the age of 89.[51][52] At the time of his death, Taylor was working on an autobiography and future concerts, among other projects.[53]
^ abRatliff, Ben (May 3, 2012). "Lessons From the Dean of the School of Improv", The New York Times. Retrieved December 9, 2017: "I recently spoke with the 83-year-old improvising pianist Cecil Taylor for about five hours over two days. One day was at his three-story home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he has lived since 1983.... Raised in Corona, Queens, he started out as a Harlem jam-session musician in the early 1950s and talks with intense loyalty about a line of particularly New York-identified piano players: Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Mal Waldron, John Hicks."
^ abMeeder, Christopher. Jazz: the Basics. p. 150.
^Morton, Brian (2011). The Penguin jazz guide : the history of the music in the 1,001 best albums. Cook, Richard. London: Penguin. ISBN978-0-14-195900-9. OCLC759581884.