Cecil Taylor

Cecil Percival Taylor was born on March 25, 1929, in Long Island City, Queens, and grew up in Corona, Queens. An only child in a middle-class home, he was encouraged by his mother, Almeda Ragland Taylor, to take up music early. He started piano at age six, later studying at the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he majored in popular music arrangement. There, he encountered contemporary European art music, with Béla Bartók and Karlheinz Stockhausen becoming notable influences. In 1955, Taylor returned to New York from Boston and formed a quartet with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Dennis Charles. His first recording, *Jazz Advance* (1956), featured Lacy; Richard Cook and Brian Morton of the *Penguin Guide to Jazz* noted that while it still nodded to conventional post-bop form, it already pointed toward the freedoms Taylor would later explore. This quartet also appeared at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, captured on the album *At Newport*. In 1958, Taylor collaborated with saxophonist John Coltrane on *Stereo Drive*, later reissued as *Coltrane Time*.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Taylor’s music grew more complex and moved away from existing jazz styles. Gigs were scarce, as club owners found his long pieces bad for business. His 1959 LP *Looking Ahead!* showcased his innovation relative to the jazz mainstream; he employed virtuosic techniques and made swift stylistic shifts from phrase to phrase, qualities that remained hallmarks of his work. Landmark recordings like *Unit Structures* (1966) appeared. Within the Cecil Taylor Unit—a shifting group of sidemen used between 1962 and 2006—musicians developed new forms of conversational interplay. In the early 1960s, an uncredited Albert Ayler jammed with Taylor and appeared on at least one unreleased recording, *Four*, which came out on the 2004 Ayler box set *Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–70)*. By 1961, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons became a regular collaborator and a core member of the Unit, along with drummers Sunny Murray and later Andrew Cyrille. Lyons’ playing, strongly influenced by Charlie Parker, retained a blues sensibility that helped tether Taylor’s increasingly avant-garde music to jazz tradition.

In the latter half of the 1960s, Taylor began performing solo concerts. The first known recorded solo performance was “Carmen With Rings” (59 minutes) at De Doelen concert hall in Rotterdam on July 1, 1967; two days earlier, he had played the same piece at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Many later solo concerts were released on albums such as *Indent* (1973), *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). He gained critical and popular acclaim, performing for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn, lecturing as an artist-in-residence at universities, and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. In 1976, he directed a production of Adrienne Kennedy’s *A Rat’s Mass* at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan, combining the original script with a chorus of orchestrated voices used as instruments. Jimmy Lyons, Rashid Bakr, Andy Bey, Karen Borca, David S. Ware, and Raphe Malik performed in the production as the Cecil Taylor Unit, among other musicians and actors.

After Lyons’ death in 1986, Taylor formed the Feel Trio in the late 1980s with bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley. This group can be heard on *Celebrated Blazons*, *Looking (Berlin Version) The Feel Trio*, and the 10-disc set *2 Ts for a Lovely T*. Compared to his earlier groups with Lyons, the Feel Trio took a more abstract approach, less tied to jazz tradition and more aligned with European free improvisation. Taylor also worked with larger ensembles and big band projects. An extended 1988 residence in Berlin was documented by the German label FMP, resulting in a box set of duet and trio performances with many European free improvisers, including Oxley, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Tristan Honsinger, Louis Moholo, and Paul Lovens. Most of his later recordings appeared on European labels, except for *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 worldwide, usually playing his favored Bösendorfer piano, until his death on April 5, 2018.