Cecil Taylor, free musician
January 30, 2025 5:08 PM   Subscribe

"[Cecil] Taylor is his own entity: one of the most enriching and confusing boundary crossers between composition and improvisation. His art can be hard to reduce. He seems to think of his music as a kinetic act, a ritual of place and ancestry, something that lives in bodies but less so in notation and documents. And this is why his records go only so far in explaining him. His performances are the key to understanding not just his playing but also the poetry he reads in and around the music, and even his physical actions — the way he walks to and away from, and sometimes around, the piano." - Ben Ratliff

The Penguin Guide to Jazz wrote that Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come "should be accounted among the greatest live recordings in jazz...the playing has an irresistible momentum that creates its own kind of rocking swing, the pulse indefinable but palpable, the rhythm moving in waves from the drummer's kit. Lyons shapes his bebopper's vocabulary into gritty flurries of notes, a man caught in a squall and fighting his way through it and over it...Here he is sharing in the discovery of a fierce new world."*

The only recording of Cecil Taylor with Albert Ayler, Copenhagen, 1962

Gary Giddins talking for half an hour about why Cecil Taylor is so great.

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posted by Lemkin (5 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, man, I loves me some Cecil Taylor! Challenging, and well worth the effort.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:18 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


A biography, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor, by critic Phil Freeman was released last year.
posted by Captaintripps at 6:16 PM on January 30 [3 favorites]


What sticks in my mind about Cecil Taylor--in performance, in 1975, in a small jazz club in Ohio--was that the drummer was positioned at the front of the stage! A statement. Because the drums and the bass were always towards the back. But Taylor broke all the rules.
posted by kozad at 6:39 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


I have so much respect for anyone who goes in an out there musical direction and has utmost confidence in their vision. Super compelling.
posted by umbú at 9:29 AM on January 31 [2 favorites]


Cooool!!

According to one of the youtube commenters, that first linked clipped is a snippet from the 1981 documentary "Imagine the Sound," which I now hope to watch soon.

youtube link
kanopy link
posted by nikoniko at 3:48 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]


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