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Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor is an NEA Jazz Master

"One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, 'You don‘t know what love is,' great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing." —Cecil Taylor

"Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home more beautiful. What goes into an improvisation is what goes into one's preparation, then allowing the prepared senses to execute at the highest level devoid of psychological or logical interference. You ask, without logic, where does the form come from? It seems something that may be forgotten is that as we begin our day and proceed through it there is a form in existence that we create out of, that the day and night itself is for. And what we choose to vary in the daily routine provides in itself the fresh building blocks to construct a living form which is easily translated into a specific act of making a musical composition." - Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor has been an uncompromising creative force who is a testament to his own existence and personal experience since his earliest recordings in the 1950's. In the 1960's, his music would become a leading exponent, along with that of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, of the budding "free-jazz" movement. This movement shook the very foundations on which jazz music was securely resting and marks a major turning point in the history of the music that challenged the structures of form and the tonal harmonic system. Taylor has said of his characteristic rhythmic playing that he tries "to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes" and his orchestral facility on the piano has allowed him to innovate new musical textures in small ensemble performance. Taylor's playing has always been technically sophisticated, but as he once said, "technique is a weapon to do whatever must be done".† The personnel in his bands over his almost five decades in jazz comprises a list of astounding talent including: Steve Lacy, Jimmy Lyons, Albert Ayler, Buell Neidlinger, Dennis Charles, Archie Shepp, William Parker, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Mark Helias, Mary Lou Williams, and Bill Dixon. Additionally, he has worked with several notable dancers and choreographers including composing music for Diane McIntyre, Mikhail Barishnokov, and Heather Watts.

While his music has always been controversial to mainstream audiences, he has always been totally true to his artistic vision, and this has extended into all aspects of his life including his passions for reading, dance, theatre, and architecture. He is also an accomplished poet, and has incorporated this talent into many of his performances and recordings.

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Book Review

In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor

Read "In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor" reviewed by Ian Patterson


In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil TaylorPhilip Freeman 344 Pages ISBN: # ISBN 978-3-9553-261-9 Wolke Verlag 2024 “The thing that makes jazz so interesting is that each man is his own academy," Cecil Taylor once said, (quoted by Val Wilmer in Jazz People, Da Capo, 1970). The pianist/composer was certainly a school of one, a pianist and composer who occupied a unique position in contemporary music for almost seventy ...

1
Album Review

Cecil Taylor: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit

Read "Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit" reviewed by Giuseppe Segala


Nel periodo di passaggio tra gli anni Settanta e Ottanta, Cecil Taylor è stato oggetto di numerose attenzioni da parte di etichette europee, che ne hanno lodevolmente documentato esibizioni dal vivo assai significative. Tra queste, alcune presentano la formazione Unit in differenti organici strumentali, che esprimono con dovizia un momento di impeto formidabile e di incredibile intesa creativa. Ne sono esempio le registrazioni in Germania del giugno 1978 Live in the Black Forest e One Too Many Salty Swift and ...

10
Book Review

In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor

Read "In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor" reviewed by Jack Kenny


In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil TaylorPhilip Freeman 344 Pages ISBN: # ISBN 978-3-9553-261-9 Wolke Verlag 2024 The sign over the nightclub says it all: Cecil Taylor starts where Thelonious Monk leaves off. Jazz has never really come to terms with Cecil Taylor. Comparisons with Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Berg are misleading. Does Taylor have a direct line to earlier pianists in the jazz tradition? To earlier composers? Is he ...

11
Album Review

Cecil Taylor: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit

Read "Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit" reviewed by John Eyles


For some years, Werner X. Uehlinger's Ezz-thetics label has been bringing smiles to the faces of countless lovers of free jazz by re-releasing albums featuring such luminaries as Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor (to name but a few of many) all with state-of-the-art sound quality. The label's distinctive orange lettering over black and white period images of the featured artists has made its albums instantly recognisable. Until now. The current album has blue ...

18
Album Review

Cecil Taylor Unit: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit

Read "Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit" reviewed by Chris May


More faux-intellectual codswallop has been written about Cecil Taylor than about any other jazz musician, dead or alive. He has been, and continues to be, misrepresented as an arcane Einsteinian theorist by a cult whose members are afraid of visceral reactions to his art (or to anyone else's). But Taylor's work demands a visceral response. It has nothing to do with rational thought and everything to do with emotion and physicality. Sadly, the nonsense that has been written about his ...

11
Album Review

Albert Ayler: More Lost Performances Revisited

Read "More Lost Performances Revisited" reviewed by Chris May


A state-of-the-art sonic restoration of obscure but historically important Albert Ayler material by Switzerland's ezz-thetics label, which with its parent label, Hat Hut, has been creating an audiophile archive of Ayler recordings with the support of his estate since 1978. All too often, “more" in an album title means “Beware: barrel scraping in progress." Not in this case. More Lost Performances Revisited is primetime Ayler. The disc draws from three sources over a five-year timespan. The earliest ...

3
Radio & Podcasts

Cecil Taylor, Ellington Seattle Concert, Aretha Franklin

Read "Cecil Taylor, Ellington Seattle Concert, Aretha Franklin" reviewed by David Brown


This week on the Jazz Continuum, we celebrate the birthday of Aretha Franklin with her music and Franklin covers by Philly organist Jimmy McGriff. We'll continue with a musical tribute to Cecil Taylor, one of the most uncompromisingly gifted pianists in jazz history who was born on this day in 1929. We'll be spinning from Taylor's discography, both early works and key, influential recordings. Then, we'll visit the Duke Ellington orchestra performing in Seattle, on this day in 1952, when ...

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Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

Recording

Cecil Taylor: Complete Return Concert

Cecil Taylor: Complete Return Concert

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

On November 4, 1973, pianist Cecil Taylor was booked to perform at New York's Town Hall. He planned to perform three free-jazz works accompanied by Jimmy Lyons (as) Sirone (b) and Andrew Cyrille (d). Sensing that Taylor's concert would be significant both as a work of music and because Taylor hadn't played in the city since the Newport Jazz Festival a year earlier, David Laura, Taylor's then manager, reached out to Fred Seibert, a Columbia University student. Back then, Fred ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

Obituary

Cecil Taylor Is Gone

Cecil Taylor Is Gone

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

Cecil Taylor, a pianist who fashioned his music from myriad styles and sources, died yesterday in New York. He was 89. From his earliest recordings in the mid-1950s with bassist Buell Nieidlinger, drummer Dennis Charles and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, Taylor pursued daring and swam upstream against jazz orthodoxy. This is how critic Ben Ratliff put it in an obituary in today’s New York Times. At the center of his art was that dazzling physicality and the percussiveness of his ...

1

Obituary

Cecil Taylor: 1929-2018

Cecil Taylor: 1929-2018

Source: All About Jazz

We compiled several Tweets about pianist Cecil Taylor's profound impact on others through his music and his friendship. Scroll to the bottom and click the link to read more.

Thanks to Cecil Taylor for his creative courage and his uncompromising vision of what music can be. We mourn his passing but celebrate his life.

— Dave Holland (@TheDaveHolland) April 6, 2018

No one touched the piano like Cecil Taylor. The force, the ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

1

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Jazz Musician of the Day: Cecil Taylor

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Cecil Taylor's birthday today!

“One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, “You don‘t know what love is,” great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing"....—-Cecil Taylor November 10, 2010 “Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home ...

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

More Lost...

Ezz-thetics
2023

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The Complete,...

Oblivion Records
2022

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With (Exit) To...

Ezz-thetics
2022

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Mixed to Unit...

Ezz-thetics
2021

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Lifting The Bandstand

Fundacja Sluchaj
2021

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