Cecil Taylor

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Cecil Taylor
Cecil Taylor playing in his apartment in the 1960s (Photograph: Charles Rotmil)
Cecil Taylor playing in his apartment in the 1960s (Photograph: Charles Rotmil)
Background information
Birth name Cecil Percival Taylor
Born March 25, 1929 (1929-03-25) (age 81)
Origin New York City
Genres Avant-garde jazz
Occupations Bandleader, Composer
Instruments Piano
Years active 1956 – present
Labels Transition
Blue Note
Freedom
Hat Hut
Enja Records
FMP
Associated acts Steve Lacy, Jimmy Lyons, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Buell Neidlinger, Alan Silva, William Parker, Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, Tony Oxley
Cecil Percival Taylor (born March 15 or March 25, 1929 in New York City) is an American Pianist and poet.[1] Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving Tone clusters and intricate Polyrhythms. His piano technique has been likened to Percussion, for example described as "eighty-eight tuned drums" (referring to the number of keys on a standard piano). [2]

Contents

Biography

Taylor began playing piano at age six and studied at the New York College of Music and New England Conservatory. After first steps in R&B and swing-styled small groups in the early 1950s, he formed his own band with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1956.

Taylor's first recording, Jazz Advance, featured Lacy and was released in 1956. It is described by Cook and 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 which the pianist would later immerse himself in." Taylor's Quartet featuring Lacy also appeared at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. He collaborated with saxophonist John Coltrane in 1958 (Stereo Drive, currently available as Coltrane Time).

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 Taylor's approach to performance (long pieces) unhelpful in conducting business.[3] Landmark recordings, like Unit Structures (1966), continued to appear, although sporadically. Many albums, like Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come, remained unreleased for years, even decades.

By 1961, Taylor was working regularly with alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, one of his most important and consistent collaborators. Taylor, Lyons and drummer Sunny Murray (and later Andrew Cyrille) formed the core personnel of 'The Unit', Taylor's primary group effort until Lyons's premature death in 1986. With 'the Unit', musicians developed often volcanic new forms of conversational interplay.

Taylor began to perform solo concerts in the early 1970s. Many of these were released on album and include Indent (1973), Silent Tongues (1974), Garden (1982), For Olim (1987), Erzulie Maketh Scent (1989) and The Tree of Life (1998). He began to garner critical, if not popular, acclaim, playing for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn, lecturing as an in-residence artist at universities, and eventually being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and then a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991.

Following Lyons's death in 1986 Taylor formed the "Feel Trio" in the early 1990s with William Parker (bass) and Tony Oxley (drums) (which can be heard on Celebrated Blazons, Looking (The Feel Trio) and the 10-CD set 2 T's for a Lovely T). He has also performed with larger ensembles and big-band projects. His extended residence in Berlin in 1988 was extensively documented by the German label FMP, resulting in a massive boxed set of performances in duet and trio with a who's who of European free improvisors, including Oxley, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Tristan Honsinger, Louis Moholo, Paul Lovens, and others. Most of his later day recordings have been put out on European labels, with the exception of 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. Few recordings from 2000 have yet been published, though Taylor, now in his seventies, continues to perform for capacity audiences around the world with live concerts, usually played on his favored instrument, the Bösendorfer piano that features 9 extra lower register keys. A documentary spotlighting the enigmatic musician, All the Notes, was released on DVD in 2006 by director Chris Felver. Taylor was also featured in an earlier Documentary film Imagine the Sound (1981), in which he discusses and performs his music, poetry and dance.

In addition to piano, Taylor has always been interested in ballet and dance. His mother, who died while he was still young, was a dancer and also played the piano and violin. Taylor once said: "I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes". He collaborated with dancer Dianne McIntyre in 1977 and 1979. In 1979 he also composed and played the music for a twelve-minute ballet "Tetra Stomp: Eatin' Rain in Space", featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts.

Taylor is also an accomplished Poet, citing Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka as major influences.[4] He often integrates his poems into his musical performances, and they frequently appear in the liner notes of his albums. The CD Chinampas, released by Leo Records in 1987, is a recording of Taylor reciting several of his poems, accompanying himself on percussion.

He is Gay.[5] He said to the New York Times in 1991, "Someone once asked me if I was gay. I said, 'Do you think a three-letter word defines the complexity of my humanity?'"[6]

Influence and musical style

Cecil Taylor, at Moers Festival 2008
Cecil Taylor, at Moers Festival 2008
According to Steven Block, free jazz originated with the performances of Cecil Taylor at the Five Spot Cafe in 1957 and Ornette Coleman in 1959.[7] In 1964, Taylor co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild to enhance the working possibilities of Avant-garde jazz musicians.[8]

Taylor's style and methods have been described as 'Constructivist'.[9] Despite Scott Yanow's warning regarding Taylor's "forbidding music":

Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone
he goes on to praise Taylor's "remarkable technique and endurance," and his "advanced", "radical", "original", and uncompromising "musical vision." [1]

This vision is one of Taylor's greatest influences upon others:

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. Cited in [8]

Discography

Main article: Cecil Taylor discography

References

  1. ^ a b Yanow, Scott (2008). "Cecil Taylor biography", AllMusic.
  2. ^ Wilmer, Val (1977). As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. Quartet . pp. 45. ISBN 0704331640. 
  3. ^ Spellman, A. B. (1985 originally 1966). Four Lives in the Bebop Business. Limelight . ISBN 0-87910-042-7. 
  4. ^ "being matter ignited...", Interview with Cecil Taylor by Chris Funkhouser published in Hambone, No. 12 (Nathaniel Mackey, editor).
  5. ^ Gill, John (1995). Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth Century Music. University of Minnesota Press . pp. 61. ISBN 0816627193. 
  6. ^ "Cecil Taylor, Long a Rebel, Is Finding Steady Work", by Peter Watrous, New York Times May 10, 1991
  7. ^ "Pitch-Class Transformation in Free Jazz". Author(s): Steven Block. Source: Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 12, No. 2, (Autumn, 1990), pp. 181-202. Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society for Music Theory.
  8. ^ a b Black Music and Cultural Nationalism: The Maturation of Archie Shepp. Author(s): Daniel Walden. Source: Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 5, No. 4, (Winter, 1971), pp. 150-154. Published by: St. Louis University.
  9. ^ Review: [untitled]. Author(s): Robert Palmer. Reviewed work(s): Indent by Cecil Taylor. Source: The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 2, No. 1, (Spring, 1974), pp. 94-95.

External links

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