Cecil Taylor
Free jazz pianist whose mercurial style challenged audiences but was praised by Jimmy Carter
CECIL TAYLOR, who has died aged 89, was the pianist whose challenging and mercurial playing virtually defined the term “Free Jazz”.
Like his near contemporary, Ornette Coleman, Taylor dispensed with elements such as regular chorus structure, chord sequences and (in Taylor’s case) four beats to a bar, which had hitherto been considered essential. Of the two, Taylor proved the more dauntingly abstract, and his music was slow in gaining a viable audience.
Cecil Percival Taylor was born on March 15 1929 and brought up in the New York borough of Queens. His father was a chef and his mother, whom he adored, played piano and violin and valued education and culture highly. She took him to concerts and, when he began learning the piano, insisted on a routine of daily practice. She died when he was aged 14.
Taylor went on to study piano at the New York College of Music, and later at the New England Conservatory. He began going to jazz clubs, hearing leading figures such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Sarah Vaughan and especially Duke Ellington, whose “orchestral” approach to the piano he greatly admired.
On returning to New York he formed his own quartet, with which he recorded his first album, Jazz Advance, in 1956. In the light of Taylor’s later work, this sounds quite conventional, if somewhat angular at times. Recordings from the next few years trace the progress towards what would be his own distinctive style.
Unfortunately for him, in late 1959 Ornette Coleman arrived in New York with his band and attracted all the attention. Despite growing critical acclaim, Taylor’s regular live work dwindled to sporadic bookings in small clubs. In 1962 this led to the grimly farcical situation in which Down Beat magazine hailed Taylor as its “Rising Star”, while the rising star himself was unemployed and washing dishes to pay his rent.
An opportunity to make his first visit to Europe arose later that year and he spent six months playing in Scandinavia. During that time he recorded two live albums at the Café Montmartre, Copenhagen. Returning home at the end of the year he found the situation as bleak as before, in contrast to the receptive Scandinavian scene.
Together with a group of like-minded musicians, including the trumpeter Michael Mantler, trombonist Roswell Rudd and saxophonist Archie Shepp, he formed a collective, the Jazz Composers’ Guild. When, in 1968, they released an album with Taylor as the featured soloist, the tide had begun to turn. Taylor’s band, the Cecil Taylor Unit, toured Europe in 1969, playing at major festivals, and he embarked on a parallel career as a solo artist.
Concert promoters and their audiences seemed no longer to be so wary. Probably more were prepared to set aside their expectations of a “normal” jazz performance. Whatever the case, the experience could be quite overwhelming. His phenomenal piano technique was often shatteringly loud, and his whole approach so physically energetic that it could spill over into chanting and a kind of shuffling dance. This probably helps explain his fondness for duets with drummers, of which there are many recorded examples, among the most admired being those with Max Roach, Andrew Cyrille, Han Bennink and Louis Moholo.
One notable case of the Taylor effect on an unprepared listener occurred during a jazz festival on the White House lawn hosted by the then President, Jimmy Carter. As Taylor’s set ended, Carter jumped to his feet and rushed over to the stage. According to George Wein, organiser of the show, “the President took the pianist’s two hands in his own, looking at them with wonderment and awe. ‘I’ve never seen anyone play the piano that way,’ he marvelled.”
Music, for Taylor, was part of his total artistic expression, which also included dance, and poetry, which he wrote and sometimes published on the sleeves of his albums or recited during a performance. He created the music for several dance ensembles and once explained: “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space that a dancer makes.”
Appreciation may have been late in arriving, but when it came it was accompanied by a string of honours. Principal among these were a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and a Macarthur Fellowship in 1991. Finally, in 2013, the Japanese Kyoto Prize brought him a bounty of $500,000.
Taylor was unique and inimitable. He angrily rejected all attempts to categorise him or his work, and the closest he ever came to explaining it himself was: “What I am doing is creating a language – a different American language.”
He was unmarried and had no surviving close family.