American jazz pianist and composer who was a leader of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, which emphasized unrestrained, emotional play and group improvisation.
Cecil Taylor
| Dictionary: Taylor, Cecil Percival |
American jazz pianist and composer who was a leader of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, which emphasized unrestrained, emotional play and group improvisation.
| Artist: Cecil Taylor |
Similar Artists:
Sun Ra,
Leo Cuypers,
Marilyn Crispell,
Yosuke Yamashita,
Don Pullen,
Paul Bley,
Ran Blake,
Albert Ayler
Influenced By:
Thelonious Monk,
Duke Ellington,
Sidney Bechet,
Coleman Hawkins,
Bud Powell,
Oscar Peterson,
John Lewis,
Erroll Garner,
Louis Armstrong,
Horace Silver
Followers:
Frank Lowe,
Khan Jamal,
Giorgio Gaslini,
Sam Rivers,
Steve Lacy,
Anthony Braxton,
Geri Allen,
Marvin "Hannibal" Peterson,
Frank Kimbrough,
Brian Jackson,
Yosuke Yamashita,
Keith and Julie Tippett,
Lonnie Liston Smith,
Sirone,
Archie Shepp,
Enrico Rava,
Chris McGregor,
Jimmy Lyons,
Sergey Kuryokhin,
Anthony Davis,
Stanley Cowell,
Greg Mills ,
Diego Amador,
Ori Kaplan,
Taylor Ho Bynum,
Denardo Coleman,
Matthew Shipp,
The Nommonsemble,
The Flying Luttenbachers,
Bruce Russell,
John Sinclair,
Tristan Honsinger,
Dom Minasi,
Glenn Horiuchi,
Keith Tippett,
Raymond Boni
Performed Songs By:
Worked With:
Buell Neidlinger,
Denis Charles,
Alan Silva,
Charles Davis,
Archie Shepp,
Roswell Rudd,
Jimmy Lyons,
Steve Lacy,
Andrew Cyrille,
Ted Curson
Formal Connection With:
- Born: March 25, 1929, Long Island, NY
- Active: '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
- Genres: Jazz
- Instrument: Piano, Leader, Percussion
- Representative Albums: "Unit Structures," "Silent Tongues," "The Great Concert"
Biography
Soon after he first emerged in the mid-'50s, pianist Cecil Taylor was the most advanced improviser in jazz; five decades later he is still the most radical. Although in his early days he used some standards as vehicles for improvisation, since the early '60s Taylor has stuck exclusively to originals. To simplify describing his style, one could say that Taylor's intense atonal percussive approach involves playing the piano as if it were a set of drums. He generally emphasizes dense clusters of sound played with remarkable technique and endurance, often during marathon performances. Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone.Taylor started piano lessons from the age of six, and attended the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory. Taylor's early influences included Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, but from the start he sounded original. Early gigs included work with groups led by Johnny Hodges and Hot Lips Page, but, after forming his quartet in the mid-'50s (which originally included Steve Lacy on soprano, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Dennis Charles), Taylor was never a sideman again. The group played at the Five Spot Cafe in 1956 for six weeks and performed at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival (which was recorded by Verve), but, despite occasional records, work was scarce. In 1960, Taylor recorded extensively for Candid under Neidlinger's name (by then the quartet featured Archie Shepp on tenor) and the following year he sometimes substituted in the play The Connection. By 1962, Taylor's quartet featured his longtime associate Jimmy Lyons on alto and drummer Sunny Murray. He spent six months in Europe (Albert Ayler worked with Taylor's group for a time although no recordings resulted) but upon his return to the U.S., Taylor did not work again for almost a year. Even with the rise of free jazz, his music was considered too advanced. In 1964, Taylor was one of the founders of the Jazz Composer's Guild and, in 1968, he was featured on a record by the Jazz Composer's Orchestra. In the mid-'60s, Taylor recorded two very advanced sets for Blue Note but it was generally a lean decade.
Things greatly improved starting in the 1970s. Taylor taught for a time at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Antioch College, and Glassboro State College, he recorded more frequently with his Unit, and European tours became common. After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, the pianist's financial difficulties were eased a bit; he even performed at the White House (during Jimmy Carter's administration) in 1979. A piano duet concert with Mary Lou Williams was a fiasco but a collaboration with drummer Max Roach was quite successful. Taylor started incorporating some of his eccentric poetry into his performances and, unlike most musicians, he has not mellowed with age. The death of Jimmy Lyons in 1986 was a major blow, but Cecil Taylor has remained quite active up until the present day, never compromising his musical vision. His forbidding music is still decades ahead of its time. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide
| Discography: Cecil Taylor |
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Hard Driving Jazz [Spain Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD |
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Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come Buy this CD |
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| Wikipedia: Cecil Taylor |
| Cecil Taylor | |
|---|---|
 Cecil Taylor playing in his apartment in the 1960s (Photograph: Charles Rotmil)
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Cecil Percival Taylor |
| Born | March 15, 1929 |
| 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 (Coltrane Time/Hard Drivin' Jazz, 1958), a session which was not a happy experience.
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 continued to appear: Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come (1962) Unit Structures (1966).
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 the unexpected release of Momentum Space (a meeting with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones) on Verve/Gitanes. The classical label Bridge recently 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.
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.
Taylor was featured in the 1981 documentary film Imagine the Sound, in which he discusses and performs his music, poetry and dance. He is openly gay.[5]
Influence and musical style
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[6]. In 1964, Taylor co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild to enhance the working possibilities of avant-garde jazz musicians[7].
Taylor's style and methods have been described as 'constructivist'.[8] 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 [7]
Taylor was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991.
Discography
Main article: Cecil Taylor discography
References
- ^ a b Yanow, Scott (2008). "Cecil Taylor biography", AllMusic.
- ^ Wilmer, Val (1977). As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. Quartet. pp. 45. ISBN 0704331640.
- ^ Spellman, A. B. (1985 originally 1966). Four Lives in the Bebop Business. Limelight. ISBN 0-87910-042-7.
- ^ "being matter ignited...", Interview with Cecil Taylor by Chris Funkhouser published in Hambone, No. 12 (Nathaniel Mackey, editor).
- ^ Gill, John (1995). Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth Century Music. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 61. ISBN 0816627193.
- ^ "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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Cecil Taylor |
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cecil Taylor |
- "Cecil Taylor: This Music is the Face of a Drum" by Robert Levin, 1971
- Discography of Cecil Taylor, by Richard Shapiro
- Cecil Taylor Online Sessionography
- The FMP releases
- The Shape of Jazz to Come - A panel discussion on April 6, 1964
- "Cecil Taylor interview" for the WGBH series, Say Brother
- being matter ignited... - Interviewed by Chris Funkhouser on September 3, 1994
- Cecil Taylor - Interviewed by Jason Gross, January 2000
- Mr. Taylor's Filibuster - Interviewed by Kurt Gottschalk, March 11, 2004
- A Fireside Chat With Cecil Taylor - Interviewed by Fred Jung
- Another Bio. (originally from Allmusic)
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Artist. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ®, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved. Read more |
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Mentioned in
- New York City R&B (1961 Album by Buell Neidlinger)
- Embraced (1977 Album by Mary Lou Williams with Cecil Taylor)
- Live in the Black Forest (1978 Album by Cecil Taylor)
- Chiasma (1975 Album by Yosuke Yamashita)
- One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye [2004] (2004 Album by Cecil Taylor)
- Dark Unto Themselves (1976 Album by Cecil Taylor Unit)
- Derek Bronston (Jazz Artist, '90s, 2000s)
- Solo Piano (1984 Album by Wolfgang Dauner)
- Tom Brown's Band from Dixie Land (1954 Album by Tom Brown)
- Axis/Solo Piano (1977 Album by Paul Bley)
- Imagine the Sound (1981 Music Film)
- The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy (1960 Album by Steve Lacy)
- The Jazz Master Class Series From NYU: Cecil Taylor (2004 Music Film)
- Jumpin' Punkins (1961 Album by Cecil Taylor)
