Cecil Taylor

Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929 – April 5, 2018) was an American jazz pianist and poet. Born in Long Island City, New York, and raised in Corona, Queens, he began piano lessons at six. He studied at the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory, focusing on arranging for popular music while also absorbing the work of European modern composers such as Béla Bartók and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Classical training and a wide view of contemporary music remained central to his work.

After returning from Boston to New York in 1955, Taylor formed a quartet with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Dennis Charles. The group recorded his debut, Jazz Advance, in 1956, appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957 (At Newport), and recorded with John Coltrane in 1958; those sessions were later released as Coltrane Time.

Looking Ahead! (1959) and The World of Cecil Taylor (1960) trace his departure from mainstream jazz phrasing. Blue Note’s Unit Structures and Conquistador!, both released in 1966, established his free-jazz language. Taylor organized group improvisation around “units” rather than fixed ensemble formats; his dense piano clusters, polyrhythms, and sudden shifts led one critic to describe the sound as “eighty-eight tuned drums.” Alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, Taylor’s most important long-term collaborator, worked with him from 1961 until Lyons’s death in 1986.

From the late 1960s, Taylor gave many solo concerts. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, and his 1974 Montreux solo performance was documented on Silent Tongues. In the late 1980s he formed the Feel Trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley. His later honors included a MacArthur Fellowship (1993) and the Kyoto Prize (2013); in 2016 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the retrospective Open Plan: Cecil Taylor. Taylor also wrote poetry and incorporated spoken word and dance into performances, collaborating with dancers including Dianne McIntyre and Min Tanaka.

The two Blue Note albums featured here are central works from his middle period. Unit Structures (1966, BLP 4237), featuring Jimmy Lyons, Ken McIntyre, Eddie Gale, Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille, is a landmark of free-jazz ensemble writing. On Conquistador! (released 1968, BST 84260), Bill Dixon’s trumpet and Lyons’s saxophone confront Taylor’s piano. Heard together, the albums reveal how Taylor fused compositional structure with collective improvisation.