Cecil Percival Taylor was born on March 25, 1929 in Long Island City, Queens and was raised in nearby Corona, primarily by his mother, who encouraged an early interest in music and the piano. Taylor studied piano and arranging at the New York College of Music (now New York University’s Steinhardt School) and the New England Conservatory in Boston, matriculating as post-bebop and open form jazz composition emerged. At the NEC, Taylor became interested in 20th century European composers and also connected with producer Tom Wilson (1931–1978), who in 1956 recorded the pianist’s debut album, Jazz Advance, and released it on his Transition imprint. Taylor’s first recorded group consisted of soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy (1934–2004), bassist Buell Neidlinger (1936–2018), and drummer Denis Charles (1933–1998). This quartet was the first jazz band to perform at the Five Spot in New York, and they also worked at the Newport Jazz Festival. Around the same time, Taylor began a friendship and close working relationship with trumpeter Bill Dixon (1925–2010), who would figure heavily in his music in subsequent decades.
As it emerged in the second half of the 1950s, Taylor’s music built on the innovations of forebears and colleagues like Duke Ellington (1899–1974), Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), Herbie Nichols (1919–1963), Horace Silver (1928–2014), and Lennie Tristano (1919–1978), as well as influences from western classical composers including Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007). Taylor struggled to keep a working band at this time; his music was shunned by many club owners, as uninterrupted performances made it difficult for bars to sell drinks. His music, rhythmically driving and exploring lengthy, dissonant passages, was critically acclaimed but difficult to present to the popular jazz world. Unlike some of his contemporaries, a prominent feature of Taylor’s music on record from the beginning was an interest in composing his own works, which spotlighted group interaction and multi-part, atonal themes. Other early albums featured saxophonists John Coltrane (1926–1967), Archie Shepp (b. 1937) and Bill Barron (1927–1989), trumpeters Kenny Dorham (1924–1972) and Ted Curson (1935–2012), bassist Chuck Israels (b. 1936), drummers Louis Hayes (b. 1937) and Rudy Collins (1934–1988), and vibraphonist Earl Griffith (1926–1961). In 1962, Taylor formed the Cecil Taylor Unit with alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons (1931–1986), drummer Sunny Murray (1936–2017), and bassist Henry Grimes (1935–2020), which would record for Impulse! Records under the direction of arranger Gil Evans (1912–1988) and, minus Grimes, make an important series of concerts and recordings in Scandinavia, including with saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936–1970).
Returning to New York in 1963, Taylor co-founded the Jazz Composers’ Guild with Dixon, drawing membership from lower Manhattan’s jazz vanguard and unifying artists in protest of poor working conditions and low pay in clubs as well as adverse recording contracts. The Guild sponsored a number of festivals and concerts throughout the city, some of which drew significant crowds; internal strife resulted in the Guild’s disbanding in 1965. In 1966 Taylor would record a pair of albums for venerable mainstream jazz label Blue Note, a rare opportunity for the company to showcase avant-garde music. Titled Unit Structures and Conquistador!, the records both featured Lyons, Grimes, bassist Alan Silva (b. 1939) and drummer Andrew Cyrille (b. 1939). Unit Structures also included trumpeter Eddie Gale (1941–2020) and reedist Ken McIntyre (1931–2001) while Conquistador! added Dixon to the ensemble. Following the release of these albums, the new Taylor Unit (with Lyons, Silva, and Cyrille) toured Europe and made a film, Les Grandes Répétitions, with composer Luc Ferrari (1929–2005). By 1969, the Unit was developing even longer suites, with single compositions lasting well over an hour, and while clubs had become far less sympathetic to such an all-encompassing musical environment, museums, universities, and metropolitan concert halls (especially in Europe) offered Taylor and his group the chance to stretch the boundaries of their music. One such performance, at the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul-de-Vence, France, was issued as a three-record set comprising one work, a dedication to Ellington called “The Second Act of A” (Shandar/RCA France). This latter version of Taylor’s band featured saxophonist and flutist Sam Rivers (1923–2011), who would go on to be a significant organizer in New York’s loft jazz scene.
In 1969 Taylor began teaching at the nontraditional Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In 1970 and 1971 he was also visiting faculty at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the result of a push by students to hire Black Music faculty. His semester at a large state university was a magnet for curious young artists though also occasionally fraught given clashes with administration and methods, the latter resulting in his failing an entire class. Returning to Antioch, he was on faculty until 1973, when the College entered a period of financial insolubleness. Antioch also hired Lyons and Cyrille so that the entire Unit was involved in teaching. Madison and Antioch both offered Taylor a body of interested students and local musicians (The Mendota Players, as they were termed at Madison), many of whom would go on to work in his Black Music Ensemble and, later, his regular bands. These players included saxophonists Bobby Zankel (b. 1949), Elliott Levin (b. 1953), Richard Keene (1949–2021), and Craig Purpura; bassoonist Karen Borca (b. 1948); trumpeters Raphe Malik (1948–2006) and Arthur Williams; drummer Jackson Krall (b. 1949); and flutist Carla Poole. The first LP of Taylor’s music for solo piano to be released, Indent, was recorded in concert at Antioch and produced for the pianist’s short-lived label Unit Core.
Returning to New York full time, Taylor presented a big band concert at Carnegie Hall in March 1974, and while the music itself has not been commercially released, the event was defining for numerous musicians emerging in the city’s jazz underground of the 1970s including saxophonist David S. Ware (1949–2012), bassist William Parker (b. 1952), and drummer Marc Edwards (b. 1949). The decade saw Taylor’s performance schedule both in the United States and abroad increase exponentially, and while the 1950s and 1960s saw only a handful of albums released under his name, the 1970s and 1980s saw documentation via a number of American and international labels including Arista, The Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, and New World (United States); Leo (England); Brain-Metronome, Enja, and MPS (Germany); Praxis (Greece); Soul Note (Italy); BYG-Toho and Trio-Kenwood (Japan), and Hat Hut (Switzerland).
In 1988, Taylor would be feted at the Workshop Freie Musik in Berlin, a set of open workshops and the brainchild of German record producer and label owner Jost Gebers (1940–2023) of Free Music Production (FMP). The results of the Workshop were released as an 11-CD boxed set and book for the label’s 20th anniversary in 1989 titled Cecil Taylor In Berlin ‘88. This commemorative package saw Taylor collaborating with a range of European improvising musicians, many of whom had been influenced by his work: saxophonists Peter Brötzmann (1941–2023) and Evan Parker (b. 1944); guitarist Derek Bailey (1930–2005); drummers Tony Oxley (1938–2023), Han Bennink (b. 1942), Paul Lovens (b. 1949), and Günter Sommer (b. 1943); cellist Tristan Honsinger (1949–2023; born in Vermont, Honsinger had expatriated to avoid the draft in 1969), trombonist Johannes Bauer (1954–2016); and bassist Peter Kowald (1944–2002). After 1988, Taylor was a regular at the Workshop and at Gebers’ long-running festival, the Total Music Meeting. The pianist continued to collaborate with Oxley and Honsinger until the end of his life, and with Oxley and William Parker he co-founded The Feel Trio, a working piano-bass-drums group which, while representing a standard instrumental format in jazz, was an irregular modality in his musical landscape. FMP would remain one home for Taylor’s music through the early 2000s (the label closed in 2010).
Into the 1990s the Taylor Unit was flexible and continued to involve both European and American players including William Parker, Honsinger, Bauer, Oxley, Krall, Zankel, Levin, woodwind players Harri Sjöström (b. 1952) and Wolfgang Fuchs (1949–2016), bassist Dominic Duval (1944–2016), cellist Muneer Abdul Fatah, and trumpeter Longineu Parsons. Taylor’s work as a solo pianist continued to evolve as well, encompassing more of his poetry and movement in ritual, trans-media settings –– Chinampas (Leo, 1987) is an example on record devoted entirely to Taylor’s sound-poetry. His collaborations with dancer-choreographers, theater makers, and poets are aspects of his career that have recently drawn significant interest. These associations were ongoing roughly since his emergence in jazz but received less attention than his music. In 1959, Taylor’s quartet with Shepp, Neidlinger, and Charles performed in the Jack Gelber (1932–2003) play The Connection at The Living Theatre. A Rat’s Mass, by playwright Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) with music by Taylor, was first performed at downtown experimental theater space La Mama in 1976 and was re-staged under the direction of Hilton Als (b. 1960) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016. Among Taylor’s frequent collaborators in the dance and movement world were Japanese butoh artist Min Tanaka (b. 1945) and Dianne McIntyre (b. 1946), and he also worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948). The Whitney Museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor, the first large scale exhibition dedicated to Taylor’s various practices both inside and outside of music, ran in 2016 and included not only live performances and archival footage but also photographs, discs, posters and ephemera, and numerous graphic scores that outlined his art from several angles.
The subject of numerous book chapters, theses, and analyses as well as a biography (It Is In The Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor by Phil Freeman, Wolke Verlag, 2024), Taylor was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, was invited to the White House to perform in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993, and was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 2013. The latter was particularly newsworthy as Taylor was swindled out of the prize money by a Brooklyn con artist who was later apprehended and charged. Performing and recording regularly until the last few years of his life, Taylor died on April 5, 2018 at his home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after a lengthy illness.
