Cecil Taylor | Piano | 1929–2018

Taylor grew up in Corona, Queens, studied classical piano from age five, absorbed Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk alongside Bartók and Stravinsky at the New England Conservatory, and emerged in the mid-1950s with a piano approach that had no clear antecedent: dense tone clusters, percussive attacks played for rhythmic rather than harmonic effect, and an improvisational stamina that routinely sustained performances well past the two-hour mark. His debut "Jazz Advance" (Transition, 1956), recorded with Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger, and Dennis Charles, arrived essentially complete, and the music changed little in its fundamentals over the following sixty years. Work was scarce in the United States for most of the 1960s despite sustained critical attention; Taylor spent much of 1962 in Europe, returned home to near-inactivity, and only recorded for Blue Note in 1966, producing "Unit Structures" and "Conquistador!" within months of each other, both now central documents of free jazz piano. Solo performance became his primary mode from the early 1970s, and a long series of recordings for FMP, hat ART, Enja, and Black Saint documented his concert activity in Europe and New York through subsequent decades. He preferred the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand for its resonance in the lower register, and described his own instrument simply as eighty-eight tuned drums.