His 1978 sextet, with trumpeter Raphé Malik, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, violinist Ramsey Ameen, bassist Sirone, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson is my absolute favorite of his groups. Small-group Cecil: When he put together ensembles, Taylor often favored unusual combinations of instruments. If you want one of the great musical bargains of your life, pick up 2 Ts For A Lovely T from Amazon’s MP3 store for $11, you get 10 full live sets, mostly consisting of one 45-minute track, with William Parker on bass and Tony Oxley on drums, recorded in 1990. Trio Cecil: The double disc Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come, a 1962 live recording with Jimmy Lyons and drummer Sunny Murray, is a crucial document of Taylor’s first truly free work, but the sound quality’s pretty raw at times. The two volumes of Garden, from the early ’80s and recently reissued, are also brilliant, and don’t miss the late-career resurgence heard on 2000’s The Willisau Concert, on which he makes full use of a Bösendorfer Imperial piano, which has nine extra keys at the low end of the instrument’s range. Indent, from 1973, is a must, as is the astonishingly beautiful Air Above Mountains, from 1975 (note: the CD version has close to twice as much music as the LP). Solo Cecil: the early to mid ’70s were Taylor’s golden era for solo piano performances. Here are a few recommendations, broken into categories. Ideally, it should have been a Braxton-sized warehouse full of discs, but he went years between albums, and put together some incredible ensembles (like the orchestra I saw) that were never recorded at all. His discography is nowhere near as large as it should have been. ![]() When it finally ended, you walked out into the night with your head spinning, unable to even listen to other music for hours or days. You had to just sit back and let it wash over you like a tide. You couldn’t follow the flow of ideas they came too fast. When he did, his piano style was volcanic, explosive, and breathtakingly beautiful. He’d start performances dancing in a highly gestural style, declaiming imagistic poetry as he emerged, slowly moving around the stage, sometimes taking 15 minutes or more to actually sit down. I saw him three times with a trio, once leading an orchestra two dozen players strong, and once with a quintet that included saxophone, cello, drums, and electronics. The great tragedy of Cecil Taylor’s passing is that no one will ever again have the experience of seeing him perform. The whole thing looked to me like a drawing by Cy Twombly when I told him so, he purred (there’s no other word for it) happily. I took a look at it on the second day, before he arrived it was covered with complex patterns of letters, the names of notes, surrounded by inscrutable symbols. He’d strike a key or two, then scrawl something in pencil on a piece of paper. On the first day, I sat in silence for hours while he worked on a piece he’d perform in April. ![]() I did manage to get him talking about the piano itself, which I considered a major victory. Instead, he told me stories about his childhood, gossiped about jazz legends he’d known and played with, and every once in a while offered a thought about the nature of creativity, or beauty. Urbane and aristocratic, he listened politely to my questions, though he rarely answered them. Taylor, a small, Yoda-like man with heavy-lidded eyes that seemed as big as ping-pong balls, was everything I expected. But I’d heard he was impossible to interview in any conventional manner, and could be savagely dismissive of writers, so part of me was convinced it was going to go very badly indeed.įortunately, it didn’t. Some of his albums - ones listed below - are among my favorite works by anyone, ever. I’d been listening to his music for close to 20 years at that point, since seeing him play the Village Vanguard, with Dominic Duval on bass and Jackson Krall on drums, in 1997. Waiting at the Whitney to meet Taylor for the first time, I was as nervous as I imagine that other writer must have been. Years ago, I read an article about the Wu-Tang Clan where RZA arranged to meet the writer at 2 AM in a parking lot. (The issue was out by the time the show opened spotting a copy in one of the glass cases was a once-in-a-lifetime thrill all its own.) ![]() I hung out with him for two days in February 2016, writing a story for The Wire to coincide with “Cecil Taylor: Open Plan,” an exhibit at the Whitney Museum that combined audio and video with posters, album covers, magazines, and other ephemera from his career. It would be impossible to condense his artistry into this intro, so I’m gonna talk about the time I personally spent with him. Cecil Taylor died on April 5, less than two weeks after his 89th birthday.
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