...and in three months' time, Cecil Taylor freed jazz

In the 1950s, while jazz explored its coolness far out west, Cecil Taylor, freshly back from Boston, took up the Thelonious Monkian revolution in New York City. Three years younger (1929) than John Coltrane and Miles Davis, he launched two kids, Archie Vernon Shepp (1936) and Steven Norman Lackritz (1934)—better known as Steve Lacy—whom he drew from dixieland.

Then he fired them because they could not keep up. Taylor's compositions at that time were complex objects with spikes distantly sharpened by Béla Bartók. Avant-garde was not an empty word.

Between October 1960's cool mildness and January 1961's bitter cold, just before firing Archie Shepp and blasting his rhythm section, Taylor recorded some stunning pieces for the meteoric Candid label, including "E.B.," where the left hand chops out syncopated chords with an axe-and-steel support from Buell Neidlinger and Dennis Charles, while the right hand endlessly scatters the pieces. A monumental groove; a hallucinatory, promising and short-lived radical transition to free jazz left with no real descendants.

Contact Daniel Mège on All About Jazz.
Almost became a jazz musician, inadvertently ended up as a planetary scientist.

Contribute to Play This! Recommend a favorite song, album, or performance and we'll share it with your fellow All About Jazz readers. Submit it here.

Comments