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