Jazz Articles about Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor: Mr. Taylor's Filibuster

by Kurt Gottschalk
March 11, 2004

As adventurous jazz fans have known for decades, and less adventurous fans have lamented for just as long, there’s nothing easy about Cecil Taylor’s music. It’s fast and it’s furious. It’s very nearly incomprehensible and, quite plainly, genius. A close listener would be doing well to follow a quarter of the information shot out in a 60-minute recital, and sitting in his audience is nothing short of being in the presence of brilliance: one can either try to follow the ...

Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley: Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley

by Kurt Gottschalk
October 1, 2002

I have a confession to make. One night at the Hotel Colibri in Victoriaville, Quebec, after a resoundingly disdained set by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley, I rode up in the elevator with Oxley and Victo festival promoter Michel Levasseur. My room was on the first floor, but I wanted to hear what they had to say. At best, most people I spoke to called the set a disappointment. The trio went on over an ...

Cecil Taylor: The Willisau Concert

by Glenn Astarita
May 4, 2002

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve listened to pianist Cecil Taylor’s classic solo performance Silent Tongues. However, with his latest solo endeavor, recorded live on September 3, 2000 at the Jazzfestival Willisau in Switzerland, the pianist has added yet another astounding entry into his already rich recorded legacy.

The thrust of this outing commences with the fifty-minute work titled “Willisau Concert Part 1.” Here we are treated to Taylor’s exhaustive explorations and spider-like manipulations of his ...

Cecil Taylor, Dewey Redman, Elvin Jones: Momentum Space

by Craig Jolley
September 1, 2001

Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane emerged as the leading voices of the new music forty years ago. Each created from a separate vision that went beyond their predecessors. Coltrane and Taylor made a record together ( Coltrane Time, United Artists). Coleman ( New York Is Now, Blue Note), and Coltrane ( The Avante Garde, Atlantic) recorded with each others' rhythm sections but there was not enough common ground for them to play together effectively. Each required collaborating musicians ...

Cecil Taylor Unit: It Is In The Brewing Luminous

by Glenn Astarita
June 1, 2001

This newly released live set of the “Cecil Taylor Unit's" performance at New York City's “Fat Tuesday" venue, presents the listener with a stunning glimpse of the pianist's interaction with his then musical soulmate, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons. And while Lyons passed away in 1986, the twosome had been performing together since the 1960's throughout various aggregations as this outing also features the two drummer attack of Jerome Cooper and Sunny Murray, violinist Ramsey Ameen and bassist/cellist Alan Silva.

On ...

Cecil Taylor Unit & Roswell Rudd Sextet: Mixed

by Jim Santella
February 1, 1999

“Everywhere," “Yankee No-How," “Respects," and “Satan’s Dance" constitute a reissue of Impulse! [AS-9126], Everywhere, originally recorded July 8, 1966 in New York by the Roswell Rudd Sextet. “Bulbs," “Pots," and “Mixed" were originally recorded October 10, 1961 in New York by the Cecil Taylor Unit, and those tracks appeared alongside several unrelated tracks by members of Gil Evans’ orchestra on Into The Hot, Impulse! [AS-9]. The original liner notes by Nat Hentoff and Michael Cuscuna, respectively, are included in the ...