Cecil Taylor

Cecil Percival Taylor was born on 25 March 1929 in Long Island City, in the borough of Queens, New York, and was raised in nearby Corona. He was the only child of Percy Clinton Taylor, head chef at the Rivercrest Sanitarium in Astoria, and Almeida Ragland Taylor — an actress in some of the earliest Black silent films, a dancer, and a musician who played piano and spoke French and German. It was his mother who set his hands to the keyboard, encouraging him to begin piano at the age of six.

Classically trained at the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory in Boston, Taylor fused the rigor of the European tradition with the deep well of African American music. From his 1956 debut, Jazz Advance, he pressed beyond the conventions of harmony and meter to become one of the founding architects of free jazz — a music of dense tone clusters, ferocious polyrhythms, and an almost percussive physicality at the piano.

In 1962 he established the Cecil Taylor Unit, the ensemble through which, alongside longtime collaborator Jimmy Lyons, he would shape his sound across decades. Landmark works such as Unit Structures and Conquistador stand among the boldest statements in American music, and his solo concerts became feats of endurance and vision.

A poet as well as a pianist, Taylor was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1991 and honored by the National Endowment for the Arts. He died on 5 April 2018 in Brooklyn. He gave the piano a new language and taught a century of listeners to hear freedom itself — may his thunder be remembered.