Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice in His Own Words

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) was a poet, composer, pianist, and dancer who is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of Free Jazz. Despite this historical significance, Taylor has not been a subject of substantial archival research. Some scholars have written his name into music scholarship through explicitly or implicitly reiterating the notion of “freedom” that circulated among contemporary jazz critics of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Others have focused on analyzing Taylor’s solo piano music, often reducing Taylor’s musical theories and practices into the formal structures of the music itself. To date, the scholarship has simplified Taylor’s work as a stylistic innovation of jazz history, and as a result, the sources that document Taylor describing his own music have been marginalized from the historical narrative. “Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice in His Own Words” addresses this gap by examining a wide variety of previously unexamined archival sources that document Taylor’s music and poetry through the words of the composer and poet himself. Approaching him as an “open book,” as he once described his life, I track Taylor’s theorization of sound from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, arguing that, throughout these decades, Taylor insisted on the inseparability of music and life. The chapters are organized to show how Taylor’s work and the social circumstances in which he lived were creative of the original music for which he is widely known. From a conservatory student advocating for “Modern Popular Music” to a teacher of “the black esthetic,” a young musician in search of the “swing concept” to a theorist of “Sound Structure,” and finally, from an established jazz pianist to a composer of an opera that stages “Black communal gathering,” I elaborate on the theories and practices of Taylor in the early decades of his career. “Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice in His Own Words” shows the depth and breadth of Taylor’s work of the 1950s to the mid-1970s as exceeding the figure of Cecil Taylor as it has been constructed by the genres of jazz.