THE RELEVANT QUEER: Cecil Taylor, Jazz Musician and Composer

“I discovered very early that it wasn’t quite enough for me to imitate people.”

TRQ: Cecil Taylor, Born March 25, 1929

Jazz musician and composer Cecil Taylor was born in New York City. Only child of Percy Taylor, a chef, and his second wife, Almeida, a former actor, dancer and a jazz-devoted amateur pianist. His mother encouraged his interest in jazz and piano and Taylor was devastated by her death when he was just fourteen. He believed her disappointment when he played hookey from school had killed her. 

He attended the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. Inspired by jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, as well as classical music, Taylor began making a name for himself with Jazz Advance, recorded in 1956. 

If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process. — Cecil Taylor

Confrontational and anarchic, Taylor was weary of using the “jazz” label to his music and rejected traditional European approaches to composing. His approach to composition through groupwork was similar to Ellington’s. 

Known for his improvisation that innovated approaches to harmony, tempo and structure, Taylor from the start made experimental music that is dense, complex and demanding. 

“In short, [Coltrane’s] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can’t separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.” — Cecil Taylor

In a 1991 interview with The New York Times, Taylor also rejected “gay” as a label to describe his complex sense of sexuality. As a queer black jazz musician whose work most listeners find difficult, Taylor remained unshakable. According to music critic Alex Ross of the Times, Taylor was “one of the greatest, most unswervingly original, most incorrigibly sublime figures in the recent history of music.” 

See I’m not interested in appealing to the larger masses of people, because what the White man shows us is that he will do anything to make money. — Cecil Taylor

Over the course of his fifty-year career, Taylor recorded dozens of albums. He won a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 1990, and a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1991. He also won Japan’s Kyoto Prize in 2013. He recorded dozens of albums and stayed productive into his 80s. In 2009 Taylor released Ailanthus/Altissima: Bilateral Dimensions of 2 Root Songs with longtime collaborator Tony Oxley.

See I’m not interested in appealing to the larger masses of people, because what the White man shows us is that he will do anything to make money. — Cecil Taylor

While working on his autobiography and planning future concerts, Taylor died on April 5, 2018 at his Brooklyn residence. 

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore. 

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Sources:

Britannica

New Yorker

The Guardian