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photo I.A. Freeman

Philip Freeman, author of In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor (Wolke Verlag)

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…..The pianist and composer Cecil Taylor’s music could be described as “difficult beauty.”  Whether playing a 60-minute solo or a short piece by a large ensemble, his work – which some would say is the ultimate in “free jazz” – stretched listener’s personal boundaries, challenging us to find relevance in his thunderous yet elegant imagination while also being thoroughly fascinated by his unique and obvious genius.

…..The bassist William Parker – who collaborated with Taylor for more than a decade – said that Cecil Taylor’s life “was a string of mysteries that made a beautiful necklace of precious sounds, dances, and poetry he called music.”  That music was an entirely new musical language – and instantly recognizable.  And, beyond what was seen on stage, part of Taylor’s genius was evident in his ability to teach that complex and difficultly beautiful language to members of his ensembles.

…..Phllip Freeman’s In The Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor  is the first full biography of Taylor, and provides a compelling and comprehensive analysis of his extensive body of work, which encompassed solo performance and ensembles of every size from duos to big bands, and included work meant to accompany dancers and theatrical performances. It also explores his poetry and the broader milieu of which he was a part.

…..In my January 28, 2025 interview, Freeman talks about Taylor – the most eminent free jazz musician of his era, whose music marked the farthest boundary of avant-garde jazz.

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Joe Maita

Editor/Publisher

 

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photo by Brian McMillen

Cecil Taylor, 1978

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Taylor did much to obfuscate his own history, from lying about his age to retitling and recycling compositions. But the sheer volume of recordings left behind, and the stunning variety they represent — solo performances, duos, small groups of varying instrumentation, large ensembles, some obviously composed and others just as obviously spontaneous — allows us now to journey at leisure through a vast world of music that perhaps overwhelmed even his most devoted fans as it was happening, and learn its secrets.

For the key to really appreciating any single piece of Cecil Taylor’s music is to listen to it over and over. Let it hit you like a flood the first time. Wash yourself in the waves of notes. Then come back — a day later, perhaps. Play it again, and this time listen as carefully as possible. Focus on his opening gambits, and trace their paths through what follows, like a nurse injecting colored dye into a patient and watching their veins reveal themselves. If — when — you get lost, listen a third time. A fourth. A fifth. At some point, it will unfold before you like a flower, and the beauty of his conception will be fully audible.

– Philip Freeman

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Listen to the 1962 recording of Cecil Taylor performing his composition “Lena,” from the album Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come – Live At The Cafe Montmartre, with Jimmy Lyons (alto saxophone); and Sunny Murray (drums). [MNRK Music Group]

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JJM  You wrote that Cecil Taylor’s music has brought you joy for more than 25 years. What was your first experience with his music?

PF  My memory is that I saw him live before listening to any of the records. I knew his name and read a write-up in the Village Voice by Gary Giddins, who wrote a piece in anticipation of Cecil’s upcoming performance at the Village Vanguard, encouraging people to go because he was a genius. That’s what I remember about that piece.  So, I decided to go based on that, which was in August of 1987.   It was a trio show and he played one long piece for about an hour.  I wasn’t prepared for what I heard, and my head was swimming.  I walked out and had no idea what I had just heard – I was blown away by the entire thing.

But I started listening more, began buying his albums – the first being his CD  Trance,  which was half of the music originally released as  Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come,  which was recorded in 1962 at the Café Montmartre in Copenhagen.  Then, in 2000, while writing about the saxophonist David S. Ware – who had been in Cecil’s band in 1976 – I bought the album they played on, Dark to Themselves.  From that point on I journeyed through the recordings.  I saw him play a couple more times, and my experience listening to his music started to gradually come together, and I eventually developed a frame of reference for his music and became a much bigger fan.

JJM  Did you did you have to train yourself to learn how to listen to his music?

PF  Yes, because there is so much to take in during one sitting, and it is very overwhelming, especially since we are conditioned by listening to rock and pop music to pretty much get the music right away.  While there may be more to it that you’ll gather with repeated listenings, to a certain degree a significant portion of what’s in popular music is immediately present, and I will freely admit that I often judge music by that standard.  But you can’t do that with Cecil Taylor’s music.  There is the initial impression, which is like a tidal wave rolling over you, but then when you listen again and again, each time you listen you’ll hear a little bit more and you’ll begin to understand. You’ll hear the ideas coming, repeating and referring back to each other and developing on each other until eventually it takes shape as a massive work.  So, the first time you listen to his music you may get swept away by it – and I have been swept away by it many times – but when you return to it a month later, you’re likely to hear something completely different.

JJM So, it takes a commitment as a listener – and to be prepared to make that commitment – if you want to gain an understanding and appreciation for his music.

PF Yes, and I do want to say that if readers of this interview are unfamiliar with Cecil’s work and would like an introduction to it, I write in great detail about many of his recordings, including some that are easy entry points.  For instance, if you just want to hear what his piano playing sounded like, start with a solo piano recording like Air Above Mountains or The Willisau Concert.  If you want to hear him do something more in a chamber music vein, then try listening to the albums from the late 1970s like The Cecil Taylor Unit, Live in the Black Forest, or 3 Phasis, because that was a group made up of trumpet, saxophone, violin, upright bass and drums, playing music that was written up – jazzy chamber music but with a very high degree of intensity.  So, there are some recordings that are more conventionally beautiful than others.  Then, you can more easily get into the trio and quartet discs from the late 60s and early 70s that are his most intense material, where the band is just blasting at you for an hour.  That would not be the place to start.  Start with something with the 50s or early 60s where you can draw a direct line from Thelonious Monk to Cecil and start understanding the connection, realizing that this is indeed jazz.  It’s hard jazz, but it’s definitely jazz.

JJM  Regarding your book, as you mentioned the bulk of it involves writing in great detail about his many recordings, but there is not much in the way of biographical information.  Regarding this, you wrote, “This book will not be a rigorous investigation of the quotidian details of Cecil Taylor’s life. It does not matter where exactly he lived from year to year, where he worked before his art became financially sustainable, what kind of fees he received for his records or his performances, or who his romantic partners might have been.”  Why did you choose to write about Cecil Taylor?

PF Your question takes me to the evolution of the project, which originally was going to be a history of avant-garde jazz in America through the work of seven or eight composers who I felt had expanded jazz through their new styles of composition. It would have included people like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Bill Dixon, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, but I couldn’t find a taker for that project.  One of the people I shared the idea with felt it was too broad of a subject, so I began to narrow the focus and think about doing something else.  Cecil had died a few years earlier, and nobody had done a biography of him – this major American artist who was hugely important to jazz music, and to the history of American music.  So, I pitched a biography and the German publisher Wolke Verlag went for it.

There have been books that dealt with Cecil Taylor.  Howard Mandel wrote a book in the mid-2000s, Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz, that focused on the avant-garde, and Cecil was one of the four artists interviewed for A.B. Spellman’s mid-80s book Four Lives in the Bebop Business.  So, there are books that have dealt with him before, but nobody had written about his entire life and body of work.  Because of that I decided that that was going to be my thing, and I felt I was in the right position to do it since I was the last person to do an in-depth interview with him [for The Wire], which took place over two days at the Whitney Museum, where he was performing.  It was the first in-depth interview he’d done in several years, and the last one he ever did because he died two years later.

JJM  He had a really interesting childhood, which included the death of his mother when he was only 14 years old.  You wrote how he was deeply traumatized by that…

PF Well, from what I was told by a relative of his, he was deeply traumatized by his mother.  She was not an especially kind or loving mother to him, and there are quotes in the book where he talks about her being a harsh disciplinarian and pushing him really hard to be a good student, and to participate in things like children’s pageants and talent shows.

JJM  He was from a well-to-do family?

PF  I feel like there’s more research to be done about Cecil’s upbringing and where his family was actually situated socially in Black society in the 1920s and 30s, but his family effectively came out of the Great Depression unscathed, and while he didn’t grow up rich, he certainly grew up privileged – his family was in the society pages of Black newspapers of the time – and I think that gave him a worldview that helped fuel his art later, as well as make him determined to make it on his own terms.

JJM  His parents were both in the food business…

PF  Yes, his father was a chef and his mother was a dietician, so it isn’t like they were cooking in cafeterias or restaurants – they were high-end, professional people.  There was definitely an atmosphere of achievement and culture and erudition and accomplishment that he was raised in.  So, high expectations were placed on him as a child, and that translated later – as an adult – into having high expectations for himself, including setting up his lifestyle in the manner to which he had become accustomed.  What that means is that while he might have been poor and have to occasionally take a job as a dishwasher or record store clerk, he was still going to see the ballet, museums and poetry readings as a cultured person.  He was born to be a cultured person.

JJM  Who did he idolize as a young musician?

PF  He was born in 1929, so as a kid he was exposed to the giants of the big band era.  He told me stories about seeing people like Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington’s band, and Chick Webb’s band with Ella Fitzgerald, and these experiences of seeing great artists presented as a big spectacle in a big venue stayed with him the rest of his life.  Whether he was working with a large ensemble or just a trio or quartet, he always wanted the music to be respected in the way that the big bands he saw when he was a kid.

JJM  So, he grew up with this sense of tradition and appreciation for music as art, which became a part of his own aesthetic throughout his career…

PF  Yes, and also a lineage that he saw himself as being part of.  One of his most famous albums, Silent Tongues – a solo album recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1974 – was part of a day-long program of solo piano concerts that also featured Randy Weston, Earl Hines, Sir Roland Hanna, and Jay McShann all paying tribute to Duke Ellington, who had just recently died. Most of the artists played at least some Ellington tunes, but Taylor did not.  Instead, he played a suite that was surprisingly melodic and had elements of stride piano and older styles of jazz incorporated into a swinging piece of music.  So, when you hear the album as a standalone it is just a beautiful solo record, but when you listen to it alongside everybody else who played that day, it registers as him making a statement that he is part of the jazz piano lineage, and an extension of it.

JJM  His piano technique is, of course, very unique. His attack on the keys is a percussive one – someone has described him as using the piano as if the keys were individually tuned drums.  When did he form his piano technique?

PF  During childhood his mother had him practicing every day, and instructed him to have very sharply curved fingers, much like classical technique.  During my interview with him, one of the things we talked about was the intensity of his practice regimen when he was younger, which carried over into his entire life.  He would practice for hours and hours, and his explanation to me was that he needed to be a complete master of the instrument, that he needed to be able to do anything he wanted to do because it allowed him the freedom to improvise and to explore his ideas since he didn’t have to sit there and think about how to play.

JJM  He attended New England Conservatory at age 17, where he had a basic music education.  He also wanted to study composition but ran into resistance from the school’s administration.  What happened there?

PF  He told me that he wasn’t allowed to take the composition class he wanted because, in his view, the school felt they already had enough Black students in the class and didn’t feel the need to make room for another.  He was understandably very bothered by this.  From what I perceived, Cecil believed that he was as good or better than anybody else at whatever he was doing, so to be rejected and dismissed on such rudimentary grounds as race and ethnicity must have been extremely bothersome, and especially because he was rejected without even having the opportunity to prove that he was more than capable and qualified.

JJM  As we talked about earlier, Cecil considered himself to be in the jazz tradition, but he was also very heavily into avant-garde classical music, and was greatly appreciated by European audiences – maybe more so than American audiences – so I can help but ask this question: If he were white, would he have even been considered a jazz musician?

PF  It’s an interesting question, and one I had not considered.  I will say that the classical elements of his work are at times over-emphasized, because while they are there, his music was always rooted in the jazz tradition, going back to his idolization of Thelonious Monk.  He told me that he once stood next to Monk in an elevator and felt as if he were standing next to a god.  And there were always many elements of Ellington in his playing, as well as Bud Powell and Horace Silver, who he loved.

In liner notes on one of his early albums, he told Nat Hentoff – who he was friends with, going back to his New England Conservatory days – that he filtered European and African music through his experience as a Black American.  And though he was interested in and studied African culture, religion and music, he was absolutely cognizant of his own identity as a Black American at all times. He didn’t want to be a European. He didn’t want to be anything else other than what he was.  He wanted to filter it all through himself.

JJM  While he attended the New England Conservatory he spent a lot of times in the jazz clubs of Boston, listening to pianists like Jaki Byard and George Wein.  Did those experiences influence his music at that time?

PF  I couldn’t say how it shaped his music, but I can say that it planted the seeds for his entire career. The connections that he made at New England Conservatory sustained him throughout the 1950s because Wein became a very important promoter who booked Cecil at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, and he remained friends with Nat Hentoff, who wrote liner notes for his albums and got him deals with labels who Hentoff produced albums for.  So, those connections were crucial to sustaining his career because the New York jazz establishment did not take too kindly to him when he arrived there in the mid-50s.  He recorded one album for the Transition label in ‘56 and after that he played at the Five Spot and made connections in the avant-garde art community.

But the jazz establishment was not necessarily welcoming to him, and the club owners were not necessarily welcoming to him because he wasn’t playing tunes in the way they were used to hearing them, which made it difficult for them to sell drinks in the way they needed to. He didn’t contribute to the conventional jazz club atmosphere.  So, he was lucky to have those connections and to have people on his side because there were many other people not on it.

JJM  Lacking the support of club owners was a similar challenge of Eric Dolphy and many other avant-garde players of the time…

PF  Taylor and Dolphy knew each other in New York – they hung out together with John Coltrane. I read an interview with Sunny Murray in which he talked about how he would sometimes serve as go-between among them, in a way, because Dolphy really wanted to play with Cecil but Cecil would always duck from it – he was never convinced to actually record or work with Dolphy. But Dolphy wanted to.

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A musical interlude…Listen to the 1966 recording of Cecil Taylor performing his composition, “Enter Evening,” from his album Unit Structures, with Eddie Gale (trumpet); Jimmy Lyons (alto saxophone); Henry Grimes (double bass); Alan Silva (double bass); and Andrew Cyrille (drums).  [Universal Music Group]

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JJM  In the late 60s/early 70s, Cecil began teaching at the University of Wisconsin.  I imagine that may have posed some interesting challenges for his students…What was he like as an educator?  Did he have success?

CT  Some of the people that he worked with and taught in Wisconsin – and also in Ohio later – went on to be members of his ensembles for many, many years afterward.  Others found the methodology he taught them to be extremely inspiring.  And this is something that I think is very interesting about Taylor.  People worry that his music might not survive because there is no sheet music for it – the recordings exist, but he didn’t notate his stuff conventionally, nor did he teach it to his bands in a conventional way. He taught a lot of it to them orally – for instance, he would play a little figure on the piano, and then he would conduct the horn section, and teach them something that responded to what he had played. And then they would bounce it back and forth and somebody would present a different idea.  So, gradually, through rigorous hours-long rehearsals that went on for weeks, pieces would take shape.  It was definitely composition. The bassist Alan Silva, who played with him in the late 60s, talked about playing on the Unit Structures album, and described how the music was rehearsed for months.  Silva said that you don’t come up with a record like Unit Structures in a jam session – it was written out as a rehearsed score that took forever to learn.  The fact that he did that with college students — even though there are no recordings of those ensembles, you can trace echoes of his methodology through their later work.  His work with ensembles wasn’t as much about teaching them a piece of music as it was teaching them a musical language that they could then use in their own way.

Although Ornette Coleman was more tune based – you can tell an Ornette Coleman tune in about three seconds – you can hear echoes of it in the music that people who played with Ornette Coleman made on their own records.  You can hear it in Don Cherry’s music or in Dewey Redman’s or Charlie Haden’s music, so, what they took from Ornette stayed with them, and I think what people who played with Cecil got from him stayed with them as well, in different ways.

JJM You write that he had a recognizable style, “not just of playing but of constructing melodies.” Many listeners and critics think of Cecil Taylor as a percussionist…How does a listener hear a melody in his music?

PF  Oh, it’s right there on the surface.  There are tremendous classically romantic melodies in all of his big compositions.  What you hear him do over and over are these ascending and descending figures, where melodies go up and down, up and down, and they repeat. He’ll come up with one, play a couple of variations on it, and then it will become a little melodic cell that he will return to again and again and again, and then spin out these long and complex solo improvisations before bringing it back down to earth, returning to that melodic figure.

One of the things that cracked his music open for me was when I saw him play at Avery Fisher Hall in the early 2000s.  The show was half solo piano and half trio, and during the solo portion, which was first, he played an absolutely thundering outburst of percussive notes that practically took out the entire keyboard.  And then there was a two second pause before he did the exact same thing again – the exact same sequence of notes, with the same force and impact – and it cracked my head open like a jar, because I suddenly realized that it was all happening on purpose, that he was in complete control the entire time, and that no matter how thunderous and overpowering the music was, he knew exactly what he was doing.  And that was when I began to understand how to listen to his playing, and that I knew he was never out of control.

JJM  Which goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which was how to listen to his music. And the answer seems to be that it takes repeated listening to hear the melodic cells – these musical gems that seem buried within an hour-long piano performance.  It requires much more than a surface level listening experience, and it requires the listener’s preparation and patience.

PF  Yes.

JJM    In the book’s foreword, Markus Müller writes that “For all its expansive freedom, Cecil Taylor’s music was introverted in its gesture and, especially in the first decade, built less on collective than on dialogical structures. For all its undeniable density, it was regarded as more aloof, and it was not stereotypically ‘hot.’”  A paragraph later he writes of seeing Taylor, and describes a live performance as “an avalanche of ideas, clusters, nuggets, structures, and hammering rapidity.”  I don’t hear Cecil Taylor’s music as being “introverted.”  What about you?

PF  I would say another way to describe it is that it’s inwardly focused, and Cecil basically said this to me.  While we were talking he basically said that if the audience likes it, “great,” but that’s not why he’s doing it.  And that’s something that I’ve heard from other performers as well, that it takes a strength of ego to get up and make music in front of people.  Cecil was doing it for himself. I’ve heard something very similar from Anthony Braxton, who has a discography running into the hundreds of albums.  When I asked him if he expected anyone to have absorbed all of his albums, or is it enough to like maybe one piece on one album, he said that if they like one thing about his music, that’s more than enough, because nobody owed him anything.  If he could reach somebody with one composition, then he felt he’d succeeded.  As John Lee Hooker wrote in “Boogie Chillun,” “it’s in him, and it’s got to come out,” which is basically the approach that these artists take.  Cecil could not do anything other than what he did, and Braxton, similarly, is compelled to compose and make music and explore his ideas.

One of the things I hope that people will take away from the book is the sheer variety of things that Taylor did with his own music – from orchestral-sized ensembles, to solo piano, to what could be considered chamber music, to playing the inside of the piano and experimenting with sound.  He was not a one-note kind of a guy.

JJM  And, your book is a reminder about how deep he was into the world of art and culture.  Of poetry – a major interest of his – you wrote that his interest in it was “on par with dance and architecture/structural engineering. With the beginning of the 1980s, audiences heard more and more of it, the poetry introducing or interspersing the music that by then was expected to be an avalanche of energy enveloping the listener.”  I can only imagine the spectacle of this. Was the audience prepared to listen to him reading his poetry?

PF  No, and people have still not come to grips with the role of poetry in Cecil’s work, and this includes people who liked him, and it includes critics who generally favored his music but who often thought of the poetry as a distraction from his music.  They didn’t accept it or understand it as a part of the whole. And, he wasn’t as convincing a performer reading his poetry as he was playing the piano – he read his lines in a weird, nasal-toned voice that could be a little off-putting.

I said earlier that his music was not necessarily about the audience, and the same is true of the poetry.  The poetry was almost impossible to cipher, not just because of the way he recited it, but also because his poetry was extremely abstract, where he’d play with words for their own sake, often dense with allusions to reference points that most of the people in the audience would not be able to decipher.  His poetry was meant to be part of the whole, but it really needs to be studied in much greater depth. There are a couple of people, most notably Chris Funkhouser, who have studied his poetry, but a lot more work needs to be done in terms of tracing its roots and literally analyzing and deciphering it.

JJM  He led a variety of ensembles over the years, made up of so many different incredible musicians – many of whom he had long-standing relationships with. What attracted them to want to play with Cecil?

PF  To some degree it was probably the challenge of it because it is very dense and difficult music.  One of the musicians I’ve talked about this with quite a bit is the bassist William Parker, who is one of the nicest people you could ever meet.  He is a genuinely gentle, kind human being, but Cecil was not that. I can only imagine that the two of them probably had some clashes over the years, but they played together from the early 70s into the late 80s. When he first started out with Cecil, he said that it was very difficult for him to understand what his position was going to be in the band because Cecil was playing so much and the drummers like Andrew Cyrille were playing so much that it was hard for William to figure out where to assert himself and create a role in the band.  He eventually figured it out and became a balancing point between Taylor and Tony Oxley, a very abstract, free, melodic drummer who didn’t play a traditional time keeping role at all.  On the records they made as the Feel Trio you can hear William as the glue holding together a Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley duo – he’s right in the middle, bouncing back and forth and giving everything structure.

JJM A long-standing member of Cecil Taylor’s ensembles was the saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who in addition to being a great musician who understood Taylor, was a close friend of his.  You write about how deep of a loss Lyons’ death was felt, and how Taylor’s music changed afterwards…

PF  Yes, Lyons died in 1986, and they had been working together since the early 60s.  So, his passing was definitely a huge problem, and not just because Lyons understood Cecil’s musical language more than anyone.  Lyons was second-in-command and in charge of teaching it to new members of the group, and when Lyons died, Cecil lost that authority figure within the organization, and he also lost his musical partner.  And what you’ll notice is that, with relatively few exceptions, after Jimmy Lyons died Cecil generally didn’t have a full time saxophonist in the band anymore. There was a band in ‘87 where Carlos Ward played sax, and then there were ensembles that were assembled for a concert or two where there would be horn players, but for the most part, from the late 80s on he was playing in duos with Tony Oxley, in piano-bass-drum trios, putting together a large one-off ensembles that played heavily orchestrated music, or he was playing solo piano.  He never again tried to have that one-on-one relationship with a saxophonist.

JJM  Playing with Cecil had to have been a challenge, for sure, but so must have been the financial challenges.  How did they make a living?

PF  I have no idea how any musician makes a living, frankly, even a guy like William Parker, who is relentlessly active.  I have no idea how he does it.  As for Cecil, in the late 80s he had achieved a level of success to the point of receiving major grants – he received a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Foundation grant.  Other big prizes also came through for him – including the Kyoto Prize which, tragically, was stolen from him and became a major court case.   So, the status of receiving these awards allowed him to command large performance fees, and in turn he passed some of them on to the musicians who worked with him.

The trumpeter Stephen Haynes worked with Cecil in the early 2000s when he had a free jazz big band orchestra that would appear at Iridium in New York once week a year for five or six years, and Haynes was the boss of that ensemble in terms of handling the details such as bringing in the musicians and making sure everybody got paid.  He told me that at one point he realized that Cecil was paying the band out of his own pocket because there was no way that what Iridium was paying them was going to cover the pay for all the musicians.  He told Cecil that being generous is not your reputation, and Cecil just kind of laughed and told him not to tell anybody!  But having the big band was important enough to him that he was willing to pay out of his own pocket to have it.

JJM  Did he have a benefactor?

PF  No, other than these occasional grants that would come through for him.  He of course got paid for his concerts, but he wasn’t supported by a patron, as far as I can tell.  He did have a long association with a wealthy woman by the name of Trudy Morse who was his unofficial manager, but I don’t know if she helped him pay his bills or anything like that.

JJM  The book contains detailed descriptions of many of his countless recordings – too many to talk about in this interview – but one of them was the 11 CD set, In Berlin ’88, which was fascinating on so many levels.  I haven’t listened to it all, and it may not even be available on streaming services other than a few pieces here and there.  The reason I bring this up is, after having spent many years in the record business, it is a beautiful and rare thing to see an artistic endeavor like this that would have very limited commercial appeal even make it to the market, and produced by such a small company.  The resulting package has been praised by people like yourself and other major Cecil Taylor advocates who believe it to be one of the more important jazz collections ever assembled.

PF  Yes.  That box is no longer available in physical form, but you can buy it digitally on Bandcamp either as an entire unit or broken out into individual discs. It’s a fascinating set that was recorded during his residency in Berlin in June and July of 1988, and is made up of solo piano work, as well as things like duos with a bunch of different drummers, and a duo with the guitarist Derek Bailey, which many people find interesting. He also put together a large ensemble and a workshop ensemble consisting of several European musicians who he taught his methodology to while they constructed an interesting piece of music that is like an avant-garde theater work with jazz music as its score.

This marks a big change in his work. It was shortly after Lyons’ death, and his doing all this creative music in Berlin really built up his profile in Europe to a much greater degree than it had existed before.  He’d been going to Europe since 1967, but this established him worldwide as a major artist, someone to be taken seriously and on a very high level.

JJM  Did he feel he achieved what he had set out to?

PF  I don’t know. I spoke to people who knew him at the end of his life who described him as being much mellower than the volatile guy they had known in the 70s or 80s. He was someone who demanded respect for his art and could be very combative about it. You know, he would fight with his band members, he would fight with promoters, he would cut people out if he decided that they were insufficiently respectful, or if he was just sick of them.  He’d get to a point where he just wouldn’t deal with someone anymore.  But in his final years, he does seem to have mellowed out and it showed up in his playing – for instance, in his late recordings you can hear a greater degree of romanticism, and he was playing ballads that exhibited a gentleness in what he was doing.

And I don’t know if he was ever satisfied with what he was doing, but after he did the performances at the Whitney Museum in April, 2016 – after not having played in New York in public since 2012 – he seemed very happy.  The final performance began as music, and then he read a long poem/lecture/ disquisition, and returned to the keyboard a little bit, and then just said, “That’s it.”  And that was the end, but he said it in an exhilarated, “there’s-nothing-more-to-say” kind of way.  So, on some level I would say that he achieved a degree of creative satisfaction, but as we know, any true artist is never completely satisfied.

JJM  While his private life was not a focus of your book, you reported on an event that had to do with the writer Stanley Crouch “outing” him in a 1982 Village Voice column titled  “Gay Pride, Gay Prejudice,” which included Taylor’s name in a list of gay jazz musicians.  Crouch wrote: “The cultural influence of black homosexuals and bisexuals is undeniable — Jelly Roll Morton’s mentor Tony Jackson, Duke Ellington’s co-composer Billy Strayhorn, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Cecil Taylor, and a closeted gaggle of others.”   You wrote that “this jab seems to have earned him [Crouch] Taylor’s undying enmity; when we spoke in 2016, he described Crouch to me as ‘the ugliest man in New York.’”  I don’t recall that you go into much detail about his personal or romantic relationships, who a longtime partner was, who he hung out with and what he’d do at night.  And I was surprised to read that he didn’t participate much in the loft scene in the 70s.  So, were there conventional relationships that you learned about that you chose not to write about?

PF  There was one relationship which I mentioned in the book, without putting it into explicit terms.  A man by the name of Ken Miller worked with him when he was teaching and was around Cecil for a long time.  I believe he passed away in the 80s.  But I really didn’t go looking for old boyfriends or whatever because he was very private about that side of himself. He was not “out.”  If you understood that he was gay, that was fine, but he didn’t present himself as a gay artist.

An Australian filmmaker who was living with Cecil toward the end of his life told me that one day a guy called to ask about booking him for a festival that was a “gay” jazz festival of some kind, and Cecil said he’d consider playing if they changed their name. He didn’t want to be considered a gay artist because he didn’t make art about him being gay.  He made art about his life, certainly.  There are pieces of music he wrote that are references to his mom, or to where he grew up in Queens, and there are pieces that are references to things that he learned about African history and African religion.  So, while there are pieces that have titles referring to aspects of his personal life, he was not an artist who trafficked in explicit autobiography the way a lot of other musicians and artists do.  That was not his thing.

JJM  What is his legacy?

PF  Since there isn’t any sheet music, his compositions are not likely to be performed in the future, which means his musical legacy exists with the recordings and film and, to some degree, interviews, because if you go back and read his interviews in jazz magazines, you’ll find that he was a fascinating thinker. He was a very sharp guy, and had a lot to say, particularly in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  Toward the end of his life he retreated into this sort of raconteur mode, where he would just smoke and tell showbiz stories from the 50s and laugh. But when you could get him to really talk about the meaning of art and his thoughts about his own work, he was extraordinarily sharp and perceptive about music in general.  He could analyze other people’s work to an extraordinary degree.

So, to understand his legacy, people should read old interviews with him, but most importantly they should just listen to the records, and as many of them as possible.  And if you find one that speaks to you, listen to it again and again and again, and you will gradually take more and more from it, and an entire system of thinking about music will unfold for you.  You can trace back to the entire lineage of jazz piano before him – Monk, Ellington, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller – but what he did was entirely his own, and, to this point, unequaled by anyone else.  You will think about music differently after you absorb Cecil Taylor’s.

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Mary_gaston22, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Cecil Taylor is gone. He will never make any more of this tremendous, sweeping music. Now, at last, we have time to absorb it.

-Philip Freeman

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Listen to the 1974 recording of Cecil Taylor performing “Crossing, Part One” [Virgin Music Group]

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In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor (Wolke Verlag)

by Philip Freeman

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Click here to read an excerpt from the book

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This interview took place on January 28, 2025, and was hosted and produced by Jerry Jazz Musician editor/publisher Joe Maita

photo by Rhonda R. Dorsett

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