Cecil Taylor, the great jazz pianist, died last week. I write ‘jazz pianist’ but he was, in truth, uncategorisable, working in the left-field of free jazz, experimental contemporary music and classical. A great rhapsodic, abstract improviser, his work was always a challenge to orthodoxy as well as to the listener. His piano playing is a complex, improvised sound, highly percussive, ‘eighty-eight tuned drums’, as Val Wilmer put it in her book As Serious as Your Life. He was as influenced […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: cecil taylor, jazz, music