Word: cecile
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unfortunately, as with most truly artistic music, in order to listen to any Cecil Taylor at all, let alone thirty straight hours of it, one has to really want to. Taylor's music is both emotionally draining and almost physically demanding. There is simply no way to listen to it passively, as the listener is constantly bombarded with screaming sheets of note-clusters, unexpected exclamations, and a frenetic rhythmic pulse that makes sitting still virtually impossible...
Acceptance of Taylor's music is a somewhat embarassing process. What makes it so is the emotional extremes that it insistently conveys. Yet the result of acceptance is revelation, plain and simple. Cecil Taylor's music is not ugliness made art; rather, it is the essence of beauty revealed...
Like that of Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor's music is the result of a very intense, powerful individual personality. As a man, Taylor dominates the people around him, whether in conversation or musical interaction. In an interview, he will inevitably take control of the proceedings out of the reporter's hands, as this reporter recently found...
...earliest recordings that will be broadcast during the orgy, those from the period 1955-1960, Cecil Taylor sounds approximately like a jazz pianist on acid. He performs with the standard format of a jazz combo: piano, bass, drums, and a hornman, in this case, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. The group records several versions of tunes from the standard jazz repertoire. Hearing Taylor perform the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn composition "Johnny Come Lately" has almost the shock value that hearing Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" must have had ten years later. The familiar jazzman's repertoire turns...
...saxophonist Jimmy Lyons is startling. These musicians are thinking so fast! On a recording such as the 1966 album Conquistador (airing on WHRB around 11:00 p.m.), the group produces music as a seamless whole. It is for this reason that Taylor chose to name his groups "The Cecil Taylor Unit," which he takes to mean, "a community of men feeding each other, relating to each other, and speaking to each other in musical, architectural sounds which have been passed on to them." The music on an album like Conquistador is not a partnership of equals, however, as Taylor clearly...