Cecil Taylor

"I don't expect people who listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to come hear me. I accept that reality."

"Sometimes when it goes really well, you wonder, "who's that at the piano?""

"You practice so you can invent. Discipline? No. The joy of practicing leads you to the celebration of the creation."

"To feel is the most terrifying thing in this society."

"Even listeners who dispute Cecil Taylor’s jazz credentials wouldn’t deny his creative intensity. They’d just protest that his furious, free-form piano improvisations, pummelling the keyboard with fingers, fists and forearms, bearing no relation to metre or melody and often lasting well over an hour, belong to the European avant-garde, not African-American tradition. But Taylor himself has always disagreed. Though conservatory-trained and possessing a virtuoso technique, he regards jazz as black music, his way, he once said, ‘of holding on to Negro culture’. His fascination with the rhythmic and harmonic abstractions of Stravinsky and Bartók, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano gave way to the potency of African-American pianists: Ellington, Monk, Horace Silver. Revelling in what he called ‘the physicality, the filth, the movement in the attack’, the young Taylor made it his own. He viewed the piano as percussive – ‘88 tuned drums’, his style an amalgam he dubbed ‘rhythm-sound-energy’. His ultimate inspiration was the very force of nature: ‘music is as close as I can become to a mountain, tree or river’. Though that kind of mysticism may seem a long way from blues and swing, Taylor’s work has its own intoxication."