Contact Vimeo Twitter Facebook

Event Info:

Cecil Taylor: Floating Gardens

During his decades of ever-evolving work in the realms of performance, composition, as a band leader, a soloist, and  collaborator, Cecil Taylor has created his own performative language. While his music is widely known, he has for decades been writing astonishing poetry and only occasionally performing it in public.

Curator: Micah Silver

Tickets are REQUIRED for this event

Images: © 2008 Michael Hoefner

His poetics transgress any particular historical imagination, creating ritual-like bridges between bodies of reference that span astronomy and genetics to Yaruba and Aztec cosmology — the sound and rhythms of his speech applying layers of warmth and nuance only a near-octogenarian visionary could muster.

About:

Cecil Taylor was born in 1929 and began playing the piano just five years later with his mother as teacher. He studied music theory and composition as young adult at the New York College of Music (no longer in existence but was the oldest music conservatory in New York City). After graduating high school he attended New England Conservatory where his study of classical piano technique and composition were extended. By the mid-50s Taylor was widely recognized as a major “jazz” pianist, a term that he never agreed described his music. In a 1994 interview with Chris Funkhauser, Taylor said: "Well, I don't know what jazz is. And what most people think of as jazz I don't think that's what it is at all. As a matter of fact I don't think the word has any meaning at all . . .” By the mid-1960s Taylor was known in the USA and Europe as the most challenging piano improvisor in the world, leading ensembles performing his compositions on several major tours and engagements at jazz festivals worldwide— his music understood as a singular hybridity of American musical and cultural traditions. In 1973 Taylor won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1977 he received an honorary doctorate from New England Conservatory, and a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “Genius Award”) in 1991. In the past two decades Taylor has continued to composer and perform, most recently with a critically acclaimed run in July at the Village Vanguard in New York City.