Cecil Taylor Quotes

It suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz—Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor—could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations.

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

I only had three teachers, really, that were interesting, and all three of them were women.

that true believers in hard-driving jazz—Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor—could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations. Or maybe

AVANT-GARDE / FREE JAZZ: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Art Ensemble of Chicago,”A Jackson in Your House,” June 23, 1969 Albert Ayler, “The Wizard,” July 10, 1964 Ornette Coleman, “Free Jazz,” December 21, 1960 Ornette Coleman, “Lonely Woman,” May 22, 1959 John Coltrane, “Ascension (Edition II),” June 28, 1965 John Coltrane, “Selflessness,” October 14, 1965 Eric Dolphy, “Out to Lunch,” February 25, 1964 Cecil Taylor, “Abyss,” July 2, 1974 Cecil Taylor, “Conquistador,” October 6, 1966

Maybe Jane was right. Maybe he was wrong to have filled her head with tales of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, let alone take her to see Jackie Wilson, Etta James, Tina Turner and the Ikettes. Maybe it wasn’t right to wake up to Chico Hamilton, Lee Morgan, Charlie Parker, and Art Blakey in the morning. Watch the sunset with Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, and Little Willie John. But Greer didn’t know what else to offer that was beautiful and colored and alive, all at the same time.

Cecil abandoned one of his regular jobs and with some money he had saved up he spent the winter months studying and composing. In the spring a contract came up for a few days, in a Brooklyn bar, where the experience of that first night repeated itself yet again. While he was returning home by train, the movement, the passage of the immobile stations brought about in him a state conducive to thinking. So he realized that the logic of the whole thing was perfectly clear, and wondered why he hadn’t seen it earlier: in all of the stories which Hollywood had brainwashed him with, there is always a musician who isn’t appreciated at the beginning but is at the end. There was the error: in the passage from failure to success, as if they were point A and point B, connected by a line. In reality failure is infinite, because it is infinitely divisible, which isn’t possible with success.