One of the more famous descriptions of Cecil Taylor’s piano playing compares his sound to someone playing "88 tuned drums," and it’s true—his all-over-the-instrument dexterity is a physical marvel. You have to recalibrate your imagination when listening to Taylor performing at top speed, the better to make sense of how much music can be made by one person in a single moment. That those note-rich passages routinely add up to unbroken hour-long performances is what makes Taylor seem like the Everest of American music.
Precisely because his technique is so potent, critical reaction to Taylor's music usually breaks down into two camps: those who feel the big climb is worth it, and those who don’t. Miles Davis famously walked out of an early Taylor gig in New York. When asked by a 1990s PBS documentary crew about Taylor’s suggestion that audiences should "prepare" for his concerts, saxophonist Branford Marsalis dismissed the concept out of hand. But elite opinion has shifted in recent years. A rising vanguard of pianists, led by the likes of Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, is not shy about praising Taylor’s extreme, often atonal style as a crucial part of the jazz tradition. This advocacy harkens back to the '60s work of African-American poet-critics like Amiri Baraka and A. B. Spellman, both of whom wrote about Taylor’s abstracted connection to the blues as much as they emphasized the pianist’s classical, conservatory training.
This recent shift in perception of Taylor's work has been helped along by two significant reissue projects. The first is a fresh and deeply clarifying remaster of Taylor’s seminal 1966 group album Unit Structures (reissued on vinyl and in a "mastered for iTunes" edition as part of the Blue Note label’s ongoing 75th anniversary celebration). With this title, Taylor made explicit his idiosyncratic break with previous jazz practices. Instead of charts written out in standard notation, the structure of these compositions was based on sequences of themes, many of which were communicated and rehearsed orally. (Other bits of Taylor’s music might be notated in small snatches, or else delivered to the band live, during Taylor’s feverish piano improvisations.) That Taylor was working with an exploded conception of "ensemble togetherness" was indicated by one excerpt from a lengthy bit of free-verse poetry that served as the original LP’s liner notes: "Time seen not as beats to be measured after academy’s podium angle." In other words: buckle up.
After Unit Structures, Taylor cut one more LP for Blue Note, Conquistador! (also reissued by Blue Note this year). Then the pianist fell into a seven-year recording hiatus. During this period, it was possible for fans to look back at the "we’re concerned for Cecil’s future" tone of those '60s music-journalism pieces by Baraka and Spellman and concede that these writers had correctly foreseen a challenging period ahead. When Taylor popped back up, in the '70s, it was often as a solo artist touring in Europe. And, over the ensuing decades, it has been the interest (and respect) that Taylor has received from foreign promoters, crowds, and artists which has contributed mightily to the cause of keeping him afloat, and at work on his art.