“The way one prepares bread, cooks dishes that we eat, can be something that causes the sense to create that which we color by calling emotion… The instrument is just an object.
“It’s all music,” he declares in Les Grandes Répétitions, wandering through a vast and elegant Parisian hôtel particulier in a black turtleneck and sunglasses, cigarette in hand, confidently expounding his aesthetic philosophy as if he were a character in a Godard film. Far from being grateful for the attention, though, he insisted that mere recognition was not enough he wanted to change the very terms of the discussion about musical creation and musical value. After more than a decade working menial jobs to pay his bills, he was finally living off his art, and being noticed. Spellman’s classic book on the avant-garde, Four Lives in the Bebop Business. That same year, he had ended a four-year recording silence with two extraordinary albums, Unit Structures and Conquistador! He was also profiled in A.B. The avant-garde jazz movement was young, brash, and commanding increasing respect from a classical establishment that had been, at best, indifferent to black music, and Taylor, a conservatory-trained pianist who was creating a radical synthesis of jazz improvisation and European modernism, had emerged as one of its most militant and sophisticated leaders. Taylor, who died at eighty-nine in April, was the only jazz musician featured. In 1966, the pianist Cecil Taylor appeared in Les Grandes Répétitions, a series of Nouvelle Vague-influenced documentaries for French television about Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and other modern composers. Cecil Taylor playing at the Sweet Basil nightclub, New York, 1989
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