"Taylor's aggressiveness and speed belie the incredible intricacy and precision of his compositions. Indeed, listeners of this performance might find themselves wishing to parse it out into a hundred or more sections (though doing so would be impossible) because the myriad themes throughout the piece explode like bubbles on a pot of boiling water, lingering just long enough for you to know that they were there before disappearing forever into the air."
"Cecil's is a voice in the interruption of race and nation, just as it is a voice in the interruption of the sentence and, indeed, in the interruption of the word itself. He works the anarchic irruption and interruption of grammar, enacting a phrasal improvisation through the distinction between poetry and music in the poetry of music, the programmatic manifesto that accompanies the music, that becomes music and turns music into poetry. These things occur "between regions of partial shadow and complete illumination" in the cut." - Fred Moton
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Determinedly avant garde, Taylor is one of the most controversial figures in jazz - an artist who found it hard to make a living from his conception of the music when it was at its most original, but someone who was lionised in later life as a founding father of the free jazz movement of the 1950s. He was conventionally trained, and during his time at the New England Conservatory also took part in Boston's burgeoning modern-jazz scene. By the time he arrived in New York in 1956, steeped in many aspects of contemporary classical music as well as jazz, he soon made his mark as an uncompromising free player. He held down a celebrated residency at New York's Five Spot, and began recording with a quartet that included saxophonist Steve Lacy. Later, he worked with saxophonists Archie Shepp or Jimmy Lyons. These groups were every bit as free and radical in their conception as the contemporary quartet led by Ornette Coleman. At the heart of their work was Taylor's piano playing, which soon shed any obvious connection with conventional melody and harmony. Referring to the number of keys on a standard piano, Val Wilmer used the phrase "eighty-eight tuned drums" to describe Taylor's pianism
