RIP, Cecil Taylor

Richard Brody:

Cecil Taylor died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-nine. Of all the jazz musicians who wrought definitive, revolutionary changes in music in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, Taylor’s advances went further than anyone else’s to expand the very notion of musical form. His ideas built on the emotional and intellectual framework of modern jazz in order to extend them into seemingly new dimensions—ones that have remained utterly unassimilable by the mainstream and are still in the vanguard, rushing headlong into the future.