Longtime Fort Greene Jazz Legend Cecil Taylor Dies At 89

FORT GREENE, NY — Legendary pianist and longtime Fort Greene resident Cecil Taylor, one of the pioneers of the free jazz movement, died last week inside his home at 89-years-old, the New York Times reported.

Taylor, who died Thursday, pushed the boundaries of jazz starting with his landmark 1956 album "Jazz Advance" that moved the genre to a more improvisational, avant-garde style with no strict chord patterns and more dissonance.

"It wasn’t the technique and feeling of jazz that Mr. Taylor was rejecting, only its form: the 32-bar song, the theme-solos-theme progression," the Times wrote in their obituary for Taylor.

"Instead, his structures often proceeded sequentially, shifting among motifs and tonal centers. When he used written scores for his musicians, melodies were indicated by note letters, but there were no staves or bar lines; this gave musicians more freedom within his music, and, he decided, more investment in it."

In 1929, Taylor was born in Long Island City, raised in Corona, moved briefly to Boston and eventually settled in Fort Greene in 1983, where he lived until his death, according to the Times.

He studied classical piano at Manhattan's New York College of Music in Manhattan then the New England Conservatory in Boston in the 1950s, but eventually started visiting jazz clubs and got inspired by players like Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, the Guardian reported.

Taylor recorded albums with legendary musicians like Charlie Parker, but went far away from the jazz mainstream in 1966 with his album "Unit Structures," which was heralded as one of the best albums of the decade by Pitchfork.

"Recorded during the same season that the psychedelic ballroom scene was starting to bubble in San Francisco, 'Unit Structures' did more to disassemble music than nearly all of the light-show-drenched psychedelia that followed," Pitchfork wrote.

"The album is by no means easy listening; the atonality is unrepentant. But Taylor’s septet finds numerous gorgeous spaces as they interpret 'free jazz' not just as the freedom to improvise but the freedom to invent musical worlds and hidden syntaxes."

He also became well-known for his thundering solo performances where he would dance around the piano and recite poetry in between his virtuosic playing.

In 1973, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship then later a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 1990, a McArthur fellowship in 1991 and Japan's prestigious Kyoto Prize in 2014, according to the Times.

A Long Island contractor bilked Taylor out of the $500,000 prize money for that award and was sentenced to prison for the crime in 2016, DNAinfo reported.

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