Cecil Taylor in the New Yorker

All the ways he was described in 1967

As readers of this newsletter know, I am currently writing In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, to be published by Wolke Verlag in 2024. Naturally, this requires a lot of reading and research, and the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ is proving to be very helpful, as is the Jazzinstitut in Darmstadt, Germany. I have also been doing a whole lot of burrowing around in the archives of the New York Times and the New Yorker. (Did you know you can get a digital-only New Yorker subscription for $6 for 12 weeks, which will grant you complete access to every issue ever printed? You can download a whole lot of articles as PDFs in 12 weeks.)

So this week, as a paying-subscribers-only post, I’m going to share a particular cross-section of what I’ve come up with: mainly, the one-line descriptions of Taylor in the New Yorker’s front-of-book listings from 1967, which are often quite snippy, especially considering how favorably he was reviewed in the magazine when they covered him at greater length. (I have a bunch of others from 1965 that might be even meaner; I’ll save those for a later post.) Jump past the paywall to read what I’ve unearthed, and thanks as always for your support.