Cecil Taylor

USA, 1955–2018

American pianist and poet (1929-2018), a founder of free jazz. Trained on Ellington and Monk and steeped in Stravinsky and Bartok, he treated the piano as a set of tuned drums, building dense, percussive improvisations of extraordinary energy that redrew the limits of jazz.

Influenced by

• Duke Ellington
• Thelonious Monk
• Igor Stravinsky

Influenced

• Sergey Kuryokhin