Top 31 Quotes About Cecil Taylor
#1. I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character ... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.
Luc Ferrari
#2. When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it 'Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,' after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.
Lou Reed
#3. The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.
Pat Metheny
#4. What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.
Steve Lacy
#5. And when I met Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window.
Archie Shepp
#6. It suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz - Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor - could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations.
Haruki Murakami
#7. So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him.
Archie Shepp
#8. But Hopes are Shy Birds flying at a great distance seldom reached by the best of Guns.
John James Audubon
#9. I understand about the relative strengths of people, and I don't think people have to be anything. They can be nothin' if they want to be.
Cecil Taylor
#11. To feel is perhaps the most terrifying thing in this society.
Cecil Taylor
#12. I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.
Cecil Taylor
#13. A steak is a steak, so I tried to experiment with different side dishes, such as truffle croquettes, and unusual condiments, but I learned that people don't want you to change the steakhouse.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten
#15. If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process.
Cecil Taylor
#16. The quality of life, values that go down to doin' that, that's the issue.
Cecil Taylor
#17. You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.
Cecil Taylor
#18. To seek God by rituals is to get the ritual and lose God in the process
Meister Eckhart
#19. To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.
Cecil Taylor
#20. Doesn't that fool know I recorded that song because I like it?
Cecil Taylor
#21. Whoever said misery loves company was full of shite. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however ... that guy was onto something.
Stephen King
#22. God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.
Francis Schaeffer
#23. Falling hard and fast. And there didn't seem to be a thing I could do about it.
Lisa Kleypas
#24. Sometimes when it goes really well, you wonder, who's that at the piano?
Cecil Taylor
#25. People have a right to protest; they have a right to make their opinion. They can be very upset about what they consider to be a murder of a person in custody, but you cannot destroy property. First person does it goes to jail.
Rudy Giuliani
#26. Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.
Cecil Taylor
#28. Rhythm is the life of space of time danced through.
Cecil Taylor
#29. In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.
Cecil Taylor
#31. I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.
Cecil Taylor
