Cecil Taylor was born March 25, 1929, in New York City, and began piano at six, practicing six days a week at his mother's insistence. He attended the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, but was influenced more decisively by the recordings of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Horace Silver than by his formal training.

By the mid-1950s he was leading his own small groups, and from his debut recording, Jazz Advance (1956), Taylor was recognized as an uncompromising musical radical. Alongside saxophonist Ornette Coleman, he opened the path toward free jazz, stripping away the structures and steady rhythms that had underpinned the genre until then, playing piano with a furious physical attack that used the instrument's full range to build an entirely original musical language.

His audience remained small relative to the critical acclaim he received, but his career gathered momentum from 1973 onward, touring and recording regularly either solo or with his own small group. He was also a poet, reciting his own work at live performances, and in 1978 was invited to perform at a White House jazz festival, where President Jimmy Carter personally approached him after his set. Taylor returned to the New York stage in 2016 after years away, receiving a standing ovation. He died April 5, 2018, in New York City, at age 89.

Taylor's playing, physically explosive, structurally uncompromising, and built from an entirely personal harmonic vocabulary, made him one of the two or three most consequential pianists in the free jazz movement, an artist who never moderated his approach for commercial reach across a six-decade career.