Cecil Percival Taylor was born March 25, 1929, in New York City and raised largely in Corona, Queens. His mother, who had studied piano and dance herself, started him on the instrument at five or six and pushed him to practice daily; his father worked as a chef, a trade whose discipline Taylor later said shaped his own. He studied at the New York College of Music as a teenager, then enrolled in a two-year diploma program at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1949, majoring in popular-music arrangement and, while there, developing an interest in twentieth-century European composers — Stravinsky and Bartók among them — alongside the American songbook. By his own account, though, none of that formal training moved him as much as records: Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Horace Silver taught him more about what he wanted from the piano than any classroom did.

Taylor graduated in 1951 and returned to New York, where he spent the mid-1950s leading small groups in the city's clubs before recording his debut, Jazz Advance, on September 9, 1956, in Boston for the small Transition label — a quartet date with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Denis Charles. Lacy, still a teenager himself, had joined Taylor's group in 1953 and stayed through the group's landmark 1957 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, an engagement now regarded as one of the first public unveilings of what would become free jazz. From the start, critics recognized Taylor as a radical: he was already stripping away conventional jazz piano's dependence on set changes and a steady walking pulse, replacing them with dense, quasi-orchestral clusters played with the same physical force a percussionist brings to a drum kit. The World of Cecil Taylor (Candid, recorded October 1960) — with Archie Shepp on tenor, Neidlinger on bass, and Denis Charles on drums — extended that language, but through most of the late 1950s and 1960s the size of Taylor's audience never came close to matching his critical standing. He took work as a dishwasher, a record-store clerk, and a delivery man to get by between engagements, later noting the strangeness of scrubbing pots while Down Beat was writing him up as a major new voice.

Two Blue Note dates cut in 1966 remain the commercial centerpiece of that decade: Unit Structures (recorded May 19, 1966, under Rudy Van Gelder's engineering) and Conquistador! (recorded that October 6), both featuring alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who had joined Taylor's group in 1961 and would remain his single most consistent musical partner — the only member of the band present, in one configuration or another, from the mid-1960s until Lyons's death from lung cancer on May 19, 1986. Both albums also drew on a deep pool of downtown players who cycled through what became known as the Cecil Taylor Unit: bassists Henry Grimes and Alan Silva, drummer Andrew Cyrille, and, on Conquistador!, trumpeter Bill Dixon.

The 1970s brought institutional recognition without much institutional money: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, short teaching residencies at the University of Wisconsin (1970–71), Antioch College in Ohio (1972–74), and Glassboro State College in New Jersey, and a striking run of solo recordings — Indent (1973, Unit Core), Silent Tongues (recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival on July 2, 1974, released 1975 on Arista/Freedom and named Down Beat's Album of the Year), and Air Above Mountains (recorded August 20, 1976, at Austria's Moosham Castle, released 1977 on Enja) — that established unaccompanied solo piano as one of his primary modes alongside the working band. He was also, throughout this period and for the rest of his life, a working poet, reciting his own verse from the stage before and during performances as a matter of course rather than as a novelty.

By decade's end the reconstituted Unit — Lyons, violinist Ramsey Ameen, trumpeter Raphé Malik, bassist Sirone, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson — cut 3 Phasis (New World, recorded April 1978), and the following June, Taylor was one of a handful of jazz musicians President Jimmy Carter invited to perform on the White House lawn. Taylor's allotted five minutes reportedly ran long, and by several accounts Carter sought him out afterward, Secret Service in tow, to ask whether he'd ever played for Vladimir Horowitz. The Unit's live document from Fat Tuesday's in Manhattan, It Is in the Brewing Luminous (recorded February 8–9, 1980, Hat Hut), and the solo recital Garden (recorded November 16, 1981, in Basel, also Hat Hut, and by Taylor's own account his favorite of his solo records) carried the group's uncompromising reputation into the 1980s. For Olim — a solo concert recorded April 9, 1986, at Berlin's Academy of Arts and dedicated to Jimmy Lyons, who died weeks later — closed that chapter of his career.

Taylor spent much of 1988 touring Europe with an ad hoc large ensemble, the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra, whose Berlin concert that July 2 — with Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Tomasz Stańko, Han Bennink, Peter Kowald, and a young William Parker on double bass — was released the following year as the two-disc Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) on FMP. Around 1990 Taylor also formed the Feel Trio with Parker, who would go on to anchor the bass chair through the following decade-plus of Taylor's most significant recordings, and drummer Tony Oxley. In 1991 Taylor received a MacArthur Fellowship, jazz's clearest form of institutional validation, decades after critics had already made the same case informally.

Taylor's later work ranged unusually widely for a musician in his late sixties and seventies: Momentum Space (recorded August 4–5, 1998, released 1999 on Verve), a trio session with saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Elvin Jones commissioned by the Creative Music Institute; a February 12, 1999, Library of Congress duo concert with violist Mat Maneri, released in 2004 as Algonquin on Bridge Records; and a September 2000 concert with Italy's Instabile Orchestra at the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia, marking that ensemble's tenth anniversary and released in 2003 as The Owner of the River Bank. In 2013 the Inamori Foundation awarded him the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, a $500,000 honor, adding to a résumé that already included NEA Jazz Master recognition. In April 2016, as part of the Whitney Museum's "Open Plan" series, Taylor returned to a New York stage after a long absence — reuniting with Butoh dancer Min Tanaka and drummer Tony Oxley — and received a standing ovation. He died at his home in New York City on April 5, 2018, eleven days after his 89th birthday.

Taylor's playing was physically explosive and harmonically self-generated: rather than treat the piano as a set of individually struck pitches governed by chord changes, he approached the instrument as a full percussion battery capable of dense, cluster-built structures, using his forearms, elbows, and full-body weight alongside his fingers to produce the volume and density his music demanded. That approach put him, alongside Ornette Coleman, at the origin point of free jazz, but Taylor arrived there from a different direction — filtered through Duke Ellington's harmonic richness, Thelonious Monk's rhythmic angularity, and the twentieth-century European composers (Stravinsky, Bartók) he studied at the New England Conservatory — producing a vocabulary with almost no direct antecedent in jazz piano. He never moderated that language for commercial reach across a six-decade career, and the loyalty of the musicians who built careers alongside him — Jimmy Lyons for a quarter-century, William Parker for over a decade — reflects how demanding and how singular his conception of ensemble playing remained from the 1960s to his final performances.