Cecil Taylor's Childhood Activities; + Bonus

Bonus Newspaper Clippings for Paying Subscribers

(Paying Subscribers, scroll down for your gifts, as usual, with THANKS!)

You heard Cecil Taylor tell Claes Dahlgren, in a 1959 audio interview, that he started piano at age 5 (many sources say 6, but I go with Taylor). There is evidence of his childhood music-making in New York City’s Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News. (The newspaper was named for Amsterdam Avenue, which was named for the Dutch settlers who displaced the Native Americans.) Taylor grew up in the Corona section of the Queens borough of New York City, so the news items are from that neighborhood. Why are we interested in this type of material? Because we want to know all we can about one of the leading musicians of the 20th century. And because it’s fun!

First, here is little Cecil listed as a dance student at age 6! (Taylor was born March 25, 1929 and died on April 5, 2018.) As you may know, Taylor was always interested in dance and sometimes danced during his concerts. The dance students listed in the first column are mostly girls, divided into primary and intermediate, followed by six boys whose level is not specified. Their teacher, Lucille Williams, had just graduated from high school. Notice that the students danced to pop songs of the day. Taylor once said “I was tap dancing when I was six,” and it would make sense that tap was the approach used in the Black community for this type of music. Some of the numbers, such as “Dancing With My Shadow” (unrelated to other songs of the same name!), tended to be performed slowly, so they may have involved a different kind of choreography, or those songs could have been played a little more quickly. For example, this version of “…Shadow” from just a few months before the event is at a perfect tap tempo. On the other hand, Ellington’s then-recent “Sophisticated Lady” would seem to be too slow for tap. It’s significant to see Taylor exposed to Ellington’s music at such a young age, because he always named Ellington as a major influence.

Let’s move ahead to just before Taylor’s 14th birthday. Neighborhood newspapers usually included local or “society” news, and Black newspapers were no exception. The contributor from Corona reports that Taylor participated in a recital where young “Artists of Tomorrow” alternated with singing, piano music, and poetry readings. By the way, I would guess that Earl Hyman, who performed a poem that day, is not Earle (sic) Hyman, a distinguished Black stage actor best known for playing Bill Cosby’s father on TV, because his birth name was George Plummer, and I don’t think he had changed his name yet. However, it is possible that he had already changed it, and, I must say, the piece that he performed, James Weldon Johnson’s “Creation,” is a long and serious poem, not something for a beginner to attempt. So, it might be Earle!

A few months later, Cecil graduated from Junior High School 116 in Queens, as noted here in the third item of the first column (scroll down please):

Cecil was also spotted at parties and social events in 1944 and 1946 (as paying subscribers will see below). For someone researching Taylor’s life, these news clippings are more important than one might think, because they will help one to reconstruct Taylor’s social circle. Some names appear in several of these articles, and if we can learn more about those people and their families, we will know a lot more about Taylor’s early environment.

See you again soon!

All the best,

Lewis