Andrew Epstein Reveals Cecil Taylor's Connections With New York School Poets

Andrew Epstein's site, Locus Solus, features an excellent essay about the recently deceased musician, composer, poet Cecil Taylor, and his friendships with many of the New York School writers, including Amiri Baraka. Epstein first draws readers' attention to an article by Adam Shatz published at New York Review of Books's website, which covers aspects of the subject. In his article, Epstein explains, "Shatz weaves together a slew of memorable anecdotes that flesh out the daunting range of Taylor’s influences and interests, and vividly convey his brilliant, complicated, sometimes difficult, enigmatic personality and aesthetic philosophy." From there: 

As Shatz writes, “Cecil Taylor was as urbane an intellectual as jazz has ever known: reader of Camus, friend of the Beats, student of modernist architecture.”

Shatz got to know Taylor during the last decade of his life, and relays the texture and content of his many conversations with the musician.  In the course of doing so, he mentions that Taylor would regularly speak with admiration about Frank O’Hara:

He invariably talked about the people he loved and the artists he admired: his father, a professional cook from whose kitchen “the most wonderful smells would emanate”; his formidable mother, who spoke French and German and took him to the ballet; Billie Holiday and Lena Horne, both of whom he worshipped; Jimmy Lyons, who had given twenty-six years of saintly devotion to Taylor’s Unit; the architect Santiago Calatrava, whose bridges he adored; and the poet Frank O’Hara, who shared his love of modern art and “was rather pleasant to look at.” (Did he know O’Hara well, I once asked him. “I don’t know anyone well,” he replied.)

I’ve never been able to find much textual evidence pointing to specific connections between O’Hara and Taylor, especially in contrast to Coleman (who O’Hara did mention in letters and refer to in his work), so I was particularly intrigued by Shatz’s recollection here.

Presumably, O’Hara and Taylor would’ve crossed paths repeatedly in the downtown music, art, and poetry scene, and I know of at least one event where they shared a (rather amazing) bill, on June 24, 1963.

Read on at Locus Solus.