Late-1950s New York audiences expecting swing or bebop instead saw a pianist attacking the keys with forearms and elbows, playing what one phrase of the era called 88 tuned drums. Cecil Taylor, born in 1929 and raised in Corona, Queens, was pushed into music at six by his mother Almeida, a dancer who also played piano and violin, and he later said he was trying to imitate the leaps and spatial movements of a dancer at the keyboard. He studied at the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory, where he immersed himself in European modernists like Bartok and Stockhausen, then brought serialism, tone clusters, and polyrhythms crashing into American jazz.

This episode follows Taylor from the 1956 album Jazz Advance, Newport in 1957, and a 1958 collaboration with John Coltrane through the years when club owners refused to book hi ...