Cecil Taylor - Free As A Bird

His early trailblazing days – including the 1956 album Jazz Advance and a startling six-week residency at New York’s Five Spot – were a prelude to a career that has proved individualistic, influential and highly controversial. Yet there is a strong case to be made for the pianist to stand alongside Ellington and Monk as pivotal figures who ushered in wholesale changes in the direction and language of jazz, heralding the age of free jazz. Taylor turned 80 earlier this year and rarely performs in Europe these days. But Jazzwise was there in Norway earlier in the year when the birthday champagne had still not lost its fizz. Interview; Marcus O’Dair

“Ornette? Ornette-i-pooh is very clever!” snarls Cecil Taylor, eyes ablaze through ruby shades, his usually soft mutter suddenly unnervingly intense. With its husky low volume and curious enunciation, syllables at times grossly protracted for emphasis, the voice is somewhere between a baddie in a Western and (a more sober) Rowley Birkin QC of the Fast Show. “Ornette-i-pooh doesn’t know what jazz is. I mean, Ornette could play the saxophone but...”

We are sitting on a private boat off the Norwegian city of Molde, at whose internationally renowned jazz festival the contrarian, and now octogenarian, pianist will perform the following evening.Yet although the largerthan-life Taylor turned 80 earlier in the year, his energy levels show no sign of dimming – as suggested by the above salvo, a response to a question about last summer’s Meltdown festival and the extent to which he shares common ground with its curator.