Cecil Taylor

Rivaled perhaps only by Art Tatum as a virtuoso of jazz piano, Taylor combined the compositional grandeur of the European tradition with a technique of jackhammer intensity to create marathon tsunamis of joy, rage, lyricism, humor, and pathos. Beginning in the '50s, this perennial radical shaped a body of work that, in its range and audacity, made him arguably one of two or three of the most original jazz artists of the postwar period.