Art & Creativity Quote by Luc Ferrari

Ferrari’s praise lands with the force of a quiet conversion story: a composer known for tape music, sonic documentary, and a suspicious ear toward concert-hall pieties hears Cecil Taylor in the mid-60s and can’t unhear him. The timing matters. 1965-66 is a hinge moment when European avant-garde institutions are busy systematizing “new music” into techniques and schools, while American free jazz is detonating structure from the inside. Ferrari’s “a bit later” reads like a self-aware admission that the shockwave reached him after it had already started changing the room.

Calling Taylor “an amazing character” is doing diplomatic work. It signals that the impact wasn’t only aesthetic; it was social, even theatrical. Taylor’s intensity, his refusal of polite separation between performer and instrument, carried a kind of embodied argument: the piano isn’t a polite machine for harmony, it’s a physical terrain to be attacked, mapped, inhabited. When Ferrari singles out “the way he approaches the instrument,” he’s pointing to technique as worldview. Taylor doesn’t interpret the piano; he redefines what counts as piano playing.

The subtext is envy and permission. Ferrari hears in Taylor a model for making sound that isn’t obligated to lineage, that treats form as consequence rather than goal. “Astonishing” isn’t just admiration; it’s a recognition that Taylor’s freedom is rigorous, earned, and contagious - the sort of artistic stance that gives another composer license to be less correct and more alive.