o que diz Cecil Taylor

I never understood how musicians could play music for poets and not read poems. I don't understand musicians who can play for dancers and not know how to dance. I mean, it's very interesting to me, you were talking about your research; well, one of the things--before I put words down, I probably have read a thousand words.(...)

if you have the opportunity to play for people all in different countries, one of the things you begin to discover is that people are--you can find oppressed people all over the world, therefore somewhere along the road you get the idea that it is certainly not about yourself. Any gift that you have is not about that at all. It's about a force that is about the ungiven, the uncreative. It is about the amorphous, and you are at best merely a vessel. And once you begin to understand that [laughs]--the wonderful thing about it is--I was thinking about it today--that the first time I heard Billie Holiday, I heard it in the room of a member of the family who was not very well thought of, and the other part of the family all liked Bing Crosby. And that was alright, but there is a qualitative difference. So in our small way what we attempt to do is to look and see and receive and become a sponge and attempt to make anything that exists as part of the palette to describe whatever it is we think we want to do. And what you want to do is to be as beautiful and as loving and as all-consuming as possible, so that the statement has many, many different implications, and it has many different levels. The only way to do that, seems to me, is to research.

extracto de uma entrevista de cecil taylor