On Monday, January 23rd at one o'clock in the afternoon, Harvard's own radio station WHRB 95.3 FM will broadcast a special thirty-hour feature on the music and life of contemporary pianist Cecil Taylor.

One of WHRB's traditional reading period Orgies, this program will cover Taylor's 40-year career in depth through recordings from 1955 to the present, as well as a series of interviews with Taylor and other musicians associated with him.

Perhaps the most virtuosic American musician alive, Taylor has achieved recognition within the musical world for his immense technical skill combined with an aggressive, passionate approach to improvisation.

Emerging from two very separate traditions, Cecil Taylor's music is difficult to classify, beyond calling it sui generis. A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Taylor draws deeply upon the twentieth-century European art music school of composers such as Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. However, his professional experience from an early age came in the jazz world, the network of bars and nightclubs where the African-American musical idiom was being developed.

A musical rebel from the start, Cecil Taylor was either ignored or actively denounced by much of the jazz world when he first started performing in the mid-1950's.

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who visited and performed at Harvard last spring, remembers how difficult it was to gain critical and social acceptance for Taylor's musical innovations. "We had almost the whole world against us," said Lacy, "we had more rehearsals than gigs, and there were about two, or three, or four people that would follow us around from gig to gig. That was our public, really...There were musicians who would walk off the bandstand when Cecil would walk in a club."

Just what was so radical about Taylor's music? In essence, Cecil Taylor broke every rule, and smashed every convention that had been held sacred by the jazz world. His all-out assault on the hapless, half-tuned pianos that sat on the bandstands of most clubs meant that he not only broke the accepted standards of melody, harmony, and song structure, but also countless pianos themselves.

In performance, Taylor attacks the keys with astonishing speed and strength in an unrelenting, jagged dance that races up and down the instrument. Through his incredible volume and energy, Taylor pushes and prods the musicians he plays with to the limits of their own technique and creativity.

Unfortunately, as with most truly artistic music, in order to listen to any Cecil Taylor at all, let alone thirty straight hours of it, one has to really want to. Taylor's music is both emotionally draining and almost physically demanding. There is simply no way to listen to it passively, as the listener is constantly bombarded with screaming sheets of note-clusters, unexpected exclamations, and a frenetic rhythmic pulse that makes sitting still virtually impossible.

The chaotic energy of much of Taylor's music is periodically interrupted by periods of intense calm, but even the calmer moments require concentration to grasp the tantalizing hints of romantic melodies that flit from underneath his fingertips.

Acceptance of Taylor's music is a somewhat embarassing process. What makes it so is the emotional extremes that it insistently conveys. Yet the result of acceptance is revelation, plain and simple. Cecil Taylor's music is not ugliness made art; rather, it is the essence of beauty revealed.

Like that of Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor's music is the result of a very intense, powerful individual personality. As a man, Taylor dominates the people around him, whether in conversation or musical interaction. In an interview, he will inevitably take control of the proceedings out of the reporter's hands, as this reporter recently found out.

When asked about a specific album recorded in 1969, Taylor somehow managed to turn the conversation into an expose on the insidious linkage between Ronald Reagan's presidency and the fame of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Asked about his practice regimen, Taylor simply answered, "Trance."

The challenges of interacting with such a complex, larger-than-life personality are magnified in a musical setting. The WHRB orgy will feature interviews with six of Taylor's former sidemen, including such well-known saxophonists as Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp, and David Murray, who discuss their experiences and struggles working with Taylor. When asked whether it was difficult to play with Taylor, Lacy answered simply, "It was impossible. He was so fast, and so way beyond everybody that I had heard." The piece de resistance of the orgy will be the taped interview with The Maestro, as Taylor is often called.

In the earliest recordings that will be broadcast during the orgy, those from the period 1955-1960, Cecil Taylor sounds approximately like a jazz pianist on acid. He performs with the standard format of a jazz combo: piano, bass, drums, and a hornman, in this case, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. The group records several versions of tunes from the standard jazz repertoire. Hearing Taylor perform the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn composition "Johnny Come Lately" has almost the shock value that hearing Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" must have had ten years later. The familiar jazzman's repertoire turns into a nightmare version of itself on Taylor's earliest recordings.

Also in this period, namely in 1958, Taylor recorded an album with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. It is difficult to find a more bizarre record anywhere. With Coltrane struggling mightily to cling to his own advanced harmonic world against Taylor's barrage of atonal clusters, jarring rhythmic patterns, and jackhammer assaults on the piano, a profound tug-of-war between two musical camps ensues. Nobody wins, and the tension produced is exhausting both for the musicians and listeners. Still, this has to be one of the most interesting recordings of American music ever made. It has the curiosity value that one might experience hearing Frank Zappa conduct Beethoven.