Each will perform a solo set before coming together for the second half of the performance. His relationships with other musicians on the New York “scene” were strained, not only because of his uncompromising music, but also because he was a gay man in a largely homophobic jazz community. A quartet date with Steve Lacey on soprano sax, it’s notable primarily because it showcases Taylor playing tunes, which he does very well. On compositions by Monk and Ellington, and standards such as Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To”, he swings like the clappers, but the heavily percussive and melodically deconstructive elements of his mature style are there in embryo.This quartet was the first group to play the Five Spot Cafe in New York, and Taylor was beginning to make a considerable reputation until the increasingly abstract character of his music, and the arrival in New York of Ornette Coleman with his more melodic concept of free jazz, consigned him to the outside berth once again This, more or less, is where he has remained. When he’s most interesting, he sounds like me.” Taylor’s recording debut, the album Jazz Advance, made in Boston in 1956 (and produced by Tom Wilson, who would go on to produce Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground), is a fascinating document. “But he didn’t say between what and what.” For his own part, Taylor has said of Brubeck: “I learned a lot from him.

Although the influence sounds unlikely, Brubeck told me in an interview that Taylor used to look over his shoulder when he played in New York clubs.”He said I was the missing link,” Brubeck said. After taking piano lessons from the age of six, he attended New York College of Music and later the New England Conservatory, where he was influenced by the heavy block-chords of Dave Brubeck’s jazz piano playing. And although a whole school of improvised music has grown up in response to his free- form experiments in the Sixties, it mostly isn’t jazz anymore. He once said: “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.”
Cecil Taylor was born in New York in 1929, to a mother who was both a dancer and a pianist. No matter how fractured the arpeggios (you have to see Taylor in action to experience just how powerfully he hits those keys), there’s always at least an echo of the jazz tradition to be heard. While he may never play two conventionally congruent notes, the music somehow continues to swing.

You may even be able to dance to it, for one of Taylor’s greatest influences and most abiding passions is the art of dance. No wonder subsequent movements have doubled back to the comforting familiarity represented by chords and tunes, for after Taylor’s fobiddingly dense improvisations post-modernism was perhaps the only place to go. For a while, Matt’s creativity and Martin’s gravity appear an open and mature alliance as they share knowledge of Martin’s HIV and Matt’s incipient depression.But you cannot know everything about someone, and as more and more emerges about two of his ex-lovers, now his housemates, Martin’s character complicates. Although he’s nearly 70 and his great breakthrough occurred 40 or so years ago, apres Taylor, there’s still nothing but a dirty, great, black hole. The various stations on the way – bebop, cool, hard-bop, modal – flash by and then you hit the Taylor terminus of totally free improvisation, where the yawning jaws of an immense abyss open up to swallow you. The American pianist Cecil Taylor (pronounced See-s’l) is just about the last stop on the line as far as jazz is concerned. Here is the complexity of characterisation I missed in Fraser’s earlier work.Fraser’s argument is that it is the distortions of relationships caused by the pressures of straight society on “sick” gays, and the real sickness of Aids, that so confuse Matt and Martin and bring such destructive frustration.Marianne Elliott directs the impassioned exchanges with clarity and force and is supported by a design team which ensures that the dance- club settings work as a metaphor for the whole urgent action..

Nor is it easy to get a fix on these two: the knowing Quebecois Yves (Nathan Willcocks), and the out-of-his-face kid Rex, played by Daniel Roberts. But as Martin’s personality first draws doubts and then darkens, so Matt reveals more of his own self-centred ruthlessness and disdain for “losers” among whom even Rachel (Ruth Lass) comes to be counted. Matt, the likeable young married man who discovered he was gay in Poor Superman, seems to have flicked into an entirely new persona. But in Ben Daniels’ strong performance he is still engaging and touchingly nervous as he begins a promising relationship with Martin.Martin Yesterday (Ian Gelder) is an openly gay local politician tirelessly committed to making Toronto a more humane and decent place to live.