The Cecil Taylor Audiotape Collection consists of 176 cassettes and DATs made of performances, workshops, studio recordings, interviews, and talks that took place between 1962 and 2002, which were acquired by Blank Forms after the artist's death in 2018. The bulk of these tapes document live concerts, both solo and with Taylor’s working (and special, one-off) ensembles of various sizes, as well as a number of duet recordings made with trumpeter Bill Dixon.

A number of these tapes represent recordings later issued on compact disc, though it is not presently clear if these are masters or dubbed copies for reviewing purposes. Several tapes also include the work of other artists: English experimental group AMM; pianist Marilyn Crispell; the Canadian duo of pianist Paul Plimley and saxophonist/theorist John Oswald; composer Robert Ceely; and Japanese progressive rock group Saisei Koubou. Regular Taylor collaborators including William Parker, Tony Oxley, Sunny Murray, Evan Parker, Jackson Krall, Harri Sjöström, Bobby Zankel, Tristan Honsinger, saxophonists Glenn Spearman and Marco Eneidi, percussionist Thurman Barker, bassist Barry Guy, and guitarist Franky Douglas appear throughout these programs and their work is well represented.

Live concerts spotlight a number of venues that have receded into history: Eddie Condon’s New York jazz club in Midtown Manhattan; Yoshi’s in Oakland, California; and the early iterations of notable Downtown New York venue the Knitting Factory on Houston Street and in Tribeca. European concert houses are also well-represented, including Stockholm’s Jazz Club Fasching; the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, home of the Workshop Frieie Musik; and the BIMhuis in Amsterdam, as are significant jazz and experimental music festivals like the Willisau Jazz Festival, Akbank Jazz Festival, and the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in its namesake Quebec city.

Taylor’s residencies and workshops at the Knitting Factory and at the now-closed Turtle Bay Music School are featured on quite a number of these tapes and give insight into his process directing large-scale compositions and improvisations over a period of time. Further offering a window into Taylor’s history and artistry are numerous WKCR-FM (Columbia University) radio interviews, as well as interviews with NPR host, jazz advocate, and pianist Marian McPartland for her long-running Piano Jazz program. A number of lectures are also in this series, as is a Poetry Foundation talk with poet Clark Coolidge.

All tapes were digitized by George Blood Audio in 2021 and digital files of these tapes can be accessed by request.