Bold opinions on jazz and literature

Cecil Taylor (Creative Commons photo by Michael Hoefner, source). 

Tyler Cowen, in a blog post from Thursday on what he's been reading lately: "Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor.  Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington.  Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative.  It induced me to buy another book by him.  The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me."

In the comments, "It Ain't Necessarily So" replied, "With respect, this is a bad take. Duke Ellington wrote a host of standards that are widely remembered today and arguably is the single most influential figure in the history of jazz. He wrote dozens of standards including 'Mood Indigo,' 'Satin Doll,' 'Caravan,' 'I Got it Bad and That Ain't Good,' and the inescapable 'It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing.' Even today, it's pretty common to hear at least one Ellington tune during any set in a jazz club. As an illustration of Ellington's importance, Cecil Taylor continued to perform Ellington compositions for most of his career. Also, Ellington's band was one of the most important and influential during the era when jazz was the most popular music of the day."

"To say that Sun Ra and Taylor, who came along in an era when jazz had been marginalized and ceased to be popular music, were more musically important than a figure like Duke Ellington, is a poor revisionist take on musical history."

This is one of those instances where I wish I could ask Robert Anton Wilson his opinion, perhaps jazzbos in RAW fandom such as Eric Wagner and Steve Fly can weigh in? 

I am a huge fan of Duke Ellington. Although I consider myself reasonable conversant with jazz -- I've listened to Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea, and other major figures -- I am not really familiar with music of Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra. I did some hasty Cecil Taylor research and borrowed Unit Structures from Hoopla, is there an obvious Sun Ra album to try, in the same vein that everyone who doesn't know Miles Davis is supposed to listen to Kind of Blue? 

When I thought about Tyler's post, I realized it reminded me of this statement from Wilson: "James Joyce is more important than Jesus, Buddha and Shakespeare put together. Pound is the greatest poet in English. Thorne Smith should be reprinted immediately, and would be enormously popular with the current generation, I wager. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best (and only) literature of our times. All of these opinions are pompous and aggressive, of course, but questions like this bring out the worst in me."