Cecil Taylor takes the stage at 8 p. m. Saturday for a solo piano concert in Asbury Hall in Babeville. It’s part of the well-nigh miraculous Hallwalls music series, which, it seems, nothing can harm, much less kill.

There will, assuredly, be no more important musical performance all year in Buffalo.

And thereby hangs a fascinating tale of one legendary jazz revolutionary and a city that was not-so-briefly a hotbed of musical revolution like few others.

PREVIEW

WHO: Cecil Taylor

WHEN: 8 p. m. Saturday

WHERE: Asbury Hall at Babeville, 341 Delaware Ave.

TICKETS: $25 general; $20 students/seniors; $18 members (box office; Tickets.com)

INFO: 854-1694 or www.hallwalls.org

Taylor turned 80 last month. His appearance Saturday night is the fifth that I know of in this city. The back story in the previous history of Cecil Taylor and a hugely congenial New Music city:

1968, Buffalo State College: The Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today — the most extraordinary cultural event by far ever to take place in this city — featured, along with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, separate concerts by jazz radicals Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor.

The house was full for Taylor’s appearance. Excitement was high in Buff State’s Upton Hall. Few, if any, had heard Taylor before. But, as were most of the festival events, large audiences turned out to witness an entire community’s galvanizing moment.

What kind of jazz is this? was the question of one concertgoer before the band took the stage. I don’t know, one wag answered, but I don’t think it’s going to be “Stormy Weather.”

It wasn’t — not by name, anyway. But Taylor’s violent, thrilling storm at the keyboard introduced an entirely different kind of jazz climate to a city unused to it.

Taylor had, by then, been one of the two major poles of jazz revolution for more than a decade (the other was alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, whose shocking advent followed Taylor by a couple of years).

What we heard that afternoon was Taylor approaching the piano, as he once said, as if it were “88 tuned drums.” And what we saw as Taylor’s body and arms moved over the piano keyboard, was a kind of tense and magical dance performance by a man sitting down whose object was the creation of sound.

Early 1970s, University at Buffalo South Campus: Taylor and his group play a summer evening concert in Baird Hall (now called Allen Hall) on the UB South Campus. The air in the room is hot and close. The compact, relatively small venue is packed with students. It remains, to this day, one of the most powerful jazz performances by anyone I’ve ever heard. Its visceral impact on everyone was immense.

Mid-’70s, Artpark: In its first few seasons, the new Lewiston facility’s large state budget provided provided some of the most shocking music the hall would ever hear — the first Western New York appearance, for instance, of the Sun Ra Arkestra (who, unforgettably, paraded through the hall in avant-New Orleans mummer style, chanting “Space is the place, space is the place”).

Taylor’s group plays for the smallest audience I have, to this day, ever seen for an Artpark performance. If there were 30 of us there, I’d be amazed. Everyone rushes to the theater’s first 10 rows.

It is, then, another explosive chamber concert by Taylor’s group. At the same time, it was impossible not to wonder how many similar events Taylor, by that time, had had to play in a career of steadfastly refusing any compromise of his own incomparably thorny and dissonant music.

In the annals of jazz, some would probably score it a three-way tie among Taylor, Coleman and Eric Dolphy over which musician had to suffer the most rejection and abuse at the hands of listeners and fellow musicians.

I wouldn’t. I think “the winner” of that contest was, in his early years, Cecil Taylor by a mile.

Understand, though. Just a few years later, Taylor would be playing in Jimmy Carter’s White House. And not long after that, composing ballet music for Mikhail Baryshnikov.

1985, University at Buffalo North Campus: Taylor occupies half of a solo piano event in Slee Hall sponsored by the New York State New Music tour. Composer/performer Andrew Stiller reviewed the event for The News: “Carefully choreographing his entrance and wearing bells, he chant-rasped his theme: ‘Those who extend their hand (in friendship, pianism, applause) do not lie.’

“What makes Cecil Taylor’s music run,” Stiller wrote, is a “marriage of energy and sheer physicality, with an intellect and virtuosity seemingly out of nowhere.”

In cold fact, Taylor’s music is far from out of nowhere. He was classically trained at the New England Conservatory of Music— perfectly aware, no doubt, that the tone clusters he makes such extraordinary use of in his piano splatter have relatives in Prokofiev and Bartok and origins in music written in 1912 by a then-16-year-old Henry Cowell, who gleefully wanted pianists to use their fists and forearms (Charles Ives, independently, was also happy at the time to be treating the piano as a larger, resonant percussion box of strings and prettily polished wood).

At the same time, Cowell, Ives, Cage et. al. couldn’t possibly pertain less to what Taylor has played his whole life, which he has long maintained is part of a long and great black tradition of percussive pianists in jazz (Monk, Randy Weston, etc.).

The great jazz critic Gary Giddins, a couple of decades ago, wrote eloquently about Taylor’s victory in the world of artistic reputation against almost impossible odds: “Everybody wins when a visionary achieves the valued appurtenances of a life in art without having to cede his vision . . .”

“Taylor is Taylor is Taylor. His celebration of self is bound up with a stubborn intransigence. . . . Personality itself is technique. Given Taylor’s holy role as the eternal outer curve of the avant-garde, it isn’t his function to make things easy. When we can listen to him with half an ear, he’s lost.”

Of more recent vintage (last year) is Taylor partisan Howard Mandel, who in his book “Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz” writes: “Cecil’s music is not going away but has rather through his perseverance and determination opened up musical territory that dares others to enter and will remain ripe for exploration even long after they do. To ignore him and his music is like pretending that there are fewer continents than actually exist or to assume that we’ve heard everything there is to hear in life, though his music obviously proves otherwise.”

It is, quite literally, impossible to predict what will happen Saturday night when Taylor meets Asbury Hall.

It would seem unlikely, then, that much actual dance will be incorporated into the performances of a musician who just celebrated his 80th birthday — not the way it was in past Taylor decades.

But one never knows.

Poetry has been a part of Taylor’s performances of late. That too could be part of what the audience will hear when the long, many-decade triumph of a great jazz artist and visionary continues in a former New Music hotbed that his music once so powerfully sulfurized.