[Dixielandjazz] Billy Taylor NY Times Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here is a copy of th NY Times Obit for Dr. Billy Taylor.
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/ barbonestreetjazband

December 29, 2010 - by Peter Keepnews - NY Times
Billy Taylor, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 89

Billy Taylor, a pianist and composer who was also an eloquent  
spokesman and advocate for jazz as well as a familiar presence for  
many years on television and radio, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He  
was 89 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson.

Dr. Taylor, as he preferred to be called (he earned a doctorate in  
music education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in  
1975), was a living refutation of the stereotype of jazz musicians as  
unschooled, unsophisticated and inarticulate, an image that was  
prevalent when he began his career in the 1940s, and that he did as  
much as any other musician to erase.

Dr. Taylor probably had a higher profile on television than any other  
jazz musician of his generation. He had a long run as a cultural  
correspondent on the CBS News program “Sunday Morning” and was the  
musical director of David Frost’s syndicated nighttime talk show from  
1969 to 1972.

Well educated and well spoken, he came across, Ben Ratliff wrote in  
The New York Times in a review of a 1996 nightclub performance, as “a  
genial professor,” which he was: he taught jazz courses at Long Island  
University, the Manhattan School of Music and elsewhere. But he was  
also a compelling performer and a master of the difficult art of  
making jazz accessible without watering it down.

His “greatest asset,” Mr. Ratliff wrote, “is a sense of jazz as  
entertainment, and he’s not going to be obscure about it.”

A pianist with impeccable technique and an elegant, almost self- 
effacing style, Dr. Taylor worked with some of the biggest names in  
jazz early in his career and later led a trio that worked regularly in  
New York nightclubs and recorded many albums. But he left his mark on  
jazz less as a musician than as a proselytizer, spreading the gospel  
of jazz as a serious art form in high school and college lectures, on  
radio and television, on government panels and foundation boards.

He also helped bring jazz to predominantly black neighborhoods with  
Jazzmobile, an organization he founded in 1965 to present free outdoor  
concerts by nationally known musicians at street corners and housing  
projects throughout New York City.

“I knew that jazz was not as familiar to young blacks as James Brown  
and the soul thing,” he told Barbara Campbell of The Times in 1971.  
“If you say to a young guy in Harlem, Duke Ellington is great, he’s  
going to be skeptical until he has seen him on 127th Street.”

William Edward Taylor Jr. was born in Greenville, N.C., on July 24,  
1921, and grew up in Washington. His father, William, was a dentist;  
his mother, Antoinette, was a schoolteacher. He had his first piano  
lesson at 7 and later studied music at what is now Virginia State  
University. Shortly after moving to New York in 1943 — within two days  
of his arrival, he later recalled — he began working with the tenor  
saxophonist Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and he  
remained a fixture on that celebrated nightclub row for many years.

Dr. Taylor had the technique, the knowledge and the temperament to  
straddle the old and the new; his adaptability made him a popular  
sideman with both swing and bebop musicians and led to his being hired  
in 1949 as the house pianist at Birdland.

In 1951 he formed his own trio, which was soon working at clubs like  
the Copacabana in New York and the London House in Chicago. Within a  
few years he was lecturing about jazz at music schools and writing  
articles about it for DownBeat, Saturday Review and other  
publications. He later had a long-running concert-lecture series at  
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He also became one of the few jazz musicians to establish a successful  
separate career in radio and television. In 1958 he was the musical  
director of an NBC television show, “The Subject Is Jazz.” A year  
later the Harlem radio station WLIB hired him as a disc jockey; in  
1962 he moved to WNEW, but he returned to WLIB in 1964 as both disc  
jockey and program director, and remained in those positions until  
1969. He was later a founding partner of Inner City Broadcasting,  
which bought WLIB in 1971.

Commercial radio became increasingly inhospitable to jazz in the  
1960s, but Dr. Taylor found a home at National Public Radio, where he  
was a familiar voice for more than two decades, first as host of “Jazz  
Alive” in the late ’70s and most recently on “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at  
the Kennedy Center.” That series, on which he introduced live  
performances and interviewed the performers, made its debut in the  
fall of 1994 and remained in production until the fall of 2002.

In 1968 Dr. Taylor was appointed to New York City’s new Cultural  
Council, along with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and other  
prominent figures in the arts. He later held similar positions on both  
the state and federal level and until recently was an adviser to the  
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

In 1980 he was a member of an advisory panel that called for greater  
support for jazz from the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of the  
panel’s proposals were eventually enacted, and Dr. Taylor became a  
beneficiary of the endowment in 1988, when he received a $20,000 Jazz  
Masters award. He was also given a National Medal of Arts in 1992.

Dr. Taylor wrote more than 300 compositions. They ranged in scope and  
style from “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” a simple 16- 
bar gospel tune written with Dick Dallas that became one of the  
unofficial anthems of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to the  
ambitious “Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra” (1973).

In addition to his daughter, Dr. Taylor is survived by his wife,  
Theodora. A son, Duane, died in 1988.

As much energy as his other activities required, Dr. Taylor never lost  
his enthusiasm for performing — or his frustration with audiences  
that, as he saw it, missed the point. “Most people say, ‘Hey, let’s go  
to the nightclub and have a few drinks, and maybe we’ll even listen to  
the music,’ ” he once said. “It’s a lack of understanding of the  
musicians and of the discipline involved.

“This is not to say that playing jazz is all frowning and no fun at  
all. But because you make it look easy doesn’t mean you didn’t spend  
eight hours a day practicing the piano.”