[Dixielandjazz] R.I.P. Billy Taylor

[Robert Ringwald]

Billy Taylor, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 89
by Peter Keepnews
New York Times, December 30, 2010

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 area 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 at 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 stint 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 Times in
a review of a 1996 nightclub performance, like "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 reared
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 Virginia
State College. 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 famous 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 Down Beat, 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 both jobs until 1969. He was later
a founding member 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 From 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's newly formed 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 himself 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 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."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. 
Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.