Jazz pianist who became the music's most articulate and widely heard advocate
Charles Seeger, father of the folk singer Pete Seeger, once told a revealing jazz story which he heard on a 1950s trip to a conference of musicologists. An eminent delegate confided to Seeger that he didn't hate jazz at all, in fact it was probably important and worthy of study ? but he hated the tendency of the music's fans to treat their passion as if it were holy. Seeger suggested that maybe classical music admirers treat their preference as holy, too. "Ah," returned the musicologist, "but it is."
Although Billy Taylor, the jazz pianist, broadcaster and educator, who has died aged 89, campaigned tirelessly for jazz to be accorded the same respect as classical music, the one-time house pianist at New York's Birdland club was never tempted to turn jazz into holy writ. The warmth, openness and cultural breadth that informed his profound jazz knowledge was to make him widely regarded as the most respected jazz educator in the US. He was also one of the few jazz advocates to secure regular airtime on mainstream radio and television, notably as a cultural correspondent on CBS News's Sunday Morning programme, as musical director of David Frost's show between 1969 and 1972, and as host of the National Public Radio show Jazz Alive.
Taylor was an elegant swing pianist in a style raised on the panache of Teddy Wilson and later inflected by bebop, but after the 1960s, his devotion to education increasingly occupied him. He spread the word through constant lecturing, writing and persuasive service on arts and education advisory boards. But most imaginatively, he brought the jazz legends of his youth to 1960s street corners and ghetto schoolrooms with his Jazzmobile project. The name of Duke Ellington might not mean much to a young James Brown fan, Taylor told the New York Times in 1971, but "when he's seen him on 127th Street", it becomes a different matter.
Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina. His father, William, was a dentist, his mother, Antoinette, a schoolteacher. Raised in Washington, he took his first piano lesson at the age of seven ? then a jazz-loving uncle introduced him to the music of Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson.
He went on to study music at Virginia State College (now University), in Petersburg, playing professionally in the evenings and graduating in 1942. By 1944, he was active in the New York clubs, working with the saxophonist Ben Webster and the bop trumpet pioneer Dizzy Gillespie, and in the next two years he freelanced extensively, including work with the violinist Stuff Smith and a European tour with the composer/arranger Don Redman.
In the early 50s, he played Latin jazz with the bandleader Machito, led a backing band for the clarinettist Artie Shaw, and played alongside the bassist Charles Mingus, the drummer Art Blakey and others, in the Birdland house trio. During that period, he worked with the biggest names in bebop, including Charlie Parker, Gillespie, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan.
But the proselytising Taylor wanted access to levers of cultural power rarely available to jazz artists in the 1950s. He wrote a series of piano primers, began lecturing, wrote articles for DownBeat and Saturday Review, and delivered a long series of piano-illustrated jazz lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He programmed the NBC TV show The Subject Is Jazz from 1958 and in 1965 launched Jazzmobile to bring the music directly to a young black audience increasingly indifferent to jazz.
Taylor and the lyricist Dick Dallas also wrote a seminal song for the civil rights movement, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, debuted by Nina Simone in 1967. Taylor was to write more than 300 compositions, ranging from that song to ensemble pieces such as Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra (1973).
He was host of the Jazz Alive radio show throughout the 1970s, and of Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center in the 90s ? shows with an informal mix of erudition and populism. From 1980 he was active in a campaign for greater jazz support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and won one of its prizes, a Jazz Masters, in 1988. He was a cultural representative for the US in the Soviet Union in 1987-88, and founded his own record label, Taylor Made.
Many Taylor sessions are unavailable, but his drive and lyricism at the keyboard received wider recognition in the 1990s with a sparky series of recordings, including a vivacious bebop get-together with Mulligan on Live at MCG (1993). In 1994 his career was celebrated at Carnegie Hall, New York, in Billy Taylor: My First 50 Years in Jazz. For his 75th year in 1996, he played a solo session on Ten Fingers ? One Voice.
Taylor is survived by his wife, Theodora, and his daughter, Kim. A son, Duane, died in 1988.
? William Edward Taylor, jazz pianist and educator, born 24 July 1921; died 28 December 2010
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/dec/30/billy-taylor-obituary
Josie Maran Leighton Meester Dominique Swain Jamie Chung Alicia Witt
No comments:
Post a Comment