Billy Taylor Jazz Music World

Pianist, composer, teacher and lecturer, television and radio personality, recording artist and author…Billy Taylor is all of these.

For more than six decades, Dr. Billy Taylor’s enthusiastic and personal commitment to make jazz a part of the American mainstream have been rewarded by recognition and acclaim by his peers, critics, educators, students, enthusiastic listeners, and five US presidents.

Billy Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina on July 24, 1921. His father was a dentist and his mother a schoolteacher and they encouraged their son’s creativity. After the family moved to Washington, D.C., for a more cosmopolitan life, he began studying music with Elmira Streets. Billy experimented with drums, guitar and saxophone but soon settled on classical piano study.

The big bands provided much of the musical excitement in Billy’s life during his teenage years. There was music all around him: on the radio, at parties, and at D.C.’s Howard Theatre, where he became an enthusiastic regular. One of the theater’s most enduring qualities was its cultivating of a young art form known as jazz. As jazz expanded and new artists came to the forefront, the Howard, listening to live broadcasts on the radio and hearing music locally, proved vital in showcasing the plethora of black talents to Billy Taylor.

At the same time, Billy seriously pursued his studies and graduated from Virginia State College with a B.S. in Music in 1942.

After taking a couple of years off for more practice and study, Billy Taylor arrived in New York City in 1944, on a Friday evening quickly made his way to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. The club, bebop’s birthplace, was the setting for the hottest jam session in town. When Billy played the piano that night at Minton’s, fate intervened. One of his idols, Ben Webster, was part of the jam session, and he stood by the piano while Billy played. Ben was one of Billy’s idols when he was considering becoming a tenor player.

 

Ben invited Billy to audition for his group at the Three Deuces and two days later, the young pianist began his professional career with Webster’s quartet (which also included drummer Big Sid Catlett and bassist Charlie Drayton) at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, alternating sets with the Art Tatum Trio. Billy’s admiration and respect for Tatum touched the Piano Master and the young man soon became Tatum’s protégé.

Billy also began his recording career at the same time, in a trio with Al Hall and Jimmy Crawford for Savoy.

 

When Dizzy Gillespie first opened on 52nd Street, with a band that featured Don Byas, Max Roach and Oscar Pettiford, he didn’t have a pianist. So although Billy was working another gig across the street, he sat in with Dizzy between sets. Billy remembers that “Bud Powell was supposed to be Dizzy’s pianist but Bud’s guardian, trumpeter Cootie Williams, was concerned about the under-age musician running around 52nd Street, so he wouldn’t let him work the gig, which was lucky for me because I got to play with Dizzy.”

 

As word quickly spread of Billy’s keyboard acumen, he began working steadily, with Machito’s Afro-Cuban ensemble, Eddie South, Coleman Hawkins, Wilbur de Paris, Roy Eldridge and Jo Jones, his “self appointed guardian.”

 

He played in the pit band for “Blue Holiday,” starring Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams and the Katherine Dunham dancers, and then served as the featured piano soloist in Don Redman all-star orchestra, the first American band to tour Europe after World War II. When he returned, he opened for Billie Holiday in “Holiday on Broadway,” in a piano-organ duo with Bob Wyatt, and he worked with Cozy Cole’s quintet (who replaced the Benny Goodman Sextet) in Billy Rose’s Broadway show, The Seven Lively Arts.

 

After replacing Erroll Garner in the Slam Stewart Trio, he played Café Society Uptown and Downtown and the Iceland restaurant with Artie Shaw. And during this period, the late 40s and 50s, Billy began playing lot of solo gigs up and down the northeast corridor: The Earle Theater in Philadelphia, The Royal Theater in Baltimore, the Howard Theater in D.C. and the Apollo in New York.

In 1949 he got a call to sub for Al Haig with Charlie Parker and Strings at Birdland. This was the beginning of his two-year stint as house pianist at that legendary jazz club, an unbroken continuum as soloist with all-star groups which included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gilespie, Miles Davis, Kai Winding, Jo Jones, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Milt Jackson, Art Blakey, Terry Gibbs and almost all of the other top flight jazzmen who played that famous emporium. Often playing opposite such bands as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Stan Kenton and Lennie Tristano, his tenure at Birdland was one of Taylor’s greatest learning experiences.

As leader of his own trio he also established records for long engagements at the Embers, the London House, the Hickory House, the Composer and Club Le Downbeat, where he introduced Latin percussionist Candido to the jazz world. It came as no surprise when Billy Taylor won the first International Critics Award for Best Pianist by Downbeat magazine.

Billy began recording with his own group during the early 1950’s for such labels as Prestige, Riverside, ABC Paramount, Impulse!, Sesac, Mercury and Capitol Records. He also recorded albums with Quincy Jones, Sy Oliver, Mundell Lowe, Neal Hefti, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Sonny Stitt, Lucky Thompson, Coleman Hawkins and Dinah Washington. And because he was writing so prolifically, he started his own music publishing company, Duane Music, Inc.

Having firmly established himself as important musician, Billy began writing about jazz and giving lectures/clinics to music teachers interested in teaching jazz. He began to witness first-hand, the serious lack of funding for the arts and humanities and began to focus on radio and television in order to gain better exposure for America’s classical music. Billy helped to facilitate many local and national broadcasts featuring jazz artists in live performances. Some in broadcast studios, others in nightclubs, dance halls, and hotels.

In 1958 he was named Musical Director of the first television series ever produced about jazz, The Subject Is Jazz, broadcast Saturday afternoon on NBC.. His house band for these thirteen programs included Eddie Safranski, Doc Severinsen, Tony Scott, Jimmy Cleveland, Mundell Lowe, Earl May, Eddie Safranski, Ed Thigpen and Osie Johnson. Guests included none other than Willie The Lion Smith, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Jimmy Rushing, Bill Evans and Aaron Copeland.

Billy remembers having lunch with Copeland: “We were talking about improvisation and he asked if we ever played music with no predetermined melody, harmony or rhythm and how he’d like to hear it if we could. So we did that on the show, playing what was, and probably still is, the most far out music ever heard on television.”

During the 1960’s, Billy was working regularly with his trio and hosting his own daily radio show on New York’s WLIB. He was making guest shots on various TV shows and recording for Capitol Records. His success on WLIB led to a post at the popular New York radio station, WNEW, where he began playing jazz for their affluent middle-of-the-road audience. He continued to perform as well during this period, usually with his trio and sometimes with larger ensembles. At the same time, in 1964, Billy Taylor made a major contribution to bringing Jazz back to the community when he founded, with Daphne Arnstein, Jazzmobile, a unique outreach organization which produces summer outdoor concerts, conducts workshops and clinics; sponsors lectures/demonstrations and artists residencies in public schools; and develops special programs for disadvantaged youth in inner cities.

When Billy Taylor founded Jazzmobile with the goal of bringing jazz to the streets of Harlem, it was an untried concept. Since 1964, literally hundreds of jazz greats such as Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Buddy Rich, Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gilespie and Milt Jackson have made an important contribution to Jazzmobile by performing the free outdoor concerts which are now enjoyed by thousands people each season.

 

Billy proudly remembers Duke Ellington’s Jazzmobile appearance, in 1971: “People didn’t believe he would come uptown, but he brought the whole band, and I don’t know who was more excited, the audience, or Duke. He loved playing for the people of Harlem, and they loved him, madly.”

The program has since been extended through the five boroughs of New York and to other cities as well, including Washington, Pittsburgh and Hartford..

Year round, this unique outreach organization offers an arts education enrichment program in music, dance, drama and poetry; jazz workshops for students over 16 taught by professional jazzmen; public school lectures and demonstrations. All Jazzmobile activities are free, with both public and private funding.

In the early 1970’s, Taylor was named Musical Director for the popular daily television program, The David Frost Show. Many feel he had the best jazz band on TV at that time, which included Frank Wess, Bob Cranshaw and Bobby Thomas. They played an hour jazz concert every night for the studio audience, and at least twice a week, Frost booked guests like Louis Armstrong, Mel Torme, Tony Bennett, Pearl Baily, Count Basie, or Buddy Rich to play and be interviewed. The band made two recordings before the show came to an end three and a half years later.

Billy Taylor then returned to WLIB, this time as a broadcaster and the program director of the station and began to build the largest jazz audience in New York City while also hosting a popular local television program on New York’s Channel 47. By now, on television and on the radio, Billy Taylor was synonymous with Jazz.

Never one to rest on his previous accomplishments, and clearly a man driven by the need to keep growing, Billy took Teddy Wilson’s recommendation and Billy began piano studies with Richard McClanahan in the late 40s, continuing for many years. In 1975, his dissertation on “The History and Development of Jazz Piano, A New Perspective for Music Teachers,” earned him a combined Masters and Doctorate in Education from the University of Massachusetts. Billy has also been a Yale University Duke Ellington Fellow, and Yale Fellow at Calhoun College.

He has since received twenty two honorary doctorate degrees including Humanities degrees from Fairfield University, Carlton College, University of Massachusetts, Clark College and Bank Street College and Honorary Doctorates in Music from St. Johns University, Berklee College of Music, University of Minnesota, University of Michigan-Flint, George Washington University, and from Virginia State University, his father’s alma mater.

Billy Taylor has strived to maintain a balance between the performance and educational aspects of his career. In the midst of his performing peregrinations, he has been an adjunct professor at C. W. Post College in New York and a visiting professor at Howard University. And every summer, he leads the Jazz in July program at the University of Massachusetts, where he is the Wilmer D. Barrett Professor of Music.

He was appointed to the National Council for the Arts by President Nixon in 1970, and although this was a tremendous honor, the amount of time required to be an effective arts advocate took precious time away from practicing his music. Nonetheless, he tackled the task at hand, alongside his distinguished colleagues, Maurice Abravenel, Eudora Welty, Beverly Sills, and Nancy Hanks, who were doing so much to help make the arts available to everyone. It was a highly productive and rewarding period for Taylor.

All the while, Billy Taylor continued his work in broadcasting, as Musical Director for Tony Brown’s Black Journal Tonight (PBS); and from 1977-1982, as host of NPR’s most listened to jazz program of its time, “Jazz Alive.”

By the end of the 1970’s he was touring with his trio more than ever, but playing fewer and fewer jazz clubs, which had become crowded, overpriced and excluded young people. Realizing the need to bring his music to a broader audience, Billy Taylor began to focus more on performing in larger venues such as concert halls and performing arts centers, which were a welcome change. In the early 1980’s, Taylor was tapped by Charles Kuralt to become arts correspondent for the popular television program, CBS Sunday Morning. During his twenty year plus tenure, he has profiled over 250 well-known and not-so-well-known members of the jazz community (he received an Emmy Award for his profile on Quincy Jones).

It was during this time that Billy also decided to start his own record company, Taylor Made, but after producing five albums, he realized that it was the music he wanted to be involved in, not the business. He continued his work as a performer both on the bandstand and on television & radio as well.

He hosted his own jazz piano show for Bravo, Jazz Counterpoint, which featured such artists as George Shearing, Marian McPartland and Ramsey Lewis, along with two different NPR radio series, “Dizzy’s Diamond.” and “Taylor Made Piano,” which traced the history of jazz using the piano to tell the story.

Based upon Dr. Taylor’s book, Jazz Piano, Taylor Made Piano won a Peabody Award and generated more requests for tapes than any previous NPR program. As the 80’s drew to a close, Billy Taylor signed with GRP/Impulse, making some of his most popular recordings, including the re-release of My Fair Lady Loves Jazz (arranged by Quincy Jones), It’s A Matter of Pride, Dr. T (featuring Gerry Mulligan) and Homage (featuring the Turtle Island String Quartet) which received a Grammy nomination in 1996.

During the 90’s Dr. Billy Taylor was named Artistic Advisor for Jazz to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Since 1994, under the umbrella of Jazz at the Kennedy Center, Taylor has developed one acclaimed concert series after another including the Art Tatum Pianorama, the Louis Armstrong Legacy series, the annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, Beyond Category, Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead and the Jazz Ambassadors Program.

His nationally broadcast NPR series, “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center” featured a mix of performances, audience Q & A, and conversations with musical guests. Billy pioneered the “play a little, talk a little format” in the early 80’s, with his “Jazz Models & Mentors” series, presented four times a year at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taylor performs regularly with his Trio, featuring bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Winard Harper.

To date, Billy Taylor has over 350 songs to his credit, including the popular, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free, which has been recorded by various artists and served as an anthem for the civil rights movement, as well as the music for a recent Coca-Cola commerical. Billy’s compositions express his eclectic viewpoint and are modern and melodic, utilizing blues, early American folk themes and spirituals.

Some of his best known works integrate jazz and symphony orchestra. Peaceful Warrior, dedicated to Martin Luther King, was commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony and its premiere featured the Billy Taylor trio and a choir of a hundred voices. Taylor’s six movement suite, Let Us Make a Joyful Noise a jazz worship service, was originally commissioned by Tufts University. The piece, premiered by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, was inspired by the 97th psalm and is in the tradition of Ellington Sacred Concerts. His Suite ForJazz Piano and Orchestra, was commissioned by Maurice Abravenal and was premiered, with Taylor at the piano, in Mormon Tabernacle. Conversations, comissioned by the Ronoake Symphony Orchestra, featured Billy’s Trio and violinist Joe Kennedy. Homage was written for, and performed with the Juilliard String Quartet

Impromptu, an earlier work that featured soloist Gerry Mulligan, often appears on Billy’s symphonic programs. For Rachel, a dance suite, was collaborative effort with choreographer Rachel Lampert, and was commissioned by the University of New Hampshire. He also composed the musical score and lyrics for an off-Broadway production of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and The Jewel, and some dance music for the original production of Your Arms Are Too Short To Box With God.

Now in his 80s, Billy Taylor remains vigorously dedicated to nurturing jazz and creating new forums and opportunities for the artists who perform it. He encompasses that rare combination of creativity, intelligence, vision, commitment and leadership, all qualities that make him one of our most cherished national treasures.

One measure of his success was the award of the 1988 Jazz Masters Fellowship, from the national Endowment for the Arts. This is presented to jazz masters whose careers have made a significant contribution to the art form in the African-American tradition and whose influence has been felt throughout the world, especially by young artists.

This sentiment was reiterated by the editors of Downbeat magazine who presented Dr. Billy Taylor with their Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984. Billy was cited for “striving to better the plight of jazz musicians everywhere, for helping to enlarge the audience for jazz and to educate that audience. And in 1988, Billy was named an NEA Jazz Master, along with Art Blakey and Lionel Hampton. Since then, the NEA has elevated its Jazz Masters Awards to be on a par with the Pulitzer Prize as the highest award our nation can bestow for someone in Jazz.

Between concert dates, television, and radio engagements, writing music and lecturing, Billy finds time to enjoy his family. He has been married to Teddi since 1946. Their son, Duane, an artist, passed away in 1988. Their daughter Kim, and her husband Anthony, are Professors of Law at New York University.

With Dexter Gordon and
high school classmate Frank Wess
at the Public Theatre, New York.

With pianist/composer Roberta Piket and drummer Sylvia Cuenca - 1998 Kennedy Center Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival
Photo by Jeffrey Kliman

   “When Billy was appointed by
President Nixon to the National
Counsel on the Arts, he had power
in the upper level of the arts. When
there were meetings, if there wasn’t
a Billy Taylor there, nobody would
even mention the word J-A-Z-Z.
It just didn’t exist.”
  Jimmy Owens
Trumpeter/Educator