AUGUST 2013 downbeat 91

musician, teacher billy taylor exemplified classThe ebullient pianist, composer, educator and author Dr. Billy Taylor almost single-handedly made jazz a thriving educational discipline, and presented it in the media with clarity and dignityall of which comes across in the pages of The Jazz life of dr. billy Taylor (indiana university Press). The North-Carolina-born, Washington, D.C.,-bred Taylor was a poetic and propulsive musician who recorded more than 60 recordings as a leader, who, before the term multi-tasking was invented, launched groundbreaking, pioneering parallel careers as an Emmy and Peabody winning radio broadcaster, variety show musical director and TV correspondent. He was also an acclaimed author of nine books, in-cluding Billy Taylors Taylor Made Piano, and was a tireless spokesman, who coined the phrase jazz is Americas classical music. This concise and com-pelling autobiography was co-written with Teresa Reed, director of the School of Music at the Uni-versity of Tulsa. She began working with Taylor in 2006 and continued her work after his passing in 2010 at 89.

The most illuminating passages deal with Taylors early life. Those looking for a clichd, dark ghetto tale of black poverty and suffering in Taylors reminiscences of growing up in the nations capital in the 1920s and 30s will not find it here. Instead, Taylorthe son of a dentist and homemakerproudly describes the D.C. mid-dle-class enclave he grew up in that produced a segregated yet thriving African-American busi-nesses, art venues, and role models in an age where there was an equally significant artistic and cultural movement among our people that echoed the well-known achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. That refinement was evi-dent in Taylors Dunbar High School, one of the greatest black high schools in the country, which boasted teachers like historian Carter G. Wood-son and Taylors piano teacher Henry Grant, who encouraged Taylor to listen to Debussy etudes and [former pupil] Duke Ellington together so we could compare the similarities between their use of harmony.

Teachers and mentors occupy a special place in Taylors heart, from his piano-playing Uncle Bob to Undine Smith Moore, the classical pianist/composer who urged Taylor to drop his sociology major at Virginia State to music. He graduated in 1942, and headed to New York a year later. There he jammed at Mintons Playhouse, secured sev-eral prestige-building gigs with Eddie South, Don

Redman, Ben Webster and Cozy Cole, and be-came the house pianist at Birdland from 1949 to 1951. It was during this period that Taylor penned his first book, Billy Taylors Basic Bebop Instruc-tion, where jazz education entered his life, which also included his wife, Theodora, and later his children Duane and Kim. Those early opportuni-ties to speak and write about jazz foreshadowed things to come, he writes.

In the ensuing decades, Taylor would record a number of excellent recordings, including My Fair Lady Loves Jazz and Its A Matter Of Pride and even penned a soul-jazz standard, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free. His profile as an educator and broadcaster also grew, as evidenced by his history-making stints as a disk jockey and program director on New Yorks WNEW and WLIB radio stations. He also gave back as an educator through his role in co-creating Jazzmobile, the Harlem-based mobile performance venue that provided free jazz concerts and lessons to inner city youth. Taylor broke ground as musical direc-tor of The David Frost Show, being the first Af-rican-American in that position, hosted National Public Radios Jazz Alive, and served as a cultural correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning.

Though Taylor, who earned his doctoral de-gree at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1975, approached his role as jazz educator, am-bassador and spokesman with verve, the book makes clear that his pianism, an astonishing, tech-nically impressive amalgam that spans all of the eras of jazz, was overlooked as a result. Still, Taylor did not mind so muchas he writes, At the time, I knew that my involvement in these various efforts took away the precious hours that I would have liked to spend writing songs and playing the pia-no. Looking back, however, I have no regrets. DBordering info: iupress.indiana.edu

books / By euGene holley Jr.

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