Dr Billy Taylored. Teresa L Reed (Indiana University Press, £18)
What makes a jazz life? A large dollop of vice is essential, going by the bestselling jazz autobiographies. Miles Davis’s memoir presents a world where “shooting heroin, fucking around with whores, [and] borrowing money” nestle alongside the artistic genius found in jazz dives. Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog has swaggering accounts of the bassist’s sexual adventures. It includes a (probably fictional) career as a pimp.
The new autobiography by pianist and educator Billy Taylor, who died in 2010, suggests something very different. The book has been assembled by Teresa Reed, an academic at the University of Tulsa, from a series of interviews given in Taylor’s final years, and weaves a lucid narrative out of a remarkably varied career. As a pianist, Taylor’s breadth was formidable. His aesthetic was mostly bebop, but also embraced Latin, big band and gospel. He performed with everyone who was anyone, and his recordings stretch from the mid-1940s into the 21st century. His compositions include the civil rights anthem “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” made famous by Nina Simone and, in Britain, as the title music of the BBC’s Film Programme.
But Taylor was most important as an educator. Here, his breadth was truly forbidding. He was a teacher, lecturer, television presenter, radio broadcaster, media investor, event organiser and arts activist. Before Wynton Marsalis marched onto the stage, it was Taylor who stood as the most articulate, accessible, and accomplished spokesman for jazz in America. He insisted that jazz was not only an underground art fit for smoky bars. It was also “America’s classical music,” serious enough to be celebrated in concert halls. This conviction formed the heart of an alternative kind of jazz life.
Taylor began playing while growing up in 1930s Washington, DC, a member of the middle class black elite. Racial segregation structured much of his upbringing, and drilled him in “where to eat, where not to eat; where to sit, where not to sit.” Taylor also stresses that segregation created close communities in which an affinity for jazz could flourish under the guidance of teachers and uncles (and despite the disapproval of a father). Whatever you did, excellence was expected. Though there were other motivations too: young Bill enjoyed attractive girls sitting beside him on the piano stool. By 13 he was playing gigs and encountering “the seedier side of nightlife.”
A move to New York is central to many jazz autobiographies. Taylor made the pilgrimage in 1943 aged 21, and quickly established himself amongst bebop giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Tatum. Taylor’s stories from this period teeter on the edge – and sometimes succumb – to nostalgia, but they form the centre of his narrative. He is keen to emphasise that the paternalism of older musicians kept him away from seedy situations. The drummer Jo Jones, for instance, would introduce him around town, but with a proviso: “His name is Billy Taylor, and he can’t drink.” To reinforce this, Taylor details an early lapse into sloppy drunken playing. The humiliation before his elders was total, and the lesson obvious. “From that day, I vowed I’d never drink before playing.”
Taylor began recording seriously in the 1950s and broadcasting regularly in the 1960s. By the 1970s he was a major public figure, spending much of his time playing the part of jazz’s clean-cut ambassador. His hours behind the piano diminished. Curiously, though, Taylor’s narrative accelerates just when he began to exercise a major influence on the jazz world. He lists a number of educational achievements: a ground-breaking television series called The Subject Is Jazz, a community arts project called Jazzmobile, radio broadcasting and station operating and a jazz programme at the Kennedy Centre.
But the details are scant. Where are the accounts of ignorant questions from politicians he schmoozed? Or the frustrating meetings with badly informed arts administrators? Or the endless hours spent grinding corporate sponsorship out of the business establishment? Taylor begins to seem overly polite. Much institutional graft lay behind his ambassadorial and educational work, but here they do not appear to have been a struggle at all. The most glaring gaps concern his battles within the jazz community. The most he will say about unnamed critics of his corporation-courting is that they “were unable to match their disapproval with the funds we needed.”
If you caught him in an impatient mood, Taylor could find a bad word to say about those he disagreed with. In 1976 he told Len Lyons, a fellow pianist and jazz journalist, that he became a teacher “because Dizzy…and Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington refused to do it.” They tended to deflect inquiries about jazz with a grin, some bebop slang, or a sly witticism. (“What is jazz?” “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”) This infuriated Taylor. “I knew that these men knew intellectually what they were doing, but I read interview after interview where they came off sounding like idiots. The writers reported accurately what they were saying, but what they said was bullshit.” For Taylor, jazz education was made impossible by musicians who played into stock images of the jazz life. They might do this through impatience with ignorant journalists or from a need to sell records. But it suffocated attempts at education. It “gave people outside of the field reason to say that jazz cannot be analysed, it cannot be taught,” and the idea that jazz was a vice persisted.
A televised encounter with the conservative commentator William F. Buckley provides a brief window into this in Taylor’s final chapter. It was 1980 and Taylor was at the height of his public fame, but the stereotypes lingered. “Why can’t classical musicians ever have a drink before they play, but people who play jazz, like Art Tatum, for instance, seemed to have no difficulty drinking and playing?” Buckley demanded. “Is it because you’re always playing by ear, and under the circumstances, your fingers pretty much go where you want them to?” Jazz was just the instinctive ability to find the notes despite the inevitable inebriation. In his book Taylor attacks this “most ridiculous question,” but on air and under the lights he controlled himself. “I’m amazed that anyone can do that. I can’t. When I was young, I learned that if I drink and play, it goes straight to my fingers.”
For a moment we get inside the virtuosic performance that Taylor sustained throughout his career. We see his jazz life as a long and patient exercise in knowing what to say and what not to say, as a stylish and striking achievement. In a world where, as he put it in 1975, “racism, ignorance, paternalism, greed, prejudice and other non-musical elements” all shape what jazz means, Taylor promoted alternatives through education. Provocatively, his autobiography insists that this education is necessarily linked with grubbier realities like funding, institutional support, and advertising. “As musicians, we must do more than just play our instruments… It all starts with marketing, with keeping the public aware of jazz.” If the jazz life is made to be about “America’s classical music,” Taylor argues that the art can come first.
Yet the paradox of his book is that drugs and dens remain by far the most successful way to market jazz. Smoky dives and silhouetted saxophones sell things far better than classical music does. In the end, this is why The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor has been published between the firm boards of a university press hardback and not within the soft covers of a mass-market paperback.
What makes a jazz life? A large dollop of vice is essential, going by the bestselling jazz autobiographies. Miles Davis’s memoir presents a world where “shooting heroin, fucking around with whores, [and] borrowing money” nestle alongside the artistic genius found in jazz dives. Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog has swaggering accounts of the bassist’s sexual adventures. It includes a (probably fictional) career as a pimp.
The new autobiography by pianist and educator Billy Taylor, who died in 2010, suggests something very different. The book has been assembled by Teresa Reed, an academic at the University of Tulsa, from a series of interviews given in Taylor’s final years, and weaves a lucid narrative out of a remarkably varied career. As a pianist, Taylor’s breadth was formidable. His aesthetic was mostly bebop, but also embraced Latin, big band and gospel. He performed with everyone who was anyone, and his recordings stretch from the mid-1940s into the 21st century. His compositions include the civil rights anthem “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” made famous by Nina Simone and, in Britain, as the title music of the BBC’s Film Programme.
But Taylor was most important as an educator. Here, his breadth was truly forbidding. He was a teacher, lecturer, television presenter, radio broadcaster, media investor, event organiser and arts activist. Before Wynton Marsalis marched onto the stage, it was Taylor who stood as the most articulate, accessible, and accomplished spokesman for jazz in America. He insisted that jazz was not only an underground art fit for smoky bars. It was also “America’s classical music,” serious enough to be celebrated in concert halls. This conviction formed the heart of an alternative kind of jazz life.
Taylor began playing while growing up in 1930s Washington, DC, a member of the middle class black elite. Racial segregation structured much of his upbringing, and drilled him in “where to eat, where not to eat; where to sit, where not to sit.” Taylor also stresses that segregation created close communities in which an affinity for jazz could flourish under the guidance of teachers and uncles (and despite the disapproval of a father). Whatever you did, excellence was expected. Though there were other motivations too: young Bill enjoyed attractive girls sitting beside him on the piano stool. By 13 he was playing gigs and encountering “the seedier side of nightlife.”
A move to New York is central to many jazz autobiographies. Taylor made the pilgrimage in 1943 aged 21, and quickly established himself amongst bebop giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Tatum. Taylor’s stories from this period teeter on the edge – and sometimes succumb – to nostalgia, but they form the centre of his narrative. He is keen to emphasise that the paternalism of older musicians kept him away from seedy situations. The drummer Jo Jones, for instance, would introduce him around town, but with a proviso: “His name is Billy Taylor, and he can’t drink.” To reinforce this, Taylor details an early lapse into sloppy drunken playing. The humiliation before his elders was total, and the lesson obvious. “From that day, I vowed I’d never drink before playing.”
Taylor began recording seriously in the 1950s and broadcasting regularly in the 1960s. By the 1970s he was a major public figure, spending much of his time playing the part of jazz’s clean-cut ambassador. His hours behind the piano diminished. Curiously, though, Taylor’s narrative accelerates just when he began to exercise a major influence on the jazz world. He lists a number of educational achievements: a ground-breaking television series called The Subject Is Jazz, a community arts project called Jazzmobile, radio broadcasting and station operating and a jazz programme at the Kennedy Centre.
But the details are scant. Where are the accounts of ignorant questions from politicians he schmoozed? Or the frustrating meetings with badly informed arts administrators? Or the endless hours spent grinding corporate sponsorship out of the business establishment? Taylor begins to seem overly polite. Much institutional graft lay behind his ambassadorial and educational work, but here they do not appear to have been a struggle at all. The most glaring gaps concern his battles within the jazz community. The most he will say about unnamed critics of his corporation-courting is that they “were unable to match their disapproval with the funds we needed.”
If you caught him in an impatient mood, Taylor could find a bad word to say about those he disagreed with. In 1976 he told Len Lyons, a fellow pianist and jazz journalist, that he became a teacher “because Dizzy…and Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington refused to do it.” They tended to deflect inquiries about jazz with a grin, some bebop slang, or a sly witticism. (“What is jazz?” “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”) This infuriated Taylor. “I knew that these men knew intellectually what they were doing, but I read interview after interview where they came off sounding like idiots. The writers reported accurately what they were saying, but what they said was bullshit.” For Taylor, jazz education was made impossible by musicians who played into stock images of the jazz life. They might do this through impatience with ignorant journalists or from a need to sell records. But it suffocated attempts at education. It “gave people outside of the field reason to say that jazz cannot be analysed, it cannot be taught,” and the idea that jazz was a vice persisted.
A televised encounter with the conservative commentator William F. Buckley provides a brief window into this in Taylor’s final chapter. It was 1980 and Taylor was at the height of his public fame, but the stereotypes lingered. “Why can’t classical musicians ever have a drink before they play, but people who play jazz, like Art Tatum, for instance, seemed to have no difficulty drinking and playing?” Buckley demanded. “Is it because you’re always playing by ear, and under the circumstances, your fingers pretty much go where you want them to?” Jazz was just the instinctive ability to find the notes despite the inevitable inebriation. In his book Taylor attacks this “most ridiculous question,” but on air and under the lights he controlled himself. “I’m amazed that anyone can do that. I can’t. When I was young, I learned that if I drink and play, it goes straight to my fingers.”
For a moment we get inside the virtuosic performance that Taylor sustained throughout his career. We see his jazz life as a long and patient exercise in knowing what to say and what not to say, as a stylish and striking achievement. In a world where, as he put it in 1975, “racism, ignorance, paternalism, greed, prejudice and other non-musical elements” all shape what jazz means, Taylor promoted alternatives through education. Provocatively, his autobiography insists that this education is necessarily linked with grubbier realities like funding, institutional support, and advertising. “As musicians, we must do more than just play our instruments… It all starts with marketing, with keeping the public aware of jazz.” If the jazz life is made to be about “America’s classical music,” Taylor argues that the art can come first.
Yet the paradox of his book is that drugs and dens remain by far the most successful way to market jazz. Smoky dives and silhouetted saxophones sell things far better than classical music does. In the end, this is why The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor has been published between the firm boards of a university press hardback and not within the soft covers of a mass-market paperback.
