Billy Taylor in Ithaca

Arts feature:
profiling jazz pianist and educator Billy Taylor
Ithaca Times
September 12, 2007
774 words

"Playing Strong"

full text here

Playing strong
By: Mark Tedeschi
09/12/2007

"I'm retired now," jazz pianist and educator Billy Taylor says. "I used to tour 50 weeks a year. I'm taking it easy. I still travel, but not as much."

He's earned a breather; after 350 original songs, 23 honorary doctoral degrees, two Peabody awards, an Emmy, a Grammy, and an appointment to the National Council of the Arts, any musician would be eager to settle down.

Relative to the busy schedule he's had for much of his life, Taylor has slowed - but his activity in the world of music performance and education is far from complete. He teaches in the summer at the University of Massachusetts, writes original compositions, and, on a regular basis, lectures and performs all around the country. Not bad for an 86-year-old.

This weekend, Taylor will be visiting the Whalen Center at Ithaca College for two nights: On Friday at 4:30pm in the Hockett Family Recital Hall, he'll coach Ithaca College student jazz ensembles; on Saturday at 8:15pm in Ford Hall, he'll host "An Evening With Dr. Billy Taylor," which will include a demonstration, a lecture, and a solo performance. Both shows are free and open to the public.

Taylor has been the Artistic Advisor for Jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the past 13 years, and he says there are actually many performers out there who are around his age. "We had quite a few of them as guests for special presentations last spring, and I'm so proud," he says. "Some people don't get the kind of attention they should."

With a professional career spanning over 60 years, Taylor knows he's been very fortunate to have worked with so many significant figures in jazz history. He produces a few names as if pulling them out of a hat, while granting them equal respect: Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus. In the 1980s, Taylor was the arts correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, where on every show he used to have "at least four or five interviews with people who were into different kinds of jazz."

Though he thinks as a whole "we decided as a country to put [jazz] on the side," Taylor remains optimistic. "People come from other places because they recognize the quality of the music, and they play it with their own unique accents." The variety of contemporary jazz encourages Taylor to continue educating people. "So many don't realize that jazz is America's classical music. It speaks very eloquently about freedom." Musicians visit the U.S. from all over the world, he says, because they heard a form of music they wanted to get closer to.

Technology has afforded the world an even greater opportunity for that kind of exposure. Just look at Taylor's website, www.billytaylorjazz.com, which is filled with videos, audio clips, interviews, biographies, and a wealth of other information. "It could get expensive to go through the process of having to buy a record or see a performer live," he says. "[This kind of] technology allows it more easily."

Two of the Kennedy Center events that Taylor is especially proud of are the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, a showcase of "the world's most acclaimed female jazz artists," and Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead, a residency program for young people who want to study jazz performance and composition. Taylor's enthusiasm for these annual programs indicates his everlasting drive to edify as many people as possible on the dynamic potential of jazz music.

Taylor's appearance this weekend is part of Ithaca College's Enduring Masters series, a collaboration between the School of Music and the Gerentology Institute. "I'm delighted [Ithaca] is doing things like that," he says of the series. "The media now is so pop-oriented and hip-oriented. Look at the TV show American Idol. [Some of my students] can sing better than those contestants. It's ridiculous that [the producers] have made such an arbitrary decision of what we're supposed to listen to. It gives people the wrong idea of what American music is about."

He has performed in Ithaca before: "We used to bring the jazzmobile out there...it was always fun," he says. Taylor applauds the city's offering of exciting music that, he says, doesn't garner as much attention as it should. "One of the reasons I do this kind of [Enduring Masters] concert is that you can hear so much more from a live performance than you would from a record or on television," he says. "To be in the same room with someone and see what they do is a dimension that too often is missing in music."

More information on the Enduring Masters series is available at www.ithaca.edu/enduringmasters.