Billy Taylor - Jazz Great
On this day in 1921, Billy Taylor, an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator was born. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
A jazz activist, Taylor sat on the Honorary Founders Board of The Jazz Foundation of America, an organization he founded in 1989, with Ann Ruckert, Herb Storfer and Phoebe Jacobs, to save the homes and the lives of America's elderly jazz and blues musicians, later including musicians who survived Hurricane Katrina.
Taylor appeared on hundreds of albums and composed more than 300 songs during his career, which spanned over six decades. His 1963 song "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free", dealt with civil rights issues and became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It was selected as "one of the greatest songs of the sixties" by The New York Times and was the theme music of the BBC Film TV program and the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi.
Engaging and educating more audience and young people was a central part of Taylor's career. He was the Wilbur D. Barrett Chair of Music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale. Besides publishing instructional books on jazz, he taught jazz courses at Howard University, Long Island University, the Manhattan School of Music, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied under Roland Wiggins and earned his master's degree and EdD degree in Music Education in 1975.
His extensive appearance in television series and jazz educational programs brought the music he loved to the masses at the grassroots level as well as more formal arenas. He was sometimes better known as a television personality than a pianist. He was quoted in a 2007 article in the Post Magazine: "there's no question that being an advocate eclipses my reputation as a musician. It was my doing. I wanted to prove to people that jazz has an audience. I had to do that for me."
