My Friend, Dr. Billy Taylor
Summer is upon us. Time for a few blasts from the past.
Here’s one about an old friend. Dr. Billy Taylor.
My late friend and colleague, pianist Billy Taylor, or Dr. Billy Taylor as he liked to be referred to, always had that grin, the kind that made you feel like he knew something you didn’t—and he usually did. He wasn’t just a pianist or composer or educator; Billy was an evangelist for jazz, a proselytizer for its spiritual depth. He’d sit there, in a sharp suit that whispered taste without screaming money, and tell anyone who’d listen: Beethoven and Mozart? Sure, they’re European classical music. But Armstrong and Bird? They’re American classical music.
It wasn’t just a hot take. It was Billy’s gospel, his hill to die on. He argued it at cocktail parties where the wine tasted too dry and the company too smug. He laid it out on stage, in interviews, and over drinks with people who thought jazz was just something you heard in Woody Allen movies. He stood by it until he died, defying critics and the clutches of polite academia.
The idea that Louis Armstrong blowing his trumpet and Charlie Parker breaking the sound barrier with his sax belonged in the same sentence as the powdered wigs of Vienna made some people furious. Classical music, in their eyes, was European—a lineage of Bach to Brahms, with no room for syncopation or improvisation. Billy thought they were full of it. For him, jazz wasn’t just music; it was an American art form with a pedigree, a craft honed in the smoky clubs of New Orleans and New York, a testament to the ingenuity and resilience of Black musicians who turned the ugliness of oppression into beauty.
And maybe that’s why it rattled so many. Calling jazz American classical made people confront things they didn’t want to think about—race, appropriation, the fact that the supposed “high art” of America wasn’t crafted by the elite but by outsiders and rebels. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t safe. But Billy wasn’t interested in safe.
He’d point out that Mozart and Beethoven had rules to break, boundaries to push. Jazz, he said, had the same. Listen to the structure of a big band arrangement, the call-and-response, the tension-and-release. It was all there, just like in symphonies and concertos. The difference was that jazz invited chaos into the room. Jazz dared to let things fall apart and then stitched them back together, better than before.
Billy didn’t want to erase Beethoven. He loved Beethoven. He played Beethoven. But he saw Armstrong and Parker as his contemporaries in genius, not his successors. To him, the music was just as rigorous, just as expressive, and just as timeless. The fact that it came from America’s underbelly—the places society ignored or feared—only made it more profound.
And now? Now, we live in a world where you can hear Beethoven in a car commercial and Armstrong in an algorithmically curated playlist called Dinner Party Vibes. The lines have blurred, but Billy’s assertion still stings. Calling jazz American classical music forces you to look at the context, at the way America commodifies its art but rarely venerates it, at how Black culture is so often mined but not canonized. It demands you wrestle with what art is worth and who gets to decide.
Billy got serious about jazz early. His Uncle Robert handed him records of Fats Waller and Art Tatum, and his piano teacher drilled him on the basics: Make me feel something, she’d say. By high school, he was jamming at Dunbar High in DC, where Duke Ellington’s former teacher, Henry Grant, let Billy and friends like Frank Wess riff in the music room during lunch. Segregation may have closed many doors, but Billy found his way through, cobbling a musical education from formal lessons, street wisdom, and pure grit.
In 1944, Billy landed in Harlem and walked straight into Minton’s Playhouse, the epicenter of bebop, where he joined Ben Webster’s band. By the next week, he was splitting gigs with Art Tatum at the Three Deuces. Tatum, a giant among giants, took Billy under his wing, mentoring him over late-night jam sessions and cab rides across the city.
Billy didn’t just absorb the music—he expanded its reach. In the 1950s, he authored the first instructional book on bebop piano. By the ’60s, he was on radio and TV, hosting The Subject Is Jazz, the first national television series on jazz, and giving America a crash course on the genre’s depth. He co-founded Jazzmobile, a groundbreaking program that brought live jazz to underserved neighborhoods, proving the music didn’t belong in stuffy concert halls but on the streets, where it was born.
Through it all, Billy Taylor stayed prolific. As a performer, he played with everyone: Coltrane, Dizzy, Billie Holiday. As a broadcaster, he profiled over 100 artists for CBS’s Sunday Morning, winning an Emmy along the way. That’s where I came into the picture. I was Billy’s producer on many of those Sunday Morning profiles.
Billy Taylor died on December 28, 2010, at 89, leaving behind a wife, a daughter, and a jazz community that regarded him as family. To the end, he championed jazz not as an artifact of a bygone era but as a living, breathing testament to the creativity and resilience of its people.
Thanks for reading. See you soon.