The Artist as Institution Builder in Harlem
The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music’s most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field. In all of the obituaries published on the occasion of his passing a little over a week ago, I was surprised to not read more about his role as the founder of the Jazz Mobile Workshop, since that was how I came to know Dr. Taylor. Much has justly been written about his founding of the Jazz Mobile touring music program in the early 1960s. He developed this program in order to take jazz music directly into the community by way of a mobile stage which was attached to a truck. In a different context it might have been used as a parade float. Here it was used as a vehicle to bring free music of the highest quality into those communities who might be least exposed to it (given the decline of jazz as a popular music) and least able to afford it (given that the music was now largely played in clubs). During the summer the roving stage is set up in conspicuously public locations such as parks, and name musicians perform. It was a brilliant idea and one that persists to this day. It exists because of Dr. Billy Taylor.
But oddly, little if anything has been written about the Jazz Mobile Workshop, the free music education program that Taylor founded in 1969 as one of the organization’s programs to continue perpetuating jazz music. Located in Harlem in Intermediate School 201 on West 127th Street, just off of Park Avenue, the Workshop provided free instrumental instruction on Saturday afternoon for any and all. Taylor had appointed the bassist Paul West as executive director. I first heard about the Workshop from a trumpet playing friend in my Queens, NY neighborhood, Phil Clark. Queens at that time seemed populated by a wealth of musicians, young and old, the benefit some have said of having basements and backyards to practice in, given that we all lived in houses, not apartments. Phil was one of those teenage musicians who took to showing up at the band rehearsals we used to have in first my parents living room then their basement. I’m not sure if one of the other band member knew him or if he heard us playing from out on the sidewalk (the whole neighborhood apparently could hear us), but Phil took to hanging around. I suspect he wanted to be asked to join the band, but bands are formed around compatible personalities as much as shared musical interests and skills, so Phil became a perennial hanger on. Besides, we already had a strong trumpet player in our band. To his credit however Phil mentioned to me one day that he was taking classes with Lee Morgan, the well known trumpeter. He was taking these classes, he said, free of charge on Saturdays at the Jazz Mobile Workshop in Harlem, NY.
Taking Phil up on an invitation to accompany him to the Jazz Mobile one Saturday afternoon shortly after, I was pleasantly astounded at what I found. Peering into one classroom door in Harlem’s I.S. 201 public school building I recognized bassist Richard Davis. In another classroom I spotted saxophonist Jimmy Heath. And in still another I spied guitarist Ted Dunbar. I was a serious enough young scholar of the music by that point that I had seen all of these guys in performance, and heard them on recordings, so I knew they were the masters in the field. Continuing on I located the classroom for drum set instruction and entered the room. The teacher there in the introductory/intermediate drumming class was none other than Albert “Tootie” Heath. After several months in Heath’s class I was promoted to Freddie Wait’s advanced class after impressing Heath with a particularly fluid interpretation of a passage he had us all perform. Wait’s prodigious classroom demonstrations both inspired me while, at the same time, convincing me that I had a very long way to go indeed if I was to make music my life’s work…which I ultimately chose not to do, though I continued to play professionally in a number of bands for a few years. Dr. Taylor himself would visit the Workshop periodically. I had my most memorable experience with him one afternoon in the Small Ensemble class. He gathered us drummers together and, with himself on piano and a young Howard “Locksmith” King on bass, told us we were going to practice “trading threes.” We each looked at each other quizzically. Most jazz musicians when they solo play four, eight or maybe twelve bars, often trading “fours,” that is soloing for four bars apiece back and forth. As such most musicians develop a repertoire of phrases they often resort to, which playing for an irregular three bars completely disrupts. By having us “trade threes” (soloing for three bars each instead of four) Taylor reminded us that true creativity and improvisation does not rely on habit. It was a lesson I never forgot.Other musicians assembled by Dr. Taylor to teach at the Workshop included such luminaries as Curtis Fuller, Ernie Wilkins, Sir Roland Hanna, and Joe Newman. All were following Taylor’s lead and making their knowledge available to yet another generation. All of this asignificant history, occurring in the pre-internet age, seemed to have escaped the notice of the many writers paying tribute to Dr. Taylor upon his passing. I would have expected former drummer turned cultural critic and gadfly Stanley Crouch to have taken note, but in his obituary in the New York Daily News Crouch spent an inordinate amount of time once again bashing hip hop and “ignorant” folks in general, while doing little to pass on the history himself. But Dr. Billy Taylor was that rare individual, a consummate artist who had the vision and the institutional savvy to create something that would outlast him and benefit seceding generations. For that we can all be grateful.
Posted by Dawoud Bey