Hayes School of Music

Born Ferdinand LaMothe to Creole parents in New Orleans, “Jelly Roll” Morton possessed a unique musical gift, both as a virtuoso pianist and prolific composer. His last name was adopted by him based on his step father’s. Toward the end of his life, many of his compositions would be recorded by the pioneering chronicler of American Roots music, Alan Lomax. Morton possessed an outsize personality, even bragging to anyone who would listen that he “invented jazz.” Despite the extravagance of that claim, Morton did figure prominently at the traditional birthplace of jazz, Storyville, that famous New Orleans district of speakeasies, bordellos, Creole culture and music. In addition to dazzling compositions for the piano, Morton also recorded extensively with his band, The Chili Peppers. His rather peripatetic existence brought  him to stints in California, Chicago, Washington DC and finally, New York City, where he struggled to make ends meet, despite his considerable reputation and boundless energy. Whether he “invented” jazz or not,  there is hardly a figure in that genre who has been the subject of more scholarly research than the composer of King Porter Stomp, Jelly Roll Morton. 

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson lived a remarkable and varied life as a composing and performing musician. Like many black musicians coming of age in the 1940s and 50s, his family divided their time between the south (North Carolina) and larger cities in the north. Perkinson’s musical life began as a boy soprano in New York City, a member of Robert Craft’s choir dedicated to the performance and recording of the music of Igor Stravinsky. This very challenging start to his musical life conditioned the composer for a life of struggle and accomplishment. Both a jazz musician and a serious classical composer, Perkinson studied conducting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, returning to New York to compose and conduct as well as sit in at the piano in some of Greenwich Village’s most lively jazz clubs. Years in California followed, where he scored for both movies and television. Throughout a busy life, the composer produced a robust catalog of disciplined and powerfully-felt instrumental and vocal compositions. Here, the struggle and dynamism of the 1960s racial justice movement comes through in the music, which by turns can both thunder and lament, using the Negro Spiritual as source material.

Pianist, composer, and recording artist Billy Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina in 1921, to a dentist father and schoolteacher mother. Taylor moved to New York City in 1944, eventually becoming the house pianist at the legendary Birdland jazz club, where played alongside musical greats such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. Taylor continued on in the New York circuits, until the 1950s, when he began to lead and record with his own trio. Taylor entered the realm of television in the 1970s, when he took on the role of musical director for The David Frost Show. He was also the musical director for Tony Brown’s Black Journal Tonight, and hosted his own jazz piano show on the Bravo network called Jazz Counterpoint. Taylor hosted a variety of radio both locally in New York, and syndicated nationally by National Public Radio, including CBS Sunday Morning in the early 1980s.

Recipient of numerous awards and appointments throughout his career, Taylor became one of only three jazz musicians at the time to be appointed to the National Council of the Arts. In addition to serving on the National Council of the Arts, Taylor was also appointed the artistic advisor on jazz for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he developed a run of widely acclaimed series, including the Louis Armstrong Legacy series, and the annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival.For his performances and professional activities, Taylor received two Peabody Awards; an Emmy; a Grammy; and a place in the Hall of Fame for the International Association of Jazz Educators. Taylor graduated from Virginia State College in 1942 with his B.A. degree in Music. He received his Masters and Doctorate degrees in Music Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and went on to serve as the Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale University. Subsequent to these academic achievements, Taylor received several honorary doctoral degrees over the course of his career. Taylor passed away on December 28, 2010. (Source: blackpast.org)

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” (source: Poetry Foundation)