“America's classical music” has been a prominent answer to the persistent question of what jazz is. It challenges the drugs-and-brothels imagery that has long lingered around the music, and it rejects, perhaps too confidently, the notion that jazz is essentially enigmatic. In 1984, the critic Grover Sales published Jazz: America's Classical Music, which portrayed a grand artistic heritage. Sales saw jazz as a “miraculous cathedral” for all Americans, which “served as a fulcrum to overturn centuries-old fears and misunderstandings between white and black America that poisoned our national life.”Footnote ¹ In this upbeat story, appealing narratives of art and nation subsumed sticky questions of race. Sales was not alone. From the mid-1980s, many critics and musicians presented affirmative, elevating, and tradition-conscious ideas of jazz, which were so conspicuous that it has become usual to periodize the years since as a “jazz renaissance.” Preeminent in this era are the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, and their founding of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Even politicians got involved. In 1987, the US Congress passed the Jazz Preservation Act, which declared the music “a rare and valuable national American treasure.”Footnote ² And, in 1993, Bill Clinton told a White House gathering that “jazz is really America's classical music.”Footnote ³

Scholars were sceptical. “There is a revolution underway in jazz that lies not in any internal crisis of style,” argued Scott DeVeaux in 1991, “but in the debate over the looming new orthodoxy: jazz as ‘America's classical music.’” The idea imposed “a kind of deadening uniformity of cultural meaning on the music.” Its narratives were suffocating, its nationalism sickly. It strangled attempts to make the study of jazz “more responsive to issues of historical particularity.”Footnote ⁴ DeVeaux's argument became an influential “clarion call,” with many concurring that jazz histories “need not follow the narrative trajectory that many have constructed for ‘classical music.’”Footnote ⁵ Researchers began to draw on history, musicology, American studies, sociology, and literary criticism. They uncovered hidden histories, refused grand narratives, and focussed on the complexity of cultural meaning. In the “new jazz studies,” impatience with “America's classical music” became habitual. The idea was jazz's “favorite dictum,” a “frequently invoked phrase,” a piece of “high-art dogma,” one of the “pious clichés” that existed about the music.Footnote ⁶ By 2002, it was observed that “the once common notion that jazz might be thought of as ‘America's classical music’ has long been discredited.”Footnote ⁷

But beneath the dismissals lay hesitancy. Many were wary of tackling a narrative that had done much to elevate the music, and had certainly helped to legitimize the study of jazz in universities.Footnote ⁸ DeVeaux put his anxieties in parentheses: “(it hardly seems fair, in any case, to deconstruct a narrative that has only recently been constructed, especially one that serves such important purposes).”Footnote ⁹ “It may be a little unfair,” echoed Krin Gabbard, “to deconstruct a canonical view of jazz history so soon after it has been constructed.”Footnote ¹⁰ So a peculiar ambiguity emerged among the scholars. “America's classical music” represented everything jazz studies sought to move beyond, but was not much lingered over. It was simply summoned to stand for the suspect arguments of “such prominent spokespeople for jazz as Billy Taylor, Wynton Marsalis, and Gunther Schuller,” or “Grover Sales, Reginald Buckner, and many others.”Footnote ¹¹ Or Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, Ken Burns, the Jazz Preservation Act, American exceptionalism, neoclassicism, neotraditionalism, neoliberalism, indeed the entire “jazz renaissance.” In academic circles, “America's classical music” became a truly “once common notion”: a straw man regularly wheeled out for a good duffing up, but kept well stuffed for the sake of the music and the field. It remains an important idea poorly understood, routinely invoked but rarely interrogated. There is a need to probe its origins, untangle its meanings, and explore its influence.

For these tasks, the pianist and educator Billy Taylor is useful. He certainly claimed to have coined the phrase, though it has sometimes been attributed to Duke Ellington or James Baldwin.Footnote ¹² What is clear is that Taylor was the idea's primary theorist and most visible spokesperson. He produced its first formal rendering in his 1975 doctoral dissertation, and went on to articulate it across a range of forums as America's premier jazz ambassador before Wynton Marsalis. Scholarship on Taylor is small. The brief discussions that do exist tend to cast him as an elder statesman of the jazz renaissance: Robert Walser anthologizes Taylor's ideas in “The Eighties,” while Eric Porter aligns them with those of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis.Footnote ¹³ This article puts Taylor center stage. He enables a close contextual analysis of the idea of jazz as “America's classical music,” and a careful account of its use across a range of cultural arenas within and beyond the United States. He also offers an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about the place of, and challenges facing, African American intellectuals in the later twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁴ For Taylor reveals, in unusual depth, what is involved in the jazz ambassador's struggle to make words about music do things.

William Edward Taylor Jr. was born into a middle-class and musical family in 1921 and grew up in a segregated Washington, DC. He concentrated on the piano from a young age, was taught by Dunbar High School bandleader Henry Grant (who also taught Ellington), and studied first sociology, but then music at Virginia State University. He moved to New York in 1944, where he became Art Tatum's protégé and emerged as a reliably polished bebop player at the heart of the jazz community. He married his college girlfriend Teddi Castion in 1946, became the house pianist at Birdland from 1949 to 1951, and had a moderately successful recording career with a range of trios, playing mostly bebop, sometimes Latin.Footnote ¹⁵ As the musical director of the 1958 television series The Subject Is Jazz, he pioneered jazz education and displayed aesthetic versatility. From the early 1960s, he worked more and more in broadcasting and education. He had a daily radio show in New York, lectured at Yale, and became active in the civil rights movement.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1964, he helped to found a community arts project in Harlem named Jazzmobile, and in 1969 he became the first black musical director of a national talk show, the David Frost Show. As Taylor's public profile grew, so did his need to define jazz for a wider audience. He often evaded this difficulty by locating identity in multiplicity. “I resist the idea of saying jazz is any one thing,” he told the journalist Phyl Garland in 1969. “Jazz is many things and I believe it is this that makes it so durable.”Footnote ¹⁷

In 1970, Taylor enrolled in a doctoral program in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His educational role was growing alongside his public profile, and the jazz market remained stubbornly marginal. Moreover, the University of Massachusetts was becoming something of a center for jazz musicians in the early 1970s. Reggie Workman, Yusef Lateef, Max Roach, Cannonball Adderly, Archie Shepp, Roberta Flack, Bill Barron, Kenny Barron, Jimmy Owens, and Chris White were all enrolled in courses across the Education, Music, and Black Studies departments.Footnote ¹⁸ Most were mid-career New York players who had long moved in similar circles to Taylor; many were members of the same organizations, notably the Collective Black Artists (CBA). Faculty members like Ortiz Waltz, Roland Wiggins, and Frederick Tillis were also pioneers in the growing field of black music scholarship. Taylor's dissertation committee consisted of Wiggins, Tillis, and, as chair, Mary Beaven, who was director of the Arts and Humanities program and who had done much to make the university such a collaborative environment. Musicians involved themselves in designing and teaching courses, faculty found their way to CBA conferences, and all formed an exceptionally vibrant community in which to think about jazz. “Just having the experience of being on campus and in the company of folks like that and having the opportunity to pursue some of your ideas will influence you,” remembered Workman. “And indeed it did.”Footnote ¹⁹

It was in Massachusetts that Taylor began to argue that jazz was “America's classical music.” He can be found testing the idea in interviews as early as 1972, with direct reference to his academic work. “Jazz is a form,” he told Billboard. “All the research I'm currently conducting leads to this conclusion. It's America's classical music, and all the styles of music, classical, folk, rock and popular, surface within this one area we call jazz.”Footnote ²⁰ The idea that jazz is a distinct musical form was not, of course, an original product of Taylor's researches, but a part of rich debates in African American intellectual history, which stretched back to the early twentieth century, about the status of jazz. Many black composers, musicians, and writers had engaged in playing with the boundaries between “jazz” and “classical.” Alain Locke, for instance, saw in jazz an evolution from popular folk music to national art music, which promised “to become one of the main sources of America's serious or classical music.”Footnote ²¹ Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston disagreed with Locke's developmentalist arguments, and saw powerful social and political implications in the folk memory of the blues.Footnote ²² But, it will be argued, Taylor's later idea of “America's classical music” did not result from a close engagement with this tradition. His was an indirect encounter, mediated through more immediate, more local, sources.

Taylor's dissertation, completed in August 1975, is the fullest exposition of his idea. The History and Development of Jazz Piano: A New Perspective for Educators is a complex text, which performs multiple roles for various audiences. Taylor announced it as “an opportunity to synthesize and integrate what I have learned during my lifetime and to assimilate this information into one written document for both musician and non-musician as well as for the educator and the general public.”Footnote ²³ Its central argument, that jazz “may now be considered America's classical music,” is historical; its first twelve chapters narrate a long history of jazz, often, though not always, through the piano.Footnote ²⁴ Chapters 13 and 14 then present a formal musicological defence of the argument, and draw out some “implications for education.”

The history of jazz began with a national history of slavery. “When Africans came to this country as slaves,” argued Taylor, “they brought their musical traditions with them.”Footnote ²⁵ By skating over the colonial era, he was able to establish that “African music” became “American music” through the historical reality of an enslaved population. “Because Africans did not have the freedom to maintain their cultural identity, their musical traditions had to change,” and they had to change in a different country.Footnote ²⁶ Work songs, field hollers, spirituals: these were “obliged” musical legacies of slavery.Footnote ²⁷ They showed that the origins of jazz were necessarily, rather than willingly, American. While “surviving slavery and other forms of racism in America,” black Americans “created something of beauty … a new idiom, Afro-American music.” From this would come “America's classical music.”Footnote ²⁸ Taylor put slave agency at the center of a history which entwined ideas of nation with ideas of race from the start, and which used this dualism as a broad framework for the narrative. Taylor's history was about struggle and progress, urban migration and Jim Crow segregation. It conceived of race in terms of a black/white binary, and had a core sense that the history of America was the history of race in America.

The link between nineteenth-century slave structures and twentieth-century musical forms was not obvious, but Taylor's account of ragtime made the connection. Departing from conventional understandings of ragtime as essentially the late nineteenth-century piano music of Scott Joplin, Taylor presented it expansively as “the earliest form of jazz.”Footnote ²⁹ It encompassed the mid-nineteenth-century pianists Louis Morreau Gottschalk and Lucien Lambert, as well as the twentieth-century giant Eubie Blake. It was both “the leisure-time music of slaves on Southern plantations” and “the music of performers in taverns, barrel houses, and other places of entertainment and social activity.”Footnote ³⁰ It was also audible in a range of later blues styles: boogie, stride, even the “urban blues” of 1920s Chicago, New York, and Kansas City. Despite stylistic variation and the exploitation of white record companies, Taylor insisted that the urban blues retained “many of the rural Southern traditions” and formed the foundation for the jazz that followed.Footnote ³¹ In urban contexts, “jazz grew as an expression of black consciousness.”Footnote ³² Taylor then deployed a familiar trope to make a striking point about the music's racial identity:

Taylor appropriated the national metaphor of the “melting pot” and recast it as the product of an “Afro-American value system.” This system determined what the pot produced: nation and race were linked such that the racial structured the national. The metaphor also displayed Taylor's sociological imagination, a legacy of his undergraduate study: group consciousness, social structure, and systems of value were his analytical tools. The blues that lay at the heart of jazz were “not abstract exercises,” but “concrete expressions of black consciousness … deeply rooted in the Afro-American's own perception of who he is and what he is about.”Footnote ³⁴ The blues showed that “jazz from its beginnings to the present must be examined with the value system of its creators, Afro-American musicians.”Footnote ³⁵

The fundamental value in this system was functionality. Taylor did not have a precise theory of “functionality,” but he was clear that it had to involve swing. This was what made bebop functional music instead of more purely listening music: “no matter how syncopated or intricate a jazz passage may be, the basic beat must never lose its vitality. It must swing, or it is stylistically incorrect.”Footnote ³⁶ Bebop, Taylor argued, was “a good example of the ‘melting pot’ aspect of jazz.”Footnote ³⁷ Community agency was another important aspect of functionality. Jazz was “everywhere in the black community – in theatres, tent shows, on records, at dances, parties, picnics, parades, funerals – everywhere.”Footnote ³⁸ A historically contingent “black consciousness” thus mattered in altering or discarding elements of jazz. Indeed, Taylor worked to establish this consciousness across black communities by arguing that, as a consequence of white racism, “musically trained black musicians and untrained black musicians were influencing one another in more ways than either group cared to admit.”Footnote ³⁹ He had little time for Great Men, and argued that “jazz did not develop solely through the impact of a series of well-known, outstanding, innovative musicians … styles rapidly became the common property of an entire generation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ He consciously differentiated himself from André Hodier and Gunther Schuller, white critics who presented “the history of jazz as the impact of one individual upon another.”Footnote ⁴¹ Yet this also separated him from other black contemporaries, for, unlike Albert Murray or Stanley Crouch, Taylor did not speak in terms of “heroes” or “genius.”Footnote ⁴² Nor was he given to dismiss social science as “categorical jargon.”Footnote ⁴³ For Taylor, jazz history was social history.

The “Afro-American value system” also had implications for authorial authenticity. A “black perspective” was crucial to understanding jazz, but because there were “only a few black writers who write consistently and intelligently about jazz … the Afro-American aesthetic value system is not as much in evidence in writing as it is in radio broadcasting and on records.”Footnote ⁴⁴ So Taylor took time to recommend more suitable authors. Ortiz Walton, Phyl Garland, Hildred Roach, Eileen Southern, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) were all praised as “blacks who have directed their attention to the problems caused by having black Americans judged by the wrong criteria and recorded from the wrong perspective.”Footnote ⁴⁵ These authors provided the backbone of Taylor's secondary reading. He occasionally cited older authors in his dissertation, including Alain Locke, as well as white critics like Leonard Feather and Marshall Stearns, though rarely more than once, and he did not single them out. Rather, Taylor's account of jazz history rested on the more proximate wave of early 1970s black music scholarship represented by Southern, Roach, and Walton.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their work reflected a new impetus to document the cultural power of black music, and often drew inspiration from the Black Arts movement, and in particular from Baraka's 1963 Blues People.Footnote ⁴⁷ Baraka had also argued that blues was functional and communal, the expression of a collective black consciousness, the sound of an oppressed social group who were necessarily Americans, and a music that told the story of America.Footnote ⁴⁸

Taylor's emphasis on Baraka is curious. There were many areas where they diverged: Taylor was far more willing to trumpet America, and by 1975 Baraka had abandoned both bohemianism and black cultural nationalism for Marxism.Footnote ⁴⁹ But Taylor recommended Blues People and Baraka's more radical Black Music six times in his dissertation, which was more than any other author.Footnote ⁵⁰ Baraka is also the only literary figure to feature; neither Langston Hughes nor Ralph Ellison gets a mention. Crucially, neither does Albert Murray, even though his Omni-Americans had been published in 1970, and even though this was something Taylor had apparently read, for it featured in the bibliography of his dissertation proposal.Footnote ⁵¹ Murray's Stomping the Blues, which influentially cast the blues as good-time music, was not published until 1976.Footnote ⁵² Taylor does not, then, slot neatly into a Murray–Crouch–Marsalis lineage. Rather, he drew significantly on Baraka.

Can the musical director of the David Frost Show really be identified with the Black Arts movement? If Taylor seems an unusual Black Artist, it is worth remembering that recent studies undermine conventional understandings of the movement as only or simply the sensationalist cultural arm of separatist political militancy, but instead emphasize diffusion and diversity.Footnote ⁵³ Taylor happily performed as part of a 1968 concert titled “Focus … the Black Artist,” though his “bespectacled, clean-cut” image contrasted, for one reviewer, with the dashiki-clad performers from Blafrica Productions, who were also on the bill.Footnote ⁵⁴ Taylor's playing in the later 1960s also moved away from bebop in the direction of soul jazz, most famously with his gospel-inflected composition “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Some of Nina Simone's versions of this song ended with the lines “Say it clear, say it loud/I am black and I am proud!”Footnote ⁵⁶ Further, Taylor's links with the Collective Black Artists only grew stronger in Massachusetts. In 1978, the CBA put on a whole evening of his music.Footnote ⁵⁷

Most importantly, Taylor had cofounded a Black Arts project of sorts in 1964, along with the Harlem Cultural Council and arts patron Daphne Arnstein. Jazzmobile has received scant scholarly attention, and is not usually considered in histories of the Black Arts movement. Yet it gave free outdoor concerts, ran community programs in Harlem, and was certainly “opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community,” as Larry Neal's famous manifesto for the movement put it.Footnote ⁵⁸ Baraka even claimed that his own Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School inspired Jazzmobile.Footnote ⁵⁹ This feels exaggerated, but it nonetheless underlines the point that Jazzmobile grew out of a fertile mid-1960s milieu in which Black Arts imperatives mattered. Crucially, by 1972, just when Taylor began testing out “America's classical music” in interviews, Jazzmobile also began using the idea in promotional materials. “Jazz is America's Classical Music and its many styles reflect the best in our musical heritage,” ran the first sentence at the top of the first page of a 1972 brochure. The text on its cover made clear its cultural politics: “One thing almost as important as the contributions Blacks have made to America, is the fact that it's been kept secret so long.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Far from exceptionalist-Americanist platitude, Jazzmobile used the idea of “America's classical music” as part of a Black Arts imperative.

So Taylor insisted that jazz was functional, collective, and black. And Black Arts theorists insisted that black art was “functional, collective and committing or committed.”Footnote ⁶¹ But Taylor also cautioned against “the polarization that stems from black people discovering who we are,” did not argue that jazz was the exclusive property of African Americans, and never embraced an Afrocentric black cultural nationalism.Footnote ⁶² When it came to the nation, Taylor saw jazz as “truly American.”Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, the simultaneous blackness and American-ness of “America's classical music” gave it a political edge stronger than accommodation or integration. The idea pushed the black experience to the center of the American experience, insisted that black music was necessarily American music, and refused to apologize for its Afro-American value system. Taylor's prescriptions could sometimes sound like those of Albert Murray, whose cultural triumphalism flirted with black cultural nationalism.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet Taylor also drew on Baraka's ideas about collective black consciousness, and favoured sociological analysis over heroic individualism. Murray and Baraka were bitter intellectual opponents, but in Taylor their ideas were not incompatible. Black Americans, Taylor argued, should accept and even embrace the American dimensions of jazz. And, he insisted, its collective and functional black perspective had to be genuinely understood for this to be meaningful. For race structured the national melting pot, and the fundamental story of jazz was about black consciousness creating, from slavery, through struggle, “America's classical music.”

Taylor's account of later jazz styles sometimes found the implications of this narrative difficult. Cool jazz was easily dispensed with as something for “introspective, detached” musicians more likely to be white, and as an attempt “to reorder the basic elements of jazz.”Footnote ⁶⁵ But while free jazz was important to many Black Arts theorists, its avant-garde aesthetic was insufficiently “functional” in Taylor's terms, and he found it hard to fit into his narrative. “Where am I in relation to this music?” he asked himself in his notes. It was a question that his supervisor Mary Beaven had forced him to consider: “See Mary's note!!!”Footnote ⁶⁶ Taylor's final judgment was strained. He did not much like or play experimental music, and struck an ambivalent analytical note. “Freedom does not necessarily mean chaos,” he warned, “but it does put other burdens on the players.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Soul music, conversely, was welcomed. Its functionality was never in doubt, and Taylor ambitiously cast it as part of jazz. He highlighted his own “I Wish I Knew” as something “the black community sang,” along with Aretha Franklin's “Respect” and James Brown's “I'm Black and I'm Proud.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Most of Taylor's dissertation, then, was a history of jazz that spent its intellectual energy tackling the dynamics of race and nation. “Classical music,” however, had fallen by the wayside, for Taylor's ideas about art had been defined by aesthetic value systems associated with “black consciousness.” This gave Mary Beaven sleepless nights. “Several times over the past few weeks I have woken up in the middle of the night worried,” she wrote to Taylor in a 1.00 a.m. panic:

To be “academically respectful” Beaven urged devoting a whole chapter of the dissertation to the idea of “classical music” and to arguing that jazz conformed to this. She did not suggest engaging with the rich tradition of African American thinking about jazz as a formal music, but she did provide Taylor with a number of dictionary definitions of the word “classical,” which were rooted in European notions about Greco-Roman antiquity. “I really believe in that argument,” she implored, “but I think you need to wrestle with that one.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Taylor followed Beaven's advice, and devoted chapter 13 of his dissertation to a formal musicological defense of the idea that jazz could be understood as a classical music. He began by showing that, like classical music, jazz could be formally analyzed in terms of syntax, semantics, and kinesthetics. Deploying two ideas of “classical music” – a standard definition of canonical European art music and an account of Indian classical music emphasizing oral indigenous tradition – he then arrived at his defense:

This is thin. Jazz was classical because Taylor had made it conform to dictionary definitions. His terse analysis differed markedly from his earlier and subtler historical narrative, and, in pivoting to “historical and sociological trends in America,” he sought to return to familiar ground. There was relief in his reaffirmation of the centrality of nation and race at the end of his chapter. Jazz, he concluded, was “music which springs from self-respect, self-knowledge, and the need to celebrate black consciousness in a society which is unaware of its debt to black people. A basic form of American musical expression which speaks eloquently for our way of life, jazz is America's classical music.”Footnote ⁷¹

So the “classical” in “America's classical music” was not centrally a musicological or even a historical claim, but a powerful label with desirable connotations and Eurocentric legitimations. Taylor was giving himself enough academic cover to harness gravity, substance, and above all seriousness to jazz. Black music was not just America's music: as America's classical music, it demanded respect and financial support. As Taylor detailed in his final chapter, there were “implications for education.” These ranged from community projects to plug short-term holes to large-scale attempts to rectify “the systematic exclusion of jazz and other Afro-American music from the American educational process.”Footnote ⁷² The scale of the problem was vast. As he told his examiners in his viva voce, “deeply rooted racism, ignorance, paternalism, greed, prejudice and other non-musical elements … alter the development of jazz and stunt the artistic growth of students.”Footnote ⁷³

Ultimately, the idea of jazz as “America's classical music” was Taylor's three-word solution to these myriad difficulties. It confronted a range of entrenched attitudes and short attention spans with a memorable slogan that kept art, nation, and race in careful balance. CBA members in Massachusetts remained diffident about the “classical” label: Beaven reported that Kenny Barron and Yusef Lateef “were not much help” with the idea.Footnote ⁷⁴ Reggie Workman preferred the term “Black Classical Music,” which revised earlier lines of Harlem Renaissance thought.Footnote ⁷⁵ But Taylor's idea had carefully configured internal dynamics, which built on local sources: race gave meaning to nation, which gave meaning to classical art. And, from another angle, race structured what art was meant to be through the Afro-American value system. “America's classical music” insisted that jazz was simultaneously and meaningfully black music and American music, that jazz was as serious as any classical music, and that everyone should be educated as such. It was a subtle attempt to make a complex music cohere.

How successful it was is another matter. Taylor had wrestled with the idea inside the academy, but using it as a jazz ambassador, with wider audiences in other contexts, would be harder. Jazzmobile remained a powerful way to promote it. The roving float upon which it performed free outdoor concerts was “decorated in white wrought-iron New Orleans-style scroll work” and had “a sign on it saying, ‘Jazz – America's Classical Music.’”Footnote ⁷⁶ Literally a vehicle for the idea, Jazzmobile sought to put Taylor's “Afro-American value system” into practice by cultivating links with New York's black communities. “The float doesn't just suddenly appear,” Taylor told Down Beat. “We are invited by block associations. We wanted a liaison between us and the neighborhoods because we wanted an ongoing relationship.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The float prized functional, collective jazz of the sort Taylor had described in his dissertation. So it mostly featured black artists who played music that swung, like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Lionel Hampton, once even Ellington. Many members of the Collective Black Artists also performed, including Jimmy Owens and Max Roach.Footnote ⁷⁸ Jazzmobile also provided a stage for music explicitly about the relationship between race and nation, like Jimmy Heath's “Afro-American Suite of Evolution” or Ernie Wilkins's “Four Black Immortals” (a suite about Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.).Footnote ⁷⁹

Yet there were tensions in Jazzmobile's Black Arts imperative. Taylor's idea of “functional” jazz did not include the avant-garde, which struggled to find a space on the float. For instance, Leroy Jenkins, a violinist and prominent member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), failed to get a gig for his experimental collective, the Revolutionary Ensemble. So he wrote to the composer John Duffy in protest, and accused Jazzmobile of having “a policy excluding ‘avante garde’ [sic] musicians.” Jenkins then queried Jazzmobile's funding and asked, rhetorically and pointedly, “who defines jazz and the men who practice it?” Why couldn't “the masses” appreciate free jazz?Footnote ⁸⁰ These were searching questions, spurred in part by the mid-1970s migration to New York of many experimental musicians from Chicago.Footnote ⁸¹ They show that much was excluded by “America's classical music.” Its Black Arts imperative was not aesthetically adventurous.

It was, however, educationally effective. Jazzmobile's formal pedagogic programs consisted of Saturday morning music workshops and lecture/concert series for black schools. They often deployed the idea of “America's classical music,” though not fully. Working with children, Taylor's main aim was to spark interest. “We might start off with Work Song or a spiritual or with anything they were familiar with,” he explained. “The more we did that, the less we had to deal with the basics … We just stated it was America's classical music and went on from there.”Footnote ⁸² The nuances of race and nation were not delineated as carefully as in his dissertation, and Black Arts aesthetics were not as prominent as, for instance, in an AACM School of Music.Footnote ⁸³ But some sense of a black “value system” remained central. By closing the lecture/concerts with the funky theme from the 1971 blaxploitation hit Shaft, “America's classical music” regularly brought the house down.Footnote ⁸⁴

Jazzmobile's funding exposes the ambiguities in the idea best of all, for Taylor did not hesitate to restructure “America's classical music” when seeking sponsorship. In a press release discussing “the need for new financial support for Jazzmobile's many and varied services,” he stressed that “America's classical music” was “unique, durable and ubiquitous … Its appeal is universal yet it does not get the attention and support it deserves.” He stated that “Jazzmobile goes into the heart of living communities, making no political, ethnic, religious or class distinctions,” and he avoided any mention of an “Afro-American value system.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Funding serious art was the priority; explicating the complex racial dynamics that structured jazz history was not. Jazzmobile displayed corporate logos on its float, and attracted the sponsorship of Ballantine Beer, Chemical Bank, Coca Cola, and Exxon during the 1970s, as well as public funding from city, state, and federal sources.Footnote ⁸⁶ It had a strong sense of what one public administrator called “institutional pressures.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Critics like Leroy Jenkins, Taylor later argued, were “unable to match their disapproval with the funds we needed.”Footnote ⁸⁸ So different versions of “America's classical music” emerged for different audiences. In boardrooms, jazz was serious and classical, “non-political, non-controversial, strictly cultural” (as Jazzmobile's executive director put it when courting sponsorship).Footnote ⁸⁹ But in schools and neighborhoods, jazz was popular, functional, serious, and black. The extent to which these latter audiences saw jazz as “classical,” however, is very unclear. Taylor had an acute grasp of the means required to gain financial and institutional support for jazz, but his sense of the ends served was fuzzier.

So Taylor's idea proved flexible, especially in settings where he could reshape it himself. He was particularly nimble in interviews. Take, for instance, a piece in the Long Island Sunday Press in 1976: “‘Jazz is America's classical music – America's, not just blacks',’ says popular jazz pianist Billy Taylor, and he says it with the eloquence, smoothness and conviction that make him one of the best spokesmen jazz has ever had.”Footnote ⁹⁰ For an audience of Long Islanders reading a Sunday newspaper, Taylor trumpeted national dimensions, but he did not let the racial dynamics disappear (the “just” was important). Rather, the idea provided a snappy way into talking about nation and race in the Bicentennial year. “Although we've been doing well in funding and supporting jazz as a major art form, we could be doing better – and,” he pressed, “as for doing something worthwhile about jazz and black music in general as part of the Bicentennial, we haven't scratched the surface.”Footnote ⁹¹ The jazz ambassador began with national dimensions, but moved on to emphasize that jazz was part of black music in general, and in need of financial support.

Similar dynamics structured Taylor's wider Bicentennial activities. Under the auspices of the federal American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), Taylor helped to plan and run an “American Bicentennial Jazz Celebration.” ARBA brochures urged a “fresh dedication” to “America's classical music” as an embodiment of “the American point of view.” Though an overt sense of an “Afro-American value system” was missing, plans for a “Black Music” celebration were quietly included towards the end of the brochures “for those institutions seeking to present the Afro-American experience in interdisciplinary terms.”Footnote ⁹² An official federal celebration was a major achievement, especially given the ambivalence that surrounded many Bicentennial activities.Footnote ⁹³ However, on Tony Brown's Black Journal, a public television show on which Taylor had become the musical director, “America's classical music” played a different role in the “blackcentennial” theme of the 1976 season. From behind the Black Journal piano, Taylor was able to articulate his race/nation dualism with precision by quoting directly from his dissertation. Jazz, he said, was both the “musical expression of Black consciousness” and “a melting pot of musical ideas” that was structured by “the Afro-American value system.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Viewers were exposed to a forceful idea, and one music professor from Cleveland State University wrote in to agree that “America's Black musicians are playing, indeed, as Dr. Taylor contends, the ‘Amer. Classical Music’ when they perform jazz.”Footnote ⁹⁵

When it came to institutional work, Taylor knew how to play the game, and he played it very well. He sat on the boards of philanthropic and cultural organizations, was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation by 1978, and never missed the chance to schmooze a politician. Indeed, after a White House event in 1975, the Secretary of Agriculture and arch-conservative Earl Butz wrote to emphasize “how much I enjoyed chatting with you at the dinner table” and to praise “that wonderful philosophy that you have.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Taylor also emerged as a formidable advocate for publicly funding jazz during his tenure on the National Council of the Arts from 1978. The Black Arts poet, Baraka-associate, and arts administrator A. B. Spellman remembered that “Billy Taylor and I had many heated arguments with council members about giving some parity to jazz with classical music in the guidelines of the Arts Endowment.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Wielding a PhD that demanded that jazz was classical music, these were arguments that Taylor could win.

Taylor's success as a jazz ambassador lay in his ability to recognize what could be articulated in different contexts. Such flexibility had long formed part of the expectation that public, black intellectuals could and should explain and embody “blackness” to white audiences.Footnote ⁹⁸ But jazz created specific challenges. “Blackness” was an idea that structured jazz's cultural identity, commercial appeal, and aesthetic sensibility (often in overlapping ways). For many, it created a sense that black players had a special authority over, perhaps even an instinctive affinity for, the music.Footnote ⁹⁹ This made the jazz ambassador a particular kind of black intellectual, for to explain and embody jazz was always to leave yourself vulnerable to being trapped by the notions of blackness that surrounded the music. Indeed, Taylor argued that jazz giants had long failed as ambassadors by succumbing to stereotype. “I'm a teacher because Dizzy [Gillespie] … and Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington refused to do it,” he told fellow pianist and jazz journalist Len Lyons. Taylor went on to discuss, in unusually forthright language, the difference between a jazz artist and a jazz ambassador. “I knew that these men knew intellectually what they were doing, but I read interview after interview where they came off sounding like idiots.” What grated most was their tendency to disarm with a grin, a sly witticism, or “bebop” slang. “The writers reported accurately what they were saying, but what they said was bullshit.” Worse, their refusal to engage with nonmusicians “gave people outside the field reason to say jazz cannot be analyzed, it cannot be taught.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They had no sense of their responsibilities as public figures. Great jazz artists, Taylor felt, were not necessarily good jazz ambassadors.

Rather, Taylor thought, good jazz ambassadors should be educators. This conviction he embodied as “Dr. Billy Taylor”: stylish, sharp, nonthreatening but unapologetic. He combined delicacy of emphasis with finesse in presentation, and stood in opposition to what his publicity material called “the stereotyped jazz musician.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ His ambassadorial activities were thus less about virtuosic artistry than pedagogic performance and institutional work. He spoke with different voices to different audiences, but gathered it all around the idea that jazz was America's classical music and therefore deserved to be publicly funded, privately sponsored, meaningfully recognized as African American, incorporated into curricula, taken seriously at the Bicentennial, understood as part of a blackcentennial, and propagated to urban black communities. These were real victories. Politicians were charmed, communities served, children compelled, corporations persuaded, educators embarrassed, and attentions caught.

Things began to change in the early 1980s. Jazzmobile, for instance, had to operate in a political context that had become hostile to public subsidy for the arts.Footnote ¹⁰² So in 1981 it produced a plan for “Institutional Advancement,” which aimed to reduce its dependency on public funding, and which declared its mission statement to be the presentation, propagation, and preservation of “AMERICA'S CLASSICAL MUSIC AS A NATIONAL TREASURE.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The thumpingly national side of Taylor's idea was emphasized more and more in these years: jazz was “the music which expresses the American concept of individual freedom best.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Ideas like the black aesthetic or a collective consciousness no longer formed part of Jazzmobile's promotional material. By the mid-1980s it declared that “our multi-ethnic audience includes people from all backgrounds including culturally deprived, infirmed, and handicapped audiences.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Nationalism and multiculturalism thus became newly prominent in Taylor's idea. In its institutional articulations, “America's classical music” came to seem closer to Murray than to Baraka.

Taylor's own public statements went in a similar direction. Fewer mentions of the “Afro-American value system” were made, and he stressed national dynamics more: “jazz reflects the spontaneity and mobility of American life and is a musical reflection of our ideal of a multicultural society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The melting pot was no longer Taylor's go-to trope for explaining how race structured the nation; instead the national was invoked to soothe the racial. And, while the Black Arts movement waned, Taylor's idea could be transplanted into whiter contexts. In 1987, a Long Island arts camp called the Usdan Center incorporated “America's classical music” into their program, and asked Taylor to teach it.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This was a long way from Jazzmobile. Little in the way of black pride could be found at leafy Usdan.

Some contexts for Taylor's idea changed radically, and went beyond America. In 1982, the United States International Communications Agency (USICA, a brief incarnation of the United States Information Agency) sent Taylor on a tour of India, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. State Department-sponsored jazz tours had existed since 1956, as part of Cold War attempts to promote American culture abroad.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Taylor's idea fitted in well, and the USICA afterwards assured him that the international “appreciation of jazz as America's classical music” had been a triumphant success.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet on tour the idea had a very hard time getting through. In India, for instance, the press consistently failed to catch its subtleties. “Billy feels jazz is not the music of Black Americans,” reported Kolkata's Anadabazar, “but it's American classical music.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ “It has grown into a music that reflects more vividly and completely, the American way of life and can be aptly termed as the classical music of the USA,” echoed the Hindustan Standard, which included only a glancing reference at the end of the article to “African heritage.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Complex racial politics did not work outside a national context, and jazz was sometimes not reported as a form of black music at all. Three a.m. starts, bureaucratic fumbles, and inadequate pianos made the entire tour a frustrating experience for Taylor. “Boy, was I suckered on this one,” he wrote.Footnote ¹¹² His idea had been forged in and for America; it struggled to work in more global contexts.

Taylor's embodiment of the idea also struggled as he settled into the role of an elder statesman. On one level, this meant that he spoke to larger audiences: he presented a series on National Public Radio, worked as an occasional arts correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning from 1982, and had an institutional base at the Kennedy Center from 1994. But his public image became worryingly stuffy in the process. “Perhaps because he looks establishment, has a Ph.D. degree and seven honorary degrees, and writes for symphonies,” reported the Associated Press in 1992, “people sometimes think Taylor's jazz would be academic, not funky or swinging.”Footnote ¹¹³ The article then quoted Taylor: “They don't say that to my face … But I do get those feelings. Quite often I'm asked to recommend people for jobs I'd like to do.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Some of this was self-inflicted, for Taylor now performed in fewer clubs and more concert halls, and his swing did sound more polite.Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the “classical” label was also becoming dominant in ways he had never intended. “America's classical music” now suggested nationally uniting music, and high, perhaps academic, art.

Taylor occasionally tried to reclaim a Black Arts imperative. He took note of hip-hop, and in 1995 released “On This Lean, Mean Street,” a jazz rap about neighborhood responsibility.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Moderating an earnest panel discussion on “The Marriage of Jazz and Hip-Hop in the 90s,” he pointed to the West African griot as a figure of continuity in black music, and he titled a later album Urban Griot.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Yet the pose did not convince all, and “suburban griot” was the verdict of JazzTimes.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Taylor's dynamism as a jazz ambassador had been about his capacity to negotiate different contexts, but these were becoming more disparate as his persona seemed less agile.

Indeed, he could no longer claim a monopoly over his idea. “America's classical music” had caught on, and appeared in increasingly divergent forms from the mid-1980s. Grover Sales wrote his book about it; politicians began to deploy it. For the young Wynton Marsalis, a sense of the idea seemed useful in his neoclassical critique of fusion. “The question in jazz has always been: is it pop music or is it a classical music?” he told an interviewer in 1990. “And I don't mean classical in terms of European music, but I mean does it have formal aspects that make it worthy of study, and does it carry pertinent mythic information about being American[?]”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Fusion did not, so was not jazz. Marsalis did not embrace Taylor's idea as a slogan, nor was he troubled by its complex genealogy. Rather, he played a variation on something in the air.

“America's classical music” was now a jazz standard, open to many interpretations. There was Ken Burns, who televised jazz as “the only art form created by Americans.”Footnote ¹²⁰ And there was Stanley Crouch, who venerated “the highest American musical form.”Footnote ¹²¹ And Scott DeVeaux, who worried about the “looming new orthodoxy.”Footnote ¹²² And even Amiri Baraka, who late in his Marxist incarnation came to assert “the historical phenomenon that black American music was also American Classical music.”Footnote ¹²³ The divergent diffusion of Taylor's idea shows that the “jazz renaissance” was neither possessed by a single dogma nor cut off from the “dark ages” that came before. Black Arts imperatives were not misguided impulses surmounted by Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis; they resonated through American culture in the late twentieth century. The history of “America's classical music” undermines the utility of the “jazz renaissance” as a periodizing category, and underlines the need for its careful historicization.

In 1995, Taylor found himself confronted by the ubiquity of his idea. “You're one of the true believers in jazz as America's classical music,” prodded an interviewer. “I have to take the credit or blame for that,” countered Taylor:

Taylor got his doctorate, though the wider victory was equivocal. He continued to perform for over a decade, but his idea had stretched beyond coherence and into cliché. He died in 2010. Today, in most settings, the idea of “America's classical music” feels weak in conveying the often difficult but always insistent meanings that circle around jazz. It fails as a final answer to the perpetually persistent question of what jazz is. But, for a while, it worked. It had subtleties, priorities, roots. It did things in a world of “racism, ignorance, paternalism, greed, prejudice and other non-musical elements.” And it matters, for nonmusical elements still define the role of the jazz ambassador.