Jeffrey Taylor
Jeffrey Taylor
Professor; Director of Brooklyn College's H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, Coordinator of Global and Contemporary Jazz Studies
Jeffrey Taylor, who received his doctorate from Michigan, has been a member of the Conservatory faculty since 1993 and is the director of the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute of Studies in American Music (ISAM). He specializes in jazz and other areas of music in the United States; he also teaches general courses in Western music history and musicology and has regularly led sections of the Conservatory's introductory Core course (he is also a co-author of that course's textbook). He is on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center, where he teaches doctoral seminars in jazz history and historiography. His scholarly work has focused primarily on pre-1940s jazz, though his interests include many aspects of current trends in jazz and popular music scholarship and performance, particularly those related to race, gender, class, sexuality, and spirituality. He is on the editorial boards of Black Music Research Journal and the Journal of the Society for American Music. His writing has appeared in Musical Quarterly, Black Music Research Journal, American Music, the ISAM Newsletter, and other publications. As a performer, Taylor has focused primarily on the work of early jazz pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and James P. Johnson, and in 1998 he appeared with fellow pianist Artis Wodehouse at several events related to ISAM's The Gershwins at 100 festival. He is currently at work on a biography of jazz pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines, having published a critical edition of transcriptions of Hines's solos last year.
