The veteran drummer known for his innovative improvisation lived for 20 of those years in New York, compounding the day-to-day challenge for Taylor’s family of five in a city not known for its affordability. So, when Taylor finally was priced out of Brooklyn, the musician began looking for places to relocate.
He consulted a search engine.
“I kid you not, I googled ‘What neighborhood do you go to when you get priced out of New York?’” Taylor says. “Mt. Airy came up. And I said, ‘What in the world is this Mt. Airy?’” Eventually, …
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The veteran drummer known for his innovative improvisation lived for 20 of those years in New York, compounding the day-to-day challenge for Taylor’s family of five in a city not known for its affordability. So, when Taylor finally was priced out of Brooklyn, the musician began looking for places to relocate.
He consulted a search engine.
“I kid you not, I googled ‘What neighborhood do you go to when you get priced out of New York?’” Taylor says. “Mt. Airy came up. And I said, ‘What in the world is this Mt. Airy?’” Eventually, Taylor and wife Meghan Medlock traveled to Philadelphia to find out – and never looked back.
Now, eight years after the musician, his wife and three daughters moved to a leafy street in West Mt. Airy, the jazz percussionist, composer, and educator is getting some notable recognition from an organization based in the city he has adopted as his home. Taylor was named a Pew Fellow of the Arts earlier this year, winning an $85,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He was one of 39 Philadelphia artists and organizations – several in the Northwest - to be awarded a total of $10.2 million by the nonprofit.
“I was in complete disbelief,” Taylor says of the award. “The music industry is not easy and many people will go their entire career and not get the recognition they deserve. So, to have that recognition in this stage of my career, it’s a great feeling.”
More than 30 years into establishing his jazz bonafides, Taylor has played with greats such as Pharoah Sanders, toured the world, led his own ensembles and played in seemingly endless iterations with fellow musicians, often with Chicago Underground, the famed musical collective he co-founded with trumpeter Rob Mazurek and guitarist Jeff Parker.
The honor from Pew came in the same year that Taylor was selected to lead the University of Pittsburgh jazz studies program. At the college, Taylor plans to mentor young people in a nurturing, pay-it-forward manner that mimics the way he was mentored by his jazz elders.
Taylor became interested in music as a youngster when his sister, who had been encouraged to become a musician, garnered much of the attention of the siblings’ dad. He had longed to be a concert pianist but gave it up to work in engineering and support his family.
“I wanted him to focus on me too,” says Taylor, whose family hoped he would become a doctor. Taylor’s envy turned to determination one day after his sister was applauded when she played the piano at a family event. When Taylor took his turn in the spotlight, he strummed his toy guitar for the audience of relatives. But Taylor didn’t receive the excited applause. “They were laughing like it was cute or funny,” Taylor recalls. “I remember thinking I’m going to show all those people – and that’s sort of what I did.”
Taylor studied classical guitar, but eventually gave it up because of persistent stage fright during recitals. He learned how to play percussion in elementary school, and the drums in high school as a member of the concert band and orchestra. It was then that his fellow teen musician, bassist Matt Lux, set Taylor on a path of jazz discovery. Hearing that Taylor’s record collection included the boy band R&B of New Edition and the novelty hip-hop of The Fat Boys, Lux suggested that Taylor expand his collection. Lux gave the then 14-year-old Taylor a list of jazz legends – Art Blakey, Miles Davis, John Coltrane.
The advice would send Taylor to the record stores of Chicago’s Clark Street where the young drummer would leaf through the bins, searching for the names on the list. When he found them, sometimes on a faded Blue Note record label, he’d pay the 99 cents and head home to his record player. In the music, sometimes playing amid scratches and skips, Taylor discovered the genre whose experts, decades later, would elevate him as a role model to follow.
Taylor went on to study at the Bloom School of Jazz, attending classes as a teen while playing gigs around the city with older musicians. He earned a BFA from New York’s New School of Jazz and an MFA in jazz history and research from Rutgers University. He has taught extensively at Rutgers and Berkeley College in New York.
In their announcement of the award, Pew officials described Taylor’s talent as “a proclamation of fresh musical storytelling, steeped in tradition yet contemporary."
The $85,000 Pew windfall along with the new Pittsburgh post have given the newly-minted William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies a measure of stability. i
“As a jazz musician, a lot of the paying work is not here, it’s overseas,” Taylor says. “So, usually every month, I am finding myself somewhat out of the country on tour or playing a festival somewhere.”
Taylor says he will now have the freedom to decline gigs he might have felt compelled to take, and explore new music projects with fellow musicians including fellow Pew winner and drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, of Manayunk.
And, despite the Pittsburgh location of his new university gig, Taylor says he, his wife, who works in advertising, and daughters Essie, a student at the Henry School in Mt. Airy; Violet, who attends Academy at Palumbo in South Philadelphia and Thea, a senior at Oberlin College, don’t plan to leave Mt. Airy. Taylor will commute to maintain what he calls “a love affair” with the neighborhood that has been ongoing since his family moved in.
“Here is a place so close to the city and you have the Wissahickon, the waterfalls, the trees, nature, the bike trails, Chestnut Hill and the shops that aren’t chains,” Taylor says. “Some people live on a block where they know their neighbors. We lucked out. We live on a block where we know our neighbors – and love our neighbors.”