Chad Taylor unlocked the door to his office at the University of Pittsburgh on a recent evening, and gestured to an instrument along one wall. “This is Geri’s piano,” he said — referring to an Steinway 1098 upright and its former steward, Geri Allen. “I haven’t played it; I’m sort of afraid to touch it,” Taylor hastened to add. “At some point soon I’ll need to bring a drumset in here.”
Taylor was speaking just a few weeks into his first semester at the helm of Pitt’s Jazz Studies program — a position held by Allen from 2014 until her death in 2017. He’s only the fourth person to lead the prestigious program, founded in 1969 by saxophonist Nathan Davis, who served as its director until 2013. Taylor’s immediate predecessor was Nicole Mitchell, a flutist and composer with whom he shares collaborative history, and a connection to Chicago. (She served at Pitt from 2019 to 2022, leaving for a position at the University of Virginia.)
Next week brings the most visible manifestation of Taylor’s new academic appointment: the Pitt Jazz Seminar & Concert, now in its 54th year. An edifying, public-facing series of jazz workshops, lectures and concerts, the seminar was a signature innovation of Dr. Davis, whose legacy Taylor is keen to uphold. At the same time, he’s putting his own modern stamp on the event, bringing in peers like guitarist and producer Jeff Parker, whose contributions will include a DJ set.
The seminar’s culminating concert on Saturday, Nov. 2 will feature two jazz masters, Pittsburgh’s own Roger Humphries on drums and the Philly-born Reggie Workman on bass. They’ll perform alongside Taylor and Parker, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, tenor saxophonist Brian Settles, and vocalist Jessica Boykin-Settles. Completing the lineup are a pair of Philadelphians born nearly 40 years apart: pianist Sumi Tonooka and alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.
Taylor, 51, has resided with his family in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia for the last eight years — and he still does, commuting to and from Pittsburgh, where he keeps an apartment. (To those who wonder how he can stand the commute, he says: “Listen, you have to realize I’ve been commuting to Europe for like 30 years. So going back and forth between Pittsburgh and Philly, that’s nothing to me.”) His academic responsibilities have led him to scale back a bit on work in Philly, though he appeared last week with guitarist Nels Cline at Solar Myth. On the day that we met at Pitt, Taylor was announced as one of three jazz artists named 2024 Pew Fellows, an honor reserved for artists in the Philadelphia region.
Over the last 25 years, Taylor has been a prolific catalyst in progressive improvised music, with compatriots like cornetist and composer Rob Mazurek, his partner in the Chicago Underground Duo; the late trumpeter jaimie branch, who featured him in her band Fly or Die; and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, who has enlisted him in two acclaimed bands as well as a coequal duo. His own Chad Taylor Trio features Brian Settles on saxophone and Neil Podgursky on piano; its most recent release, The Reel, was issued on the Astral Spirits label in 2022.
Taylor studied as an undergraduate at the New School in New York, and earned an MFA in jazz history and research from Rutgers University in Newark, under the direction of Lewis Porter. As he familiarizes himself with the culture at Pitt, he’s especially interested in connecting jazz practice and jazz scholarship with other, unrelated disciplines. An undergraduate course titled History of Jazz is one of the school’s most popular, with more than 300 students enrolling every semester. Yet that popularity doesn’t always carry over to the Jazz Studies program and its offshoots, a fact that Taylor hopes to remedy by broadening the frame.
“I see jazz as more of a process now than a genre,” he reflected over dinner at a cafe on campus. “I feel like that’s where the music is going, too. And when you look at jazz as more of a process, then it really expands to all sorts of things. And this process can be used not just in music, but in other disciplines as well. So that’s something that I’m trying to focus on at UPitt, utilizing the different departments.”
This semester he has been teaching a class called Creative Arts Ensemble, working with a small group of students both in and out of jazz majors. “This is a course that is looking at how you can combine jazz with photography, with dance, with comedy, with all of the arts,” Taylor said. “The reason I’m so excited about this course is that when I look at my own success, this is how I’ve been able to survive, is by collaboration. And I do think that’s the future of where the music is going, and where I’m seeing the future of the program going.”
The class meets in a classroom on the ground floor of the Music Building, which was once the home of WQED, the nation’s first community-supported television station. Sitting behind his classroom desk, he noted that the building had served as the original studio for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which feels auspicious.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that one of Taylor’s aims is to make the Jazz Studies program feel more neighborly within the context of the university and the city. “When I interviewed students or talked with students, so many of them told me, ‘We wish we could play more,’ you know,” he said, recalling his long interview process. “And I feel like there’s this opportunity, because you have all these people interested in jazz history, yet not a lot of places to play on campus. So one thing I’m going to be working on is just trying to create more playing opportunities, regardless of whether there’s an audience or not.” He laughed. “The audience will come, if you keep doing it.”
The Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert runs Oct. 28 through Nov. 2.
