Onaje Allan Gumbs Reflects on Dr. Billy Taylor

special to NewBlackMan

Dr. Billy Taylor: You Now Know How It Feels to be Free
by Onaje Allan Gumbs

Dr. Billy Taylor was a mentor and a friend. After listening to him on WLIB radio in New York for years, I met him in person just after I got out of high school in 1967. Although I was shy at the time, I mustered up enough courage to approach him...from then, he musically took me in.

While I was still going to college, on break, I would visit him often on the set of The David Frost Show for which he served as Musical Director. Almost jokingly I told him that I'd love to write something for the band. He told me to come back in a couple of months. I came back and to my surprise, he asked me how soon could I do the arrangement. I wrote an original song called "The Third Wave." Once I delivered the chart, I had to go back up to SUNY-Fredonia. I would watch The David Frost Show religiously but never heard my tune.

When I got back to NY and visited the set, Billy told me that there was a problem with the chart. Wel,l once the problem was fixed, Billy had the band play my song into every commercial break. It was an amazing experience to witness since I had no idea that the band was going to do that.

Billy Taylor was the one that encouraged me to join ASCAP which I still belong to today. I remember him telling me,"You can join BMI or ASCAP, but if you want a career as a composer, you'll join ASCAP."

Jaijai Jackson of The Jazz Network Worldwide, a few days ago, put together a profile feature on me at her site. To my surprise, she found, among other photographs, a photo of Billy and myself. I cried when I saw it, thinking back on all he had done for me. It wasn't 48 hours later when I found out Billy had made his transition.

Dr. Billy Taylor was a champion for the importance of the Legacy of Jazz, being the founder of Jazzmobile in New York in the 60's. He was a champion for young people (I remember at a conference years ago, Billy showed me a rap that he had written for a youth symposium he was going to conduct). Through his music, he was also a social activist. His enduring composition,"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free," became one of the anthems of the Civil Rights Movement.



Billy Taylor was someone you could always walk up to and say hello or engage in a conversation. Always with that youthful voice and big smile, you knew when you were with Dr. Billy Taylor, everything was alright.

Abientot Billy. You now know how it feels to be free.

***

Pianist/keyboardist/producer/arranger/songwriter Onaje Allan Gumbs (pronounced Oh-Nah-Jay) is one of the music industry's most respected and talented music collaborators. Gumbs has worked almost three decades with top talent in the musical fields of jazz, R&B/soul, and pop to hone his considerable skills. A partial list includes Woody Shaw, Nat Adderly, Norman Connors, Angela Bofill, Jean Carn, Cassandra Wilson, Marlena Shaw, Sadao Watanabe, Phyllis Hyman ("The Answer Is You" from his 1979 Somewhere in My Lifetime album), Stanley Jordan, Denise Williams, Vanessa Rubin, Jeffrey Osborne, Eddie Murphy, Rebbie Jackson, and Gerald Albright (Live at Birdland West). His most recent project is Just Like Yesterday.

Lucille Clifton Goes Home

from The Buffalo News

Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies

by Jay Rey

Lucille Clifton, born and raised in the Buffalo area before going on to achieve some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died this morning at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73, her sister told The Buffalo News.

Clifton had been ill for some time with some type of infection, and had undergone surgery to remove her colon Friday, but her exact cause of death is still uncertain, Clifton's sister, Elaine Philip said today.

"We really don't know," Philip said, "she had an infection throughout her body, and we don't know yet where it was coming from."

Clifton, who lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state, was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000," and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation."

"She is, in my opinion, the greatest poet to have been born and raised in Buffalo in the 20th Century," said R.D. Pohl, longtime literary contributor to The Buffalo News.

"I think so, too," Philip said, "not just because she was my sister. She was so sensitive. Everything touched her. Everyone mattered to her. She was such a loving person."

The former Lucille Sayles was born into a working-class family in Depew on June 27, 1936.

She moved to Buffalo with her family at an early age, and was raised on Purdy Street. She graduated from Fosdick-Masten High School and was awarded a scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., before she transferred to Fredonia State College, where she graduated.

Clifton left Buffalo in the late 1960s, after she met and married Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University at Buffalo.

The couple moved to Baltimore and had six children. Clifton moved to California for a short time, after her husband died in 1984, but returned to Maryland several years later and has been there ever since.

In 2004, she returned to Buffalo to receive an Outstanding Individual Artist award from the Arts Council in Buffalo and Erie County and the Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

At that time, Clifton had published 11 poetry collections, autobiographical prose and 20 children's books. Her poems have appeared in more than 100 anthologies. In 1987, she became the only author to have had two books nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year and was a finalist for the prestigious award.

Besides her sister, Clifton is survived by three daughters, Sidney, Gillian and Alexia; and a son, Graham.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.