Jazz researcher and educator Ben Young has spent 25 years doing first-person research into the history of jazz music. He was heard for nearly 25 years as a radio host on WKCR-FM in New York City, where he hosted programs dealing with the gamut of Jazz and modern improvised music, and spent a decade as the station’s first Director of Broadcasting and Operations. Young has produced, annotated or researched several hundred historical jazz reissues for major and minor interests and, along with co-founder Joe Lizzi, operates the LP label Triple Point Records.
Since 2009 he has been a staff lecturer in the Swing University program at Jazz at Lincoln Center, teaching the Jazz 101/201/301 sequence, and specialized courses on Third Stream music, Free Jazz, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. He continues to teach those curricula and others at JaLC, WICN in Worcester MA, the Hartford [CT] Jazz Society, and Jazz at Atlas in Newburgh NY—and, starting in 2020, at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. In these enterprises, as in a forthcoming biography of pianist Cecil Taylor, Young underlines the importance of primary-source information to the continuing study of this music.
