Perkinson, Coleridge-Taylor

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born June 14, 1932 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Prophetically, he was named after Samuel Coleridge Taylor, an Afro-British composer and conductor from the late 19th century. He moved to New York around the age of 11 to live with his mother, a piano teacher and church organist. He attended the High School of Music and Art where he began composing and conducting, graduating with a share of the LaGuardia Prize in music in 1949. After two years at New York University’s School of Education, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music to study composition with Vittorio Giannini, Charles Mills and Earl Kim, and earned a Master’s Degree in 1953. His classmates there included later prominent jazz musicians such as Max Roach, Herbie Mann and Randy Weston.

Perkinson’s professional accomplishments span a remarkably wide range of fields, including classical music, jazz, popular music, dance, film soundtracks, scores for television, and education. In 1965 he co-founded the Symphony of the New World in New York; many of his classical compositions (influenced primarily by Hindemith, Barber and Bartok) were collected on a 2005 CD, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: A Celebration . His jazz credits include a short stint playing piano in Max Roach’s Quartet, and work with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, David Sanborn, and Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds. He straddled the jazz and dance worlds when he wrote a ballet for Alvin Ailey inspired by Charlie Parker, For Bird, With Love ; he was also Music Director for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, Jerome Robbins’s American Theater Lab and the Dance Theater of Harlem. His film credits include the Martin Luther King documentary, From Montgomery to Memphis, Sidney Poitier’s A Warm December, Cornbread, Earl and Me, and The Education of Sonny Carson . His television work included scores for Harris and Company and The Plant Family, and musical director for The Barbara McNair Show . His career in education began at Brooklyn College in 1959 and ended at Columbia College Chicago, where he directed the Center for Black Music Research and the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble until his death from cancer on March 9, 2004.

Perkinson’s career as an arranger in popular music was brief, but significant. His eclectic background equipped him well to contribute to the development of rhythm and blues from the slick pop singles of early Motown and the rawer soul of Stax/Volt Records to the more lush, fully orchestrated sounds of disco in the late 1970s. His work on Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and its companion, Leon Ware’s Musical Massage (called “the pre-eminent early disco concept albums” by the All Music Guide), puts him in the company of other arrangers of the period such as David Van de Pitte (on Gaye’s previous records What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On and theTemptations’ Ball of Confusion ), Johnny Allen and Dale Warren (on Isaac Hayes’s Shaft ), Riley Hampton and Johnny Pate (on Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly ), Thom Bell (with the O’Jays and other Philadelphia International Records artists) and Gene Page (with Motown and Barry White) who greatly expanded the level of orchestral sophistication of this music, allowing for records with dramatic, palpable atmosphere and sonic depth.

From the guide to the Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson papers, 1975-1978, (The New York Public Library. Music Division.)