Ben Young

Jazz scholar and educator Ben Young has spent 30 years doing first-person research into the history of jazz music, as learned through direct contact with the musicians and the artifacts of their achievements. Young 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.  He has produced, annotated or researched several hundred historical jazz reissues for major interests and independent labels, and has written a small number of monographs and articles documenting essential figures of the New York’s 20th Century jazz scene—including 1998’s Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon. His exhaustive biography of pianist Cecil Taylor is forthcoming in 2025. Since 2009 he has been a staff lecturer in the Swing University program at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Young presently is director of the Jazz History Database at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.