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 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 2027. Since 2009, he has been a staff lecturer in the Swing University program at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Young is presently the director of the Jazz History Database, which was founded at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.