Education
Perkinson attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City and studied composition with Vittorio Giannini and Charles Mills at the Manhattan School of Music and Earl Kim at Princeton University.
composer conductor pianist jazz musician
Perkinson attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City and studied composition with Vittorio Giannini and Charles Mills at the Manhattan School of Music and Earl Kim at Princeton University.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was Afro-American. He was named after Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). Perkinson"s mother was active in music and the arts as a piano teacher, church organist, and director of a theater company.
He was on the faculty of Brooklyn College (1959–1962) and studied conducting in the summers of 1960, 1962, and 1963 in the Netherlands with Franco Ferrara and Dean Dixon and also learned conducting in 1960 at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.
Perkinson cofounded the Symphony of the New World in New York in 1965 and later became its Music Director. He was also Music Director of Jerome Robbins"s American Theater Laboratory and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Perkinson composed a ballet for Ailey entitled Foreign Bird, With Love inspired by the music of jazz great Charlie Parker. Perkinson wrote a great deal of classical music, but was equally well-versed in jazz and popular music
He served briefly as pianist for drummer Max Roach’s quartet and wrote arrangements for Roach, Marvin Gaye, and Harry Belafonte.
Perkinson"s music has a blend of Baroque counterpoint. American Romanticism. Elements of the blues, spirituals, and black folk music
And rhythmic ingenuity.