Bill Barron, 62; Jazz Composer, Music Educator

Bill Barron, a reed player, jazz composer and educator, died last week in a Middletown, Conn., hospital near Wesleyan University, where he had been a professor of music for the last several years. Barron, whose career began in his native Philadelphia 40 years ago, was 62 when he died Thursday of cancer.

Born William Barron Jr., he studied piano and tenor saxophone before mastering the flute and soprano sax and came to New York City in the 1950s to perform with Cecil Taylor, Philly Joe Jones and others.

One of his first jobs was with the Carolina Cotton Pickers.

Along with Jones, Benny Golson, John Coltrane and Jimmy Heath, Barron was considered one of the talented, bop-oriented musicians to emerge from Philadelphia after World War II.

“The thing about coming up in Philly,” Barron said in a long-ago interview, “is that all the fellows used to get together quite often. I remember always going over to somebody’s apartment or somebody’s brother’s place, with people like Johnny Coles, Ray Bryant, Jimmy Heath and Calvin Massey, and we’d compare notes.”

In the early 1970s he began to play clubs with his brother Kenny, a pianist.

From 1968 to 1974, Bill Barron was director of the Jazz Workshop at MUSE (the Bedford Lincoln Neighborhood Museum, operated by the Brooklyn Children’s Museum), where he presented regular concerts and taught improvisation, composing, arranging, theory and reeds.

He started jazz programs on New York City radio and taught jazz at City University of New York and Afro-American music at Wesleyan.

He earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts and was seen on New York’s PBS station WNET discussing music in the context of the neighborhoods of the city.

In 1984, Broadcast Music Inc. honored him with its Pioneer of Jazz Award.

His seminal recordings include “The Next Plateau;” “Variations in Blue,” which in 1985 Times jazz critic Leonard Feather said contained “explosive hard-bop lines;” “Jazz Caper;” “Tenor Stylings of Bill Barron;” “Motivation” and “The Hot Line.”

Survivors include his wife, Anna; two daughters; his mother; another brother and two sisters.