Billy Taylor, 1921-2010

Billy Taylor’s great strength as a musician was his versatility. As the house pianist at New York City’s legendary Birdland nightclub, Taylor accompanied such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, varying his approach to suit each soloist’s idiosyncrasies. The experience earned him a reputation as a competent technician, but one without a distinctive voice of his own. No such criticism was leveled at him about his second career, as an educator and advocate for jazz, which he called “America’s classical music.”

Taylor originally aspired to play tenor saxophone, said the London Independent. Born to a middle-class black family in Washington, D.C., he studied music at what became Virginia State University in Petersburg. Finding himself “overwhelmed” by the talent of a classmate, Taylor switched to piano, which he had played as a child. He moved to New York City in 1944, heading straight for Minton’s, the Harlem club where aspiring musicians could join the biggest stars in jazz in informal jam sessions.

In New York, Taylor fell in love with the advanced harmonies and breakneck tempos of bebop, said The Washington Post. “But few musicians were comfortable speaking about its complexities to the uninitiated.” Taylor, who had a doctorate in education, “filled that void.” As musical director of the NBC television show The Subject Is Jazz, the first jazz series on TV, and as a lecturer and disc jockey, Taylor gained a reputation as the genre’s most articulate spokesman. “Younger generations came to recognize his beaming smile, oversize glasses, and rich baritone voice more than his accomplished work at the keyboard.”

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Taylor also composed more than 350 songs, including “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” which became an “anthem of the civil-rights movement,” said the London Telegraph. He was a mainstay of the Washington jazz scene, and was the chief jazz advisor to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The recipient of many awards, Taylor was presented with the National Medal of Arts by President George H.W. Bush in 1992.