Billy Taylor (July 24, 1921 – December 28, 2010) was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. Taylor appeared on hundreds of albums and composed more than 300 songs during his career, which spanned over six decades.
Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina, but moved to Washington, D.C., when he was five years old. He grew up in a musical family and learned to play different instruments as a child, including guitar, drums and saxophone. He was most successful at the piano, and had classical piano lessons with Henry Grant, who had educated Duke Ellington a generation earlier. Taylor made his first professional appearance playing keyboard at the age of 13 and was paid one dollar.
Taylor attended Dunbar High School, the U.S.'s first high school for African American students. He attended Virginia State College and majored in sociology. During his time, he joined Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Pianist Undine Smith Moore noticed young Taylor's talent in piano and he changed his major to music, graduating with a degree in music in 1942.
Taylor moved to New York City after graduation and started playing piano professionally from 1944, first with Ben Webster's Quartet on New York's 52nd Street. The same night he joined Webster's Quartet, he met Art Tatum, who became his mentor. Among the other musicians Taylor worked with was Machito and his mambo band, from whom he developed a love for Latin music. After an eight-month tour with the Don Redman Orchestra in Europe, Taylor stayed there with his wife, Theodora, and in Paris and the Netherlands.
Taylor returned to New York later that year and cooperated with Bob Wyatt and Sylvia Syms at the Royal Roost jazz club and Billie Holiday in a successful show called Holiday on Broadway. A year later, he became the house pianist at Birdland and performed with Charlie Parker, J.J. Johnson, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Taylor played at Birdland longer than any other pianist in the club's history. In 1949, Taylor published his first book, a textbook about bebop piano styles.
In 1952, Taylor composed one of his best known tunes, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free", which achieved more popularity with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He made dozens of recordings in the 1950s and 1960s, including Billy Taylor Trio with Candido with Cuban percussionist Candido Camero, My Fair Lady Loves Jazz, Cross Section and Taylor Made Jazz.
In 1958, he became music director of NBC's The Subject Is Jazz, the first television series focusing on jazz. The 13-part series was produced by the new National Educational Television Network with guests such as Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Rushing, and Langston Hughes. Taylor also worked as a DJ and programme director on radio station WLIB in New York in the 1960s.
During the 1960s, the Billy Taylor Trio was a regular feature of the Hickory House on West 55th Street in Manhattan. From 1969 to 1972, he served as music director for The David Frost Show and was the first African American to lead a talk-show band. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Buddy Rich were just a few of the musicians who played on the show.
Taylor was to write more than 300 compositions, ranging from that song to ensemble pieces such as Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra (1973. He was host of the Jazz Alive radio show throughout the 1970s, and of Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center in the 90s – shows with an informal mix of erudition and populism. From 1980 he was active in a campaign for greater jazz support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and won one of its prizes, a Jazz Masters, in 1988. He was a cultural representative for the US in the Soviet Union in 1987-88, and founded his own record label, Taylor Made.
Many Taylor sessions are unavailable, but his drive and lyricism at the keyboard received wider recognition in the 1990s with a sparky series of recordings, including a vivacious bebop get-together with Mulligan on Live at MCG (1993). In 1994 his career was celebrated at Carnegie Hall, New York, in Billy Taylor: My First 50 Years in Jazz. For his 75th year in 1996, he played a solo session on Ten Fingers – One Voice. He was honoured in 2001 with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Jazz Living Legend Award, and election to the Hall of Fame for the International Association for Jazz Education
Despite his activities in jazz education, Taylor was rarely absent from performances and recordings, always keeping his bop-based style consistently swinging and fresh. Taylor suffered from a 2002 stroke, which affected his right hand, but he continued to perform almost until his death. He died after a heart attack on December 28, 2010 in Manhattan at the age of 89.
(Edited from The Guardian & Wikipedia)