Billy Taylor: jazz personified

At 79, the legendary pianist says music is still his most effective way to communicate.

By PHILIP BOOTH

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 25, 2001

If jazz were a religion, Billy Taylor might be thought of as its greatest and most effective living preacher, a tireless, listener-friendly evangelist for the cause.

Taylor, 79, has received the jazz gospel from some of the music's patron saints. He hooked up with saxophonists Ben Webster and Lester Young, Latin bandleader Machito and singer Billie Holiday during the '40s. In the next decade, he played piano at fabled New York club Birdland, behind Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, J.J. Johnson and other legendary jazz figures.

For many Americans, the pianist has become the face of jazz, working for two decades as the arts correspondent for CBS television's Sunday Morning. Taylor's voice, too, has been heard on seven different National Public Radio programs over the years. His latest NPR series, a mix of performances, conversations with musical guests and question-and-answer sessions with the audience, originates from the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he has been jazz adviser since 1994.

Then there is his body of recorded work, a discography that includes more than two dozen swing, bebop and Latin jazz outings, stretching from 1998's Ten Fingers, One Voice all the way back to 1945's Billy Taylor Piano.

Taylor explains his devotion to jazz simply: It is his chosen language.

"Jazz, for me, is a wonderful way to express the things that I have to say musically," Taylor says from New York. "One of the reasons I'm a musician, although I consider myself a good writer and a fairly articulate person, is that there are things that I say much better from my perspective through my music. Whether it's (his composition) I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free or one of the things from my Ten Fingers album, it gets across how I feel at that particular time, in a way that it's impossible to express otherwise."

Taylor returns to one of his favorite modes of expression on Thursday, when he resumes his musical conversation with Ramsey Lewis, best known as the composer of 1965's The In Crowd, a million-selling instrumental hit. The two pianists, slated to play a two-piano show at the Mahaffey Theater, have been friends since the '50s.

They first worked together a couple of decades ago, when Lewis appeared on Taylor's Jazz Counterpoint show on the Bravo network. The two joined forces in the recording studio for We Meet Again, an album released in the late '80s.

"Because he's so popular and has had hit records, people don't realize what a fine pianist he is," Taylor says of his occasional stage partner. "Not only is he classically trained, but a lot of things that he did that made his music popular came from the fact that he's a solid musician. When we play together, we switch roles. He tends to get more classical, and I tend to get funkier."

The two typically take on compositions by Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, as well as Oscar Peterson's Nigerian Marketplace, John Lewis' Django, Denny Zeitlin's Quiet Now and several standards, including Body and Soul.

"It frees us up," Taylor says of the collaboration. "When we first began to play together, he was working with a larger combo. Over the years, more and more, he's felt like, "I have to get back to playing the piano. Let me get back to basics here.'

"That is one of the things that I believe came out of our association. We'll play four or five concerts, and then I won't see him for a few weeks or a couple of months. I always notice the fact that he's growing (musically)."

Taylor, who grew up in a musical family in Greenville, N.C., began playing piano at age 7. He turned toward jazz at age 11, after listening to Fats Waller and Art Tatum records given to him by his Uncle Bob, a stride player. Two years later, he played his first gig, and after his family relocated to Washington, D.C., he spent his free time attending concerts by Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford and Chick Webb.

After graduating from Virginia State College in 1942, Taylor headed to New York, where he found an immediate welcome at Minton's, the Harlem nightspot cherished for its role in the bebop revolution. Taylor found himself in the midst of a particularly inspired group of musicians, during a period celebrated as a golden age of jazz.

"It was exciting to be a part of that. That period was a time when I think the musicians who are now legendary, like Miles and Coltrane and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and many others, actually were shaping the language we use today. What they were doing was looking for the manner in which they were going to speak the language as individuals.

"They were standing on the shoulders of the Art Tatums, the Lester Youngs and the people who preceded us. These musicians came up with ideas which were not only very sound but were really the kinds of things that people have been building on ever since."

Preview

Billy Taylor and Ramsey Lewis, 8 p.m. Thursday, Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg. Tickets are $34-$40. Call (727) 892-5767.

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