Dr. Billy Taylor Marks His Official Return to Public Performance

On May 21, 2003, eJazzNews carried an announcement that the pianist, educator and broadcaster Billy Taylor would make his official return to public performance with his trio at the Blue Note in New York from June 24 to 29, 2003, with trumpeter Jon Faddis as special guest. Taylor was recovering from a stroke at the time. He kept performing for most of his remaining years and died after a heart attack on December 28, 2010, at the age of 89.

What the 2003 announcement said

The release, posted by the site’s editor, named the trio as Taylor with Chip Jackson on bass and Winard Harper on drums, playing two shows a night at the club on West 3rd Street. It described the illness as what was considered a mild stroke and said Taylor had rebuilt his dexterity by playing selected concerts and sitting in, including with Clark Terry and in a duet with Marian McPartland at Birdland for her 85th birthday. Taylor was quoted as saying “I feel strong,” and that “there’s a big difference between practicing alone and playing before an audience.”

The rest of the release listed his spring schedule: he had attended the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center, which he founded, received an honorary doctorate from George Washington University (the release called it his 21st) and given the commencement address at the University of Michigan-Flint. His hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, had named a street for him and renamed its annual jazz event at East Carolina University the Billy Taylor Jazz Festival. It also noted his 21st season on CBS News Sunday Morning and the 22nd year of his Jazz in July program at the University of Massachusetts. It said his label, Soundpost, was preparing archival recordings for release.

Who Billy Taylor was

William Edward Taylor Jr. was born in Greenville on July 24, 1921, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where he studied piano with Henry Grant, who had taught Duke Ellington. After graduating in music from Virginia State College in 1942, he moved to New York in 1944 and was soon hired by Ben Webster on 52nd Street; the same night he met Art Tatum, who became his mentor (Tatum is profiled in our overview of jazz pianists). In the early 1950s he was the house pianist at Birdland, then led his own trios. He wrote more than 300 pieces, among them “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” which Nina Simone made widely known.

His larger influence came through teaching and broadcasting. He co-founded Jazzmobile, the New York program that took concerts and workshops into the streets in the mid-1960s, led the band on The David Frost Show from 1969 to 1972, hosted NPR’s Jazz Alive! (1977 to 1983) and Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center (1995 to 2001), and reported on jazz for CBS Sunday Morning from 1981. He earned a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts in 1975, was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1988 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1992. He was among the first to call jazz “America’s classical music.”

What happened next

The Blue Note, like Birdland, is still open and appears in our guide to New York jazz clubs. Taylor went on recording and broadcasting; NPR later noted that he played “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” for the network in 2005, two years after the first of several strokes. At his memorial at Riverside Church in Harlem in January 2011, his final working trio partners Chip Jackson and Winard Harper performed with Jimmy Owens and Frank Wess. Jason Moran later succeeded him as artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, and in 2021 NPR’s Jazz Night in America marked his centennial with an episode featuring Jackson and Harper.

Where to start listening

• Cross Section (Prestige, recorded 1953 to 1954): early trio recordings from his first years as a leader, later reissued by Original Jazz Classics.
• Taylor Made at the Kennedy Center (Kennedy Center Jazz Recordings, 2005): concerts recorded at the Kennedy Center between 1999 and 2002, with guests including Terence Blanchard and Stanley Turrentine; NPR drew on it for its centennial tribute.

Sources

• NPR, “Jazz Pianist, Composer Billy Taylor Dies At 89,” NPR, December 30, 2010.
• NPR Music, “NPR Remembers Billy Taylor,” NPR A Blog Supreme, December 30, 2010.
• NPR, “The Urban Griot, Dr. Billy Taylor: A Centennial Celebration,” Jazz Night in America, September 30, 2021.
• National Endowment for the Arts, “Billy Taylor, 1988 NEA Jazz Master,” arts.gov, accessed October 2026.
• CBS News, “Billy Taylor,” CBS News Sunday Morning, undated.
• Washington City Paper, “A Grand Night for Swinging: Billy Taylor’s Memorial Service,” January 11, 2011.
• Discogs, “Billy Taylor: Taylor Made at the Kennedy Center,” Discogs, accessed October 2026.
• Wikipedia, “Billy Taylor,” accessed October 2026.

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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