We thought he could go on forever. For decades he has been the public face of jazz, the man with the high-beam smile and big, black-framed glasses who could speak in a tirelessly eloquent voice about the joy of jazz. And when Dr. Billy Taylor wasn't talking about jazz, he was playing it, as a pianist who had shared the stage with almost everyone who has ever mattered in the long history of jazz.
If not exactly youthful -- even as a kid, he was a model of professionalism and sober responsibility -- Taylor seemed to resist the passing of time like the ageless standards he's always loved to play. But in December 2001, he awoke one morning unable to blink. He has been working his way back ever since, recovering from the stroke that affected the right side of his body, including the right hand that once danced across the keys like Astaire.
A longtime advocate for what he calls "America's classical music," the 83-year-old Taylor will give his farewell concert Thursday at the Kennedy Center.
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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Less than a year after he was stricken, Taylor was performing again, relying mostly on his mighty left hand. (For years in concert, long before the stroke, he featured a bravura piece in which he played everything -- melody, chords, driving rhythm -- with just his left hand.) Today, he still speaks in his familiar torrent of words, his handshake is solid and, to judge from a few arpeggios and chords he played on an electronic keyboard in his room at the Watergate Hotel, much of the old dexterity in his right hand has returned.
But at 83, he's finally let the word "retirement" creep into his vocabulary. On Thursday at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater, after 70 years on the bandstand, Billy Taylor is giving his farewell concert.
"I'm becoming very aware of my mortality," he says.
He'll appear as part of the Kennedy Center's two-month celebration "A New America: The 1940s and the Arts." With the possible exception of drummer Roy Haynes, who appeared this month at the Terrace, no other living musician was as close to the creative fires of the bebop caldron of the early 1940s as Taylor. Sixty years later, the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie still sounds fresh, and the age of bebop is looking like the most fertile and vibrant period jazz has ever known.
Trumpeter Jon Faddis will join Taylor's regular trio with bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Winard Harper, but it's really going to be a showcase for Taylor. He will talk, not so much about himself as about the lessons he learned from Bird and Diz and how they elevated jazz from the dancehalls to what Taylor often calls "America's classical music."
"He has the enthusiasm of a 10- or 11-year-old who's just discovered something really cool," says Jackson, trying to explain the secret to Taylor's music and his ever-upbeat personality. "Every time I play with him I feel that, every single time."
Still, there's bound to be a melancholy undercurrent beneath the buoyant rhythms.
"Sometimes you have to stop doing one thing to focus on something else," he says. "What I want to focus on now is the programs for the Kennedy Center. I came down here a little over 10 years ago, and my idea was to build the educational department. The reason that I retired is so I can pull these things together."
Taylor wants you to know that he's not drifting away, never to touch the piano again, and that he'll keep busy as an advocate for jazz. But with this week's performance, his touring schedule comes to an end. There are no other concerts on his calendar.
Billy Taylor joined the Kennedy Center as an artistic adviser in 1994 and went about building a revived presence for jazz in a city from which it had almost disappeared. Clubs vanished, jazz radio all but went off the air, and no one seemed to care.
"Before Billy was here," says Darrell Ayers, the Kennedy Center's vice president for education and jazz programs, "the Kennedy Center would have four performances a year in jazz. Now, we're over 150 performances."
Taylor developed the vocal and piano concert series that form the core of the Kennedy Center's jazz program and launched the annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, now in its 10th year. Having performed in federally sponsored tours around the world in decades past, Taylor helped revive the State Department's dormant effort at jazz diplomacy by placing it under the administration of the Kennedy Center.
