He directs several educational programs for young musicians and gives lectures on jazz history for adults. For seven years his music-and-interview show from the Terrace Theater was broadcast on National Public Radio.
There's one other thing about his Kennedy Center projects that Taylor finds so satisfying: They bring him back to his home town.
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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He was born in North Carolina and now lives in New York, but from the age of 5 until he was out of college, Washington was Taylor's home. His father was a dentist, his mother a teacher, and everyone in his extended family played music. A piano student by 7, he was especially taken with the jazz his Uncle Bob would play.
"He introduced me to Fats Waller," Taylor recalls, "and he introduced me to the music of Art Tatum. The first time I heard Tatum, I just couldn't believe anyone could play that beautifully, that cleanly and with that much vigor. It was just an enormous way of playing the piano."
At 13, Taylor played his first professional date at the Republic Gardens on U Street (still in business, remarkably, though no longer a jazz club).
"I was so proud," he recalls. "I made a dollar, then came home and gave it to my mother."
At Dunbar High School, he played saxophone and piano. His high school music teacher, Henry Grant, who had taught Duke Ellington 20 years earlier, lived across from the Taylor family on Fairmont Street NW and became something of a model for what Taylor would do on larger scale.
"I've had several wonderful teachers in my life," he says, "and he was one of them. I want to touch people like he touched me."
Saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess, who was a year behind Taylor at Dunbar, often played with him in those early days.
"We used to jam in the orchestra room at lunchtime," Wess says. "He sounded a whole lot like he sounds now."
At Virginia State University, another teacher, Undine Moore, encouraged Taylor to pursue his gift for music. When he changed his major from sociology, his father was furious and cut off his money, so Taylor paid his own way with money earned from playing in bands.
In the 1930s and early '40s, when Taylor was young, Washington was a lively jazz town, with 15 clubs lining T and U streets NW, the most venerable of which was the Crystal Caverns (now the Bohemian Caverns). The leading bands of the time -- Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford and others -- came through for weekly shows at the Howard and Lincoln theaters. Wess recalls all-night jam sessions at an upstairs after-hours spot at Seventh and T called Freddy Woods's Footlight Club.
"All the windows were painted black," he says, "so you wouldn't know if it was day or night."
Even with all this action, everyone knew, then as now, that New York was the real center of jazz. Taylor had met Gillespie, Parker and other musicians on their D.C. visits, and a few months after he graduated from Virginia State in 1943, he took the train north.
