The Last Encore?

Taylor's peculiar obscurity owes itself in part to the quest he'd already taken up when the shutter winked on the famous Harlem tableau (he did not appear in that photo). As America began to turn away from jazz toward rock, folk, Motown, and Sinatra and the Rat Pack, jazz musicians weathered the approaching blight in all sorts of ways. Some quit, or changed their sound, or left for Europe, or simply shut their ears and played on against the mounting chorus of critics who asserted that jazz was dead. Taylor did something few other musicians wanted to attempt. He put the music ahead of his artistic ambitions and became jazz's first career educator and public evangelist, laboring for six decades in the conviction that mainstream Americans can be taught to go on caring about a musical inheritance that they seem determined to neglect.

After the applause subsided, a stage manager took the microphone and explained to the honorees how the shoot and the award ceremony were going to unfold.

"What we want to do. Is bring all the honorees on stage. In as smooth a fashion. And as quick a fashion. As possible," he said, in the maddeningly slow and loud locution of someone addressing the lunchroom at a nursing home.

The stage manager explained that the honorees would stand in a straight line. Then it was picture time, and the titans were called forward. With varying degrees of ease, the 32 mounted the dais.

The cast would not immediately come to order. Marsalis was teasing Brubeck. Ahmad Jamal was caught up in a bout of horseplay with Jarreau and Hendricks. Corea wouldn't look at the camera. "Look at me, Chick," the photographer called. "Ornette Coleman, a little to your right. Smiling is a good thing, Freddie," he said to Freddie Hubbard, master of the hard-bop trumpet, famous in his prime for pitching foul-mouthed, tearful tantrums in the middle of his sets.

Through a lightning storm of camera flashes, Taylor, sitting in the front row, wore an unflagging grin, even though singer Little Jimmy Scott, who was looking quite tired, was listing into Taylor's left shoulder. "Billy Taylor, perfect smile every time," the photographer said.

"You got about two more minutes," someone called.

After another shot or two, the photographer gave the legends leave to go. "It's a great day in Washington," the photographer called out. Yet as the legends stepped down from the stage, a question seemed to hang in the room: Fifty years from now, and the next "Great Day" shoot, would there be flesh-and-blood players filling out the frame, or just photo plates from a history book propped on a music stand?

BILLY TAYLOR IS A TALL MAN, hunched only slightly by age. His expression, even in repose, is a smile of a high, uncasual wattage, the expression of someone who has spent so much time beaming into camera lenses that the smile has been permanently scribed into his muscle memory. He is 85 years old, with a somewhat dubiously thick head of red-brown hair, and a face still so youthful that a scrupulous box office clerk would be within his rights to card Taylor for the senior citizen discount. He favors Ralph Lauren buttoned shirts and loafers, though his most distinctive accessory is his glasses. He has two pairs at least, and both are large apparatuses of beveled plastic with lenses the size of soap dishes. His showier pair, which he wears for public occasions, has little gilt embellishments on the temples, and could be melted down and minted into a handsome, spacious jewelry box.

Taylor was raised in Washington, but for the last 30 years, he has lived in a five-room apartment in Riverdale, N.Y., with his wife, Theodora. A library of vinyl albums and CDs fills one wall of the living room, which otherwise is the domain of a sleek, black Steinway baby grand, its wheels bedded in the wall-to-wall carpet. The carpet is a striking shade of red, lending Taylor's apartment the atmosphere of a perpetual awards gala.

One chilly afternoon in late winter, Taylor sat playing the piano. The tune was a jouncing stride number, a tripping melody in the upper keys and chunky quarter tones in the bass. The movement of his hands was a sight of startling effortlessness. He held his fingers straight and flat. They appeared too placid, too easeful to be responsible for the fusillade of tones burbling from the Steinway. It looked as though he was doing a poor job of miming along with a player piano.

Five years ago, Taylor suffered a stroke that temporarily crippled his left hand. He feared he'd never play again, but he committed himself to a vigorous therapy of five-finger exercises and, within two years, won back the use of his hand. That afternoon in his apartment, the pianist seemed restored to the fullness of his powers, or close to it, anyway. "I can't practice like I used to, though there's not the need to practice now," said Taylor, who officially retired from the concert stage two years ago. "I'm still in the process of just repairing whatever I have left, trying to make sure that I can play as best I can for as long as I can."