The Last Encore?

He pinched off the song with a tidy flourish. "I wrote that song for my Uncle Bob," he said. "He was a great stride player. When I was a kid, I wanted to play just like him."

Taylor was born in Greenville, N.C., in 1921. His father was a dentist, like his father before him, who was the first African American dentist in Greenville. Both of Taylor's parents were pianists, and he started lessons at age 7, by which time the family had moved north to Washington, to a house on Fairmont Street, near Howard University.

In his free time, Taylor haunted the Library of Congress, browsing through the records and scores of the musicians he admired -- Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith and the piano virtuoso Art Tatum -- though the musician he most admired was Ben Webster, Duke Ellington's saxophonist, whose velvet-throated horn was famous for its sensual immensity. "He had this big, incredible sound," Taylor said. "You could hear him breathing when he played. If he had four bars on an Ellington record, I'd go out and buy it."

Jazz was in full ferment in Washington in the 1930s. U Street, known then as "Black Broadway," thrummed with clubs and dance halls. Taylor played his first gig there at age 13, and earned 50 cents. But the heart of the D.C. jazz scene was the Howard Theatre, where Taylor went nearly every week to hear the world's biggest names in jazz -- Cab Calloway, Basie, Louis Armstrong, Holiday -- for a door charge of 40 cents.

At Dunbar High School, Taylor played in the orchestra. He also took private lessons with Henry Grant, who had taught Ellington. After graduating in 1938, Taylor enrolled at Virginia State University (then Virginia State College), his father's alma mater. Taylor wanted to pursue music, but his father had other ideas, so Taylor majored in sociology, which he studied disinterestedly, reserving his energies and passion for his music. "My sophomore year, a professor of mine, the composer Undine Moore, she called me into her office. She said, 'Billy, what's your major?' I said, 'Sociology.' She said: 'Wrong. You're wasting your time with sociology. Change your major to music.' I said, 'Okay.'"

Taylor's father, to whom he hadn't mentioned switching majors, wasn't happy when he got the next tuition bill, and he told Taylor he could finance his own education from then on. So Taylor paid his way through college gigging with a five-piece combo, sometimes playing as many as three shows a week at black dances and clubs throughout the mid-Atlantic. Some nights, Taylor and his band would pull all-night drives to make it back to Petersburg in time for morning classes.

He graduated from college in 1942, at a time when most men his age were heading overseas to fight in World War II. Taylor assumed that he, too, would be shipped off to combat, but the physical exam revealed that he'd contracted tuberculosis. "I'd been abusing my health, trying to make the band work and pay my bills," Taylor said. "The doctor said: 'Four-F, man. You need to get yourself together.'"

On a Friday night in the summer of 1944, he caught a train to New York. He went to his uncle's house in Harlem, staying only long enough to drop off his bags.

In the 1940s, 20 or more clubs lined 52nd Street, the thriving epicenter of what was then the most important jazz scene on the planet. But Taylor went instead to Minton's Playhouse, a smoggy dive on 118th Street, where a few years earlier trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker invented the strident phonic language the critics were calling bebop. Taylor walked through the door around 9 p.m. He told the bandleader he was a piano player, just in from D.C., and that he'd like to sit in. The bandleader told Taylor to wait. Taylor went to the bar. He nursed a drink, and kept nursing it until 3 in the morning, when he was finally offered a turn at the keys. He hadn't been playing long, when he looked up to see Ben Webster on the bandstand beside him.

Webster had just gotten off from his regular gig at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and when the tune wound down, Webster approached the young pianist. He liked the unconventional way Taylor voiced his chords. Webster's pianist had just left the band, and Webster asked Taylor if he'd like to audition for the job the following Sunday at the Three Deuces.

Taylor's 60-year career proceeded from the set he played that night at the Three Deuces. Webster not only offered him the job, but Art Tatum, another of Taylor's idols, was sitting in the audience. In the months that followed, Tatum, arguably the finest virtuoso that jazz piano has ever seen, took him on as a protege, proclaiming Taylor to the press as "the greatest young jazz pianist in the world."

That same year, Taylor married Theodora Castion, whom he'd met on a visit to New York a couple of years before, and the young couple moved into an apartment in Harlem.