The Last Encore?

Courtly, clean-cut and bespectacled, Taylor often cut an unlikely figure among the men with whom he shared the bandstand. Heroin was coming into vogue, and Taylor's colleague Charlie Parker was the renowned avatar of addiction chic. While Taylor's mentor, Tatum, was no junkie, he was a prodigious alcoholic, ultimately drinking himself to death in 1956. Webster, too, was one of jazz's more unpredictable celebrities. Nicknamed, "the Brute," Webster was a fearsome drunk with a reputation for violence, rumored to have once thrown a woman from a hotel window.

Taylor, when he first arrived in New York, might have gone the way of his hard-living associates, if it weren't for Jo Jones, Basie's drummer. "Whenever Jo would introduce me to people I admired, people like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, he'd say: 'This is Billy Taylor. He doesn't drink.' By which he meant, I shouldn't drink. And that was fine. So I didn't drink whenever Jo Jones was there, but when he wasn't around, I'd be knocking them back. But one time, he gave me a spanking I'll never forget. I was playing at this club on 52nd Street. I'd had a couple of drinks, feeling pretty good, and I look up, and Jo is sitting there between Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, the most important guys I knew. He just sat there with his arms crossed, giving me this very reproachful look -- I couldn't play, one of the few times I really got stage fright. I thought, 'Oh, man, why did I take that second drink?' After that, never again. You couldn't force me to have a drink if I was going near a piano."

Taylor's consumption habits weren't the only thing that set him apart in the smoke-veiled lounges of 52nd Street. "It was hard, sometimes," Taylor said. "People would see me and say: 'Look at him, he looks like a professor. Isn't he straight?'" In 1949, Taylor's reputation as a gifted, eminently versatile player landed him a job as house pianist at Birdland, the nightclub named for Parker, and America's hottest venue for avant-garde jazz. Taylor would enjoy the longest tenure on Birdland's bench of anyone in the club's history.

But Taylor stood apart from Birdland's hipster crowd. In 1951, the differences between Taylor and the clannish clique of narcotics-users he played with at Birdland came to a head. One night, the band was taking up a collection for a heroin score. When Taylor refused to chip in, the band voted to cut him from the group.

Taylor also had his differences with musicians such as Parker and Gillespie, whom he felt weren't doing enough to educate audiences increasingly alienated by the rancor and difficulty of the bop sound. Listeners accustomed to the pop sensibilities of swing music were buffaloed by bop's preference for blistering solos and jagged departures from standard harmonies. "People were asking serious questions about jazz and seeking serious answers," Taylor told Melody Maker in 1971. "It bothered me when Diz and Bird would start talking bebop and giving nonsensical answers to what they were intelligent enough to know was a seriously meant question . . . It bothered me so much that every chance I got, I tried to set the record straight."

Jazz needed a spokesman, Taylor felt, someone who could explain the sometimes challenging music to audiences without resorting to elliptical hipsterisms, such as Louis Armstrong's claim that, "man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." But no one seemed interested in the job, and so Taylor volunteered. He delivered lecture-performances explicating jazz at Yale and colleges throughout the Northeast. He narrated the music's journey from plantation fields, through ragtime and stride, to swing and bop. He unlocked for audiences the black box of jazz improvisation, explaining how musicians transform chords and melodies into spontaneously composed solos. He laid bare the mechanics of chord voicings, harmony, of bop's intricate dissonances and rhythms, of the musical interplay in ensembles, and anything else audiences and young players wanted to know.

In 1958, he took a position as on-air musical director for "The Subject Is Jazz" on NBC, a 13-episode series chronicling the music's history and anticipating Ken Burns's documentary by more than 40 years. In addition to playing regular local club dates, he held down a daily DJ slot spinning jazz records at a black-owned radio station, WLIB (AM).

"Billy Taylor's radio show was very important," said critic Gary Giddins, who grew up in New York in the 1960s. "For the few of us who were jazz fanatics during the height of the Beatles thing, Taylor's show was it. He was very good. He was very likable on the air, he and [his colleague] Ed Williams. They would zone in on a record, and they would pick a track and play the track over and over again. They were treating it like pop music. They brought people into the music, and I'm sure they sold records."

Taylor's recording career, however, was slipping into the doldrums, in part, he said, because his label, Capitol, had trained its promotional energies on Taylor's rock-and-roll labelmates, the Beatles among them. "If they couldn't make you into the next Elvis Presley," Taylor said, "they didn't want to waste time on you."

Musicians were suffering across the jazz pantheon. Big bands had fallen out of vogue. Armstrong and Ellington retreated to their tour buses, driven to earn a living before live audiences rather than in the studio. Benny Goodman started adding Stravinsky and Mozart to his repertoire. Others, such as Webster, Chet Baker, Don Byas, Stan Getz and Bud Powell, left for Europe, where audiences held jazz in more abiding esteem than those in its native land. Miles Davis, who by the close of the 1960s had abandoned acoustic jazz for electrified fusion, grew so embittered at the record companies' treatment of jazz artists that he said that to call him a jazz musician was akin to calling him "nigger."

Rather than continue making records, Taylor quit recording altogether and devoted himself to trying to persuade American audiences that jazz was not a dying form. In 1964, Taylor raised $10,000 from a beer company and commissioned the construction of a New Orleans-style rolling bandstand, pulled by a truck, which Taylor dubbed the "Jazzmobile." If black listeners were no longer coming out to hear jazz, he would bring jazz to them, free of charge. Every weekend in summer, the Jazzmobile trucked in luminaries -- Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, Brubeck, Milt Hinton -- to some of the poorest neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx. Along with the concerts, the Jazz-mobile sponsored free music instruction at local schools to anyone who walked in the door.

Taylor also tried to pitch jazz to the next generation of listeners. He appeared on the PBS children's programs "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company." In 1969, he spent a week as guest host of "Captain Kangaroo," where he introduced a nation of perhaps bewildered children to the music of stride piano hero Willie "the Lion" Smith and Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji.