The Last Encore?

In 1969, Taylor landed a job as bandleader for the "David Frost Show," a nightly talk and variety program hosted by the arid British journalist. In getting the job, Taylor had made broadcast history as the first African American bandleader on network television. The Cleveland Plain Dealer noted Frost's new hire with the headline, "David Frost Musical Director is BLACK."

In the same era, Taylor was commuting regularly to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was working on a doctorate in musicology. In 1977, he was hired to host the NPR program "Jazz Alive," syndicated to more than 200 stations, in which he conducted interviews and offered commentary on jazz performances. "He really knew how to sell the music," said Gary Giddins. "He's not the deepest thinker when he talks about the music because he doesn't want to get over anybody's head. And that's a gift, that's a gift. He brings everybody in with him."

In 1981, eight years after the Frost show had gone off the air, Taylor was hired as arts correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning," regularly hosting profiles of jazz musicians, carrying his message of the music's importance and vitality into millions of American homes. Not long after Taylor was hired by the network, Mayor Marion Barry proclaimed a "Billy Taylor Day" in Washington.

In the 1970s, he rededicated himself to performing, sometimes leaving home for months at a time. By then, Taylor's children, Kimberly and Duane, were nearly grown, and Taylor had been around for precious little of their childhood. Taylor's wife, Theodora, told an interviewer not long after he was hired for the Frost show, "I've raised two children, almost by myself."

TAYLOR'S DOCTORAL THESIS, which he finished in 1975, can be summed up in what is probably the most widely bruited sentence in today's jazz community: "Jazz is America's classical music." And while it was partly through the efforts of people such as Taylor that jazz has at last found its way into America's uppermost preserves of high culture -- the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and endowed chairs from Harvard to UCLA -- the motto also speaks to the unhappy destiny jazz would share with classical music near the end of the 20th century. "What nationalist boosters of jazz never expected when they struck gold with their classical allusion is that the two veins of music would end up suffering similar fates," wrote Richard Woodward in the Village Voice in 2001. "For many of the same reasons, jazz and classical music find themselves limping into the millennium under the burden of a glorious but sclerotic sense of tradition, and supported by an aging audience base that shows no sign of rejuvenating anytime soon."

One of jazz's bestselling albums, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," hit the charts in 1959, and the four decades that followed would witness the music's fitful recession from mainstream listenership. With a handful of notable exceptions, instrumental jazz failed to win back audiences that had started to stray at the onset of the bop era. Riven by new categories -- free jazz, Latin, fusion, acid jazz, smooth jazz -- consensus as to what jazz was or wasn't began to disintegrate. Even the music's most commercially successful incarnation in years, smooth jazz, posed an artistic quandary. A heavily pasteurized, atmospheric music that favored listener-friendly melodies over improvisatory prowess, smooth jazz, in the 1980s, revived the music's presence on mainstream radio. But the hard-core jazz establishment largely dismissed the new genre as a commercial abomination. In 1992, saxophonist Kenny G lofted smooth jazz into the Top 40 with "Breathless," which, with sales of more than 15 million copies, is the bestselling instrumental album in recording history. Yet no one has deplored his success more venomously than the jazz community.

"You're in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Kenny G, and you've got a gun with only two bullets. What do you do?" asks a bitter joke circulating widely on jazz chat sites. "Shoot Kenny G twice."

As the decades passed, jazz's star-making machinery slipped into disrepair. Record companies signed fewer artists, and though New York clubs such as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Iridium still thrive today, jazz clubs in the rest of America have undergone a massive die-off.

In 1968, the riots waged in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination shuttered the jazz clubs along U Street, leaving the city of Ellington's birth with only a handful of jazz venues, among them Blues Alley and One Step Down on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, which closed in 2000.

By the early '90s, with the exception of smooth jazz, the music had all but vanished from American commercial radio. But it found new allies in august venues such as the Kennedy Center, which in 1994 brought in Taylor as artistic adviser to help launch its fledgling jazz program.

"It was past time that cultural institutions should recognize jazz as a cultural icon in this country," said Darrell Ayers, the Kennedy Center's vice president for education. "When Billy came on, we saw a huge proliferation in our jazz programming."

Under Taylor's watch, the Kennedy Center's concert series expanded from four per year to more than 50, and in 1997, Taylor launched a radio show, "Billy Taylor's Jazz," at the Kennedy Center. Taylor also expanded the center's education initiatives, including the "Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead" program, a weeklong jazz camp whose alumni include players such as Blue Note recording artist Jason Moran, 32, the most celebrated young jazz pianist in the nation today.

Though jazz vocalists such as Harry Connick Jr., Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall still sell records in pop quantities, the market continues to be frosty for instrumental stars. These days, even Marsalis, the only household name to emerge from the jazz world in the last quarter-century, is far from commercial viability as a recording artist. Of the dozen records he recorded in the 1990s, none logged sales over 15,000 units.

In 2001, Burns's documentary series "Jazz" inspired a rash of CD releases, with Burns hoping to catch an updraft in sales from this piece of rare publicity. But the documentary, which, to the disappointment of the contemporary jazz scene, chronicled only the music's early history and basically ignored the present, didn't do much to buoy sales of new releases. By 2005, America's classical music would barely register a pulse with the record-buying public. With sales at 1.8 percent of market share, jazz was outstripped not only by traditional classical recordings, which were trickling off the shelves at 2.4 percent, but even by children's music, whose sales beat out jazz by 0.5 percentage points, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

WHILE TAYLOR IS PROBABLY JAZZ'S MOST relentlessly affable personality since Armstrong himself, he does, from time to time, suffer pangs of melancholy that history will likely remember him as a statesman, not as a musician.

"I have not prospered," Taylor told a reporter in 1983, when he was 61 years old. "I wanted my music played by everybody. I wanted to play it myself in Europe, but I've never been invited to Europe. My name doesn't mean enough at the box office. I used to think there was something wrong with me. But I know I can play the piano. I know I have influenced people. I hear other people imitating me, and their records are the ones played on the air. They've just added some sauce, but it's still me."

In the mid-1980s, Taylor returned to the studio to try to reclaim the reputation as a pianist-composer that began atrophying when he swore off recording two decades earlier. He established his own record label, Taylor Made, and released four albums. Critics received the albums genially if not ecstatically, but by then, the window for opportunity had pretty well been painted shut for jazz artists, at least as far as record sales were concerned.

"I wish, in hindsight, that I had followed my first inclination, to do what a lot of other guys were doing, just going on fighting to get their music out there. But, at the time, it just seemed pointless," he said on the Monday morning after the Kennedy Center event, in a handsome suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Maryland Avenue SW. Wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt, Taylor sat at the folding bench of a black Yamaha electric piano, which the Kennedy Center had rented for him. "Part of it was that I had another choice, so I didn't have to do that. I said, I'll direct my time and efforts to this other direction. It was a mistake, careerwise. I should have done more."

By the 1970s, the critics had mostly made up their minds about Taylor's playing. Though they praised him as a refined and versatile stylist, they tended to fault his penchant for excessive cultivation and charm -- precisely those qualities that made him such an able spokesman for the music.

"He is impressive to those excited by technique, and his touch is polite and polished," wrote one reviewer. "But underneath there is a void."

"Billy had incredible ears and an incredible touch," said critic Giddins. "He was a blessing to everyone because he could play everything. He was a great virtuoso player, and he wrote one of the all-time great [gospel] numbers ever, 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,'" later recorded by such disparate artists as Nina Simone, John Denver and Allman Brothers guitarist Derek Trucks. "Billy used to do this left-handed arrangement of 'All the Things You Are.' It was an incredible virtuoso feat, but it wasn't something that really moved you."

Part of what hounded Taylor, Giddins pointed out, was that by the late 1950s, critical appetites had begun to favor wild individualism over pianistic elan. They wanted devastating originality, exemplified by the veering, fitful melodies of Thelonious Monk, or the surging dynamism of pianists such as Ahmad Jamal or, later, Bill Evans, whose playing is so haunted, so gracefully grief-racked that his live recordings at the Village Vanguard conjure an image of the pianist quietly snugging a noose around his neck to the audience's jolly din of table chatter and chiming glassware.

"The good reviews were so few and far between," said Taylor, looking back on the critical response to his playing. "As compared to a lot of friends of mine who really got glowing reviews, I would get a lot of faint praise, and yet people were coming to see me night after night. I couldn't figure that out."

I recounted to Taylor something a jazz critic acquaintance had said while were talking about Taylor's life and work. "He's done great things as an advocate for jazz, but I didn't know he'd had a piano career."

"Yeah, I know," Taylor said. "That's happened to me a lot. There's no question that being an advocate eclipsed my reputation as a musician. It was my doing. When I got into it, people were saying, 'Jazz is dead,' and I said, 'I think you're wrong.' I wanted to prove to people that jazz has an audience. I had to do that for me."

The phone rang, and Taylor rose to answer it. The front desk was calling to let him know that people from the rental outfit were coming by to pick up the piano.

"I did everything I know how to do, both in music and in trying to help people understand what the music was about," Taylor said. "I did my best. I gave it my best shot. Unfortunately, it just didn't work."

EVERY SUMMER FOR THE LAST 25 YEARS, Taylor has returned to his alma mater in Amherst, where he spends two weeks teaching young artists at a program called "Jazz in July." Three years ago, he met a young piano prodigy named Christian Sands, and was sufficiently taken with his playing to invite Sands for a concert at the Kennedy Center last year. One bitter day in February, Sands, 17, was recording a CD at a studio in New Haven, Conn., and Taylor obliged his request to sit in as producer. "I was hoping we'd be able to do something together before I went off to college," said Sands, who was waiting to hear back from the Manhattan School of Music and the New England Conservatory. Taylor is "a very lyrical player. He always tells a story when he plays . . . These days, people don't play with the same feeling that those early cats from his generation did. He was there when the tunes were written."

Sands began playing piano at age 3. At his first lesson, his teacher introduced him to Beethoven by playing "Ode to Joy." The teacher was astounded, according to Sands's father, Sylvester, when the boy, who would turn out to have perfect pitch, wandered over to the keys and tapped out the melody in fluid mimicry. As he was learning classical technique, Sands was also absorbing jazz styles from his father, an amateur jazz pianist. "I remember when he was 6, Christian was in the middle of a classical recital when he stopped reading the music and started doing jazz riffs," said Sylvester Sands. "I said, 'You're not sticking to the music. I think you should be playing jazz.'"

Sands began playing jazz at age 7, and it wasn't long before some of his most eminent forebears began taking note of his gifts. When Sands was in fourth grade, Brubeck's doctor happened to catch one of his recitals. After hearing Sands play "Take Five," he arranged a meeting with Brubeck. Sands impressed Brubeck with a rendition of "Blue Rondo a la Turk," from Brubeck's bestselling "Time Out," and the two became friends. These days, they speak often on the phone, and Brubeck, who lives in southern Connecticut, invites the Sands family to spend his birthday with him each December.

"People [my age] don't even really know what jazz is, or where it came from," Sands said. "They haven't really listened to it. When they think of jazz, they think of elevator music or Kenny G. It's hard to explain it to them."

Sands also plays classical music and dabbles in hip-hop, but he foresees a career in jazz, never mind the challenge of making a living at it. "For me and other young musicians, it's our job to try to make the music popular again," Sands said. "Or at least to try."

Sands, a soft-spoken, light-skinned young man with a fringe of mustache, appears to be heading toward an accomplished career. Last year, after two summers under Taylor's tutelage in Amherst, Sands was selected to perform at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards, where he engaged in a musical duel with piano legend Oscar Peterson. The week before the recording session, Sands had been out in Los Angeles for his second appearance at the Grammys.

While the quintet was setting up in the studio, Taylor and Sands sat in the control room. Taylor asked how he had liked his time in L.A.

"It was a lot of fun," said Sands, who performed one of his own compositions as part of the broadcast. He continued, somewhat glumly: "But they only played, like, three seconds of it, and that was during the applause."

"Oh, that's ridiculous," said Taylor, shaking his head. Though Taylor himself was honored in the Grammys' 2005 broadcast ("They gave me an award for living so long") and was once vice president of New York's chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, which administers the awards, he regards the academy as yet another of the legion of institutions to have forsaken jazz in his time.

When the engineer had dialed knobs and tweaked levels to his satisfaction, Sands retreated to the nine-foot-long Steinway, and the recording session began. The band counted off a solemn mid-tempo ballad Sands had composed. Taylor sat enthroned in an office chair on an upper terrace in the control room. When the music started, Taylor's eyes went wide and his spine straightened, and he listened with the focused scrutiny of a jeweler peering through a loupe.

"How was that?" Sands asked when the take was over.

Taylor leaned into the producer's microphone on the table in front of him. "It was very nice," he said. "Now do another one, and play it like you mean it."

The combo wound through another couple of takes, and Taylor listened with unflagging attentiveness, raising himself out of his seat every now and again to walk -- with some effort and a slight limp -- to the studio to render face-to-face coaching to the horns or to clarify a pianistic detail to Sands. By midday, an upper register F key on the Steinway had gone sour after the morning's drubbing. While the piano tuner did his work, the musicians sat with Taylor in the control room. The drummer, a tall dark man named Jesse Hameen, kept taking a seat next to Taylor to express his gratitude. Hameen is in his 50s, and, as it happened, had played on Taylor's Jazzmobile a few times back in the '80s. "You put a lot of money in my pocket, a lot of our pockets," Hameen said.

"I'm glad," Taylor said.

Hameen mentioned that he was putting together a local program of visiting artists and wanted to know if Taylor would consider making an appearance next year.

Taylor demurred. "Well, I'm not doing a whole lot now, just trying to get my library together. I've spent too much time away from my wife. I've got to come back in now."

"How long you been married?"

"Sixty-five years," Taylor said.

"Wow," Hameen said. "That's a blessing."

"That's right. I was lucky. I met somebody very special. She brought up our kids, while I was running all over the radio, out on the road, trying to pay those bills."

"But see, you were doing more than paying bills," Hameen said. "You paid a whole lot of our bills, everybody's bills. You were the one that God used to set some stuff up for us. Some people, yeah, they are just trying to pay bills, but you set up institutions. The rest of us, we need to be coming together now, sitting with you -- a Billy Taylor summit! -- figuring out how we're going to continue this tradition."

"And that's what I was trying to do, with things like the Jazz-mobile," Taylor said, "but all of my elders drummed it into me: Man, you got to pass it on."

"And you been doing it," Hameen said. "You helped a lot of people, helped a lot of people grow. And that's serious, man. You're a tremendous example. You put so much in motion."

Taylor laughed. "Well, straight ahead, man. That's beautiful to hear."

In the next room, the piano tuner was still plinking diagnostically at the Steinway's ailing F. The morning spent listening so closely to Sands's music had roused in Taylor a desire to share some songs of his own, and so with the aid of his iPod, mainlined into the studio monitors, he treated the room to a brief synopsis of the largely vanished songs he had recorded over the years. A tune he'd recorded back in the 1950s with members from Ellington's band coursed from the speakers -- a languid saxophone breathing out a husky, voluptuous murmur above the limber cadences of Taylor's chords. The room fell silent at the sound of it. After a few measures, Christian and Sylvester Sands and Jesse Hameen lapsed into a simultaneous bout of giggling wonderment. "Man," Christian Sands said, "what a sweet sound. Who's that on the saxophone?"

"That's Johnny Hodges," Taylor said.

"Who's that young guy on the piano?" Sylvester Sands asked.

"Nobody," said Billy Taylor, smiling. "Nobody we know."

"WE'VE COME TO THE SUMMIT OF OUR PROGRAM," James Earl Jones intoned from the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall on the opening night of the "Jazz in Our Time" celebration. "The reason we're all here, to honor the living jazz legends." Jones called the 32 legends to the stage. They stood for a long moment in their medals and red ribbons, blinking and smiling under the stage lights, while the room shook with applause. When the ovations died down, the honorees turned and made their way at a careful pace, into the darkness of the wings.

With the evening almost at its end, the chairman of the Kennedy Center's board of trustees came out to utter praise for "our own living legend, Dr. Billy Taylor." And after the chairman declaimed Taylor's long inventory of achievements and job titles, Taylor was permitted at last to play the piano.

The piece he'd chosen was his most famous composition, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," arranged with a full jazz orchestra and a 50-person choir. After an introductory flourish of horns, Taylor played by himself. At the end of a night of brisk ensemble numbers and lush orchestral spectacles, a lonely, pondering elegance emanated from Taylor's unaccompanied piano. The melody was sure-handed but still halting, contemplative, its silences full of the melancholy wisdom of the blues. Even with the bandstand crowded to capacity, never before in the evening's program had the stage seemed as private and solitary a place as it did during Taylor's meandering soliloquy. One couldn't help feeling a kind of grief and deprivation when the band came in and the choir swelled, and Billy Taylor's piano became lost in plain sight.

Wells Tower is a contributing writer for the Magazine and can be reached at 20071@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.