A Sax Man Plays an Encore in the Key of D.C.

Billy Taylor met Frank Wess in 1935, when the young saxophonist moved to Washington from Oklahoma. They went to Dunbar High School together, and to this day Taylor -- the genial pianist, television personality and goodwill ambassador of jazz -- declares that Wess changed his life.

"He's the reason I don't play the tenor saxophone," Taylor says. "I was going to try to be the new Ben Webster," the tenor saxophonist who worked with another notable Washington jazzman, Duke Ellington.

Then Taylor heard Wess, and he decided to stick with the piano.

"Even in his teens, he was really a remarkable player," he says.

More than 70 years later, Wess remains one of the most durable -- and one of the most underrated -- performers in jazz. In the 1940s, he was in the influential bebop big band of Billy Eckstine (another Washington product), and he spent 11 years anchoring the reed section of Count Basie's band in the 1950s and '60s. He introduced the flute to jazz. Yet he's never quite received the full measure of attention he deserves.

"Many people have not recognized what Frank has done," Taylor says. "People just took him for granted."

Now 86, Wess will bring his piano-less quintet to the Kennedy Center's KC Jazz Club on Friday to kick off a nine-day celebration of Washington's place in jazz history. Wess and his much-younger band mates play plenty of standards, but he's constantly writing and performing new works in the classic swing tradition.

On Saturday, he and Taylor will sit down together at the KC Jazz Club to reminisce about the days when Washington's U Street corridor was known as the "Black Broadway," with nightclubs, dance halls and theaters stretching from Seventh Street to 14th Street NW.

"Every week we heard a different band at the Howard Theater," the 87-year-old Taylor recalls. "It was all very exciting for us. There was a lot going on in those days."

A documentary by journalist Hedrick Smith, "Duke Ellington's Washington," will be screened next Sunday, and at least one performance is scheduled each day through Nov. 29 to reawaken the echoes of the city's all-but-forgotten jazz legacy.

At Dunbar, Taylor and Wess studied music -- classical music only, thank you -- with Henry Grant, the same man who had been Ellington's teacher. Only when class was over was it time for jazz.

"When I moved to Washington," Wess recalled in a 2005 interview with the Web site AllAboutJazz.com, "I was in high school already and during lunchtime they used to have sessions down in the orchestra room. . . . We'd be jamming at noontime and I said, 'This is what I want to do.' " Taylor and Wess both attended Virginia State University, but much of their education took place after hours in such U Street jazz joints as Club Bali, the Bengasi, Republic Gardens and Crystal Caverns. (All are long gone except for Crystal Caverns, now Bohemian Caverns and still throbbing with music in its underground, cavelike setting.)