Artist: Billy Taylor

Billy Taylor was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. 

Taylor was a jazz educator, who lectured in colleges, served on panels and travelled worldwide as a jazz ambassador. Critic Leonard Feather once said, "It is almost indisputable that Dr. Billy Taylor is the world's foremost spokesman for jazz. 

Taylor attended Virginia State College, and moved to New York City after graduation and started playing piano professionally from 1944, first with Ben Webster's Quartet on New York's 52nd Street. The same night he joined Webster's Quartet, he met Art Tatum, who became his mentor. Among the other musicians Taylor worked with was Machito  and his mambo band, from whom he developed a love for Latin music. After an eight-month tour with the Don Redman Orchestra in Europe, Taylor stayed there with his wife, Theodora, and in Paris and the Netherlands. 

Taylor returned to New York later that year and cooperated with Bob Wyatt, Sylvia Syms and Billie Holiday at the Royal Roost jazz club in a successful show called Holiday on Broadway. A year later, he became the house pianist at Birdland and performed with Charlie Parker, J.J. Johnson, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Taylor played at Birdland longer than any other pianist in the club's history. In 1949, Taylor published his first book, a textbook about bebop piano styles. 

In 1952, Taylor composed one of his best known tunes, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free", which achieved more popularity with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Nina Simone covered the song in her 1967 album Silk & Soul. The tune is known in the UK as a piano instrumental version, used for BBC Television's long-running Film program. He made dozens of recordings in the 1950s and 1960s, including Billy Taylor Trio with Candido with Cuban percussionist Candido Camero, My Fair Lady Loves Jazz, Cross Section and Taylor Made Jazz. 

In 1958, he became music director of NBC's The Subject Is Jazz, the first television series focusing on jazz. The 13-part series was produced by the new National Educational Television Network with guests such as Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Rushing, and Langston Hughes.

In 1964, he established Jazzmobile in New York City as a way to promote jazz through educational programs. In 1981, Jazzmobile produced a jazz special for National Public Radio, for which the program received the Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting Programs.

Taylor hosted two long-running jazz programs on National Public Radio. Jazz Alive! ran from 1977 to 1983, and Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center ran from 1995 to 2001. The former program won the Peabody Award. In 1981, after being profiled by CBS News Sunday Morning, Taylor was hired as an on-air correspondent and then conducted more than 250 interviews with musicians. He received an Emmy Award for his segment on the multi-talented Quincy Jones.