Billly Taylor, RIP

Billy Taylor, jazz pianist, composer, and educationalist, has died in Manhattan at the age of 89. He took an academic route into music, then started playing professionally in 1944 with the Ben Webster Quartet in New York. A spell as house pianist at Birdland followed, and in the sixties his trio was a regular feature at Hickory House. He worked a lot in tv, hosting one of the first shows devoted to jazz on NBC in 1958, and became the first African American to lead a talk show band, for David Frost's US series. He worked as a DJ at WNEW in the sixties, and hosted a jazz programme on NPR for five years from 1977.  His great educational outreach started in 1961, founding Jazzmobile, which ran outdoors concerts, workshops and projects around New York.

He wrote "I wish I knew how it would feel to be free" in 1954, for his daughter Kim.  Words seemed to follow way behind the tune, and there's a co-credit, presumably for lyrics, to Dick Dallas, apparently an alias for one Richard Carroll Lamb (who needs more research).  It was then recorded by Nina Simone in 1967.