The name of Dr Billy Taylor is the answer to a frequently asked question: who plays that swinging theme to Barry Norman's film review programme, which is
now presented by Jonathan Ross? But while television audiences only heard I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free as a weekly slice of theme music jazz, its earlier life had been as an anthem for the American Civil Rights movement, and it was often performed by Nina Simone. For that flexibility alone - a composition both cool and loaded - Taylor deserves all due respect.
These days pianist, composer and arranger Taylor devotes much of his time to education. As artistic adviser for jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington he cuts a rather venerable figure, curating top-notch jazz events and spreading the word at every opportunity.
In fact, his success as a communicator has in many ways eclipsed his achievements as a musician, and few in formal Washington seem to remember that he once led the house rhythm section at Birdland. Taylor himself is quick to point out that his nightclub days are long over. Jazz, for him, is a now a concert-hall, high-art experience and his job is to teach.
"The thing I'm trying to do," he says, "is to bring the school and the concert hall a little closer together. The experience that people have in music is enhanced by the knowledge of what they're listening to. When they understand more about the artist and about the music, then they bring something to the table themselves. So I want people to realise that, first of all, jazz is America's classical music and, secondly, that it is music of such an unusual personal nature that each great player is identified by his or her sound or approach to the music itself."
Born in Greenville, North Carolina, in 1921, Taylor certainly didn't start out in the concert halls. As a teenager, he made his way to the clubs of Harlem and sought out such great musicians as Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk. Tatum taught him a thing or two and by the 1940s, Taylor was back in New York working with Dizzy Gillespie and Ben Webster.
His official Kennedy Center biography doesn't even contain this sort of information, however, the emphasis instead being on his academic and educational career. And perhaps that's all part of that move from session to recital, from intimate to formal, from club to concert hall?
"You have to lose something no matter what you do when you change venues. If you move to a festival you lose some of the intimacy, for example. So in the concert hall, yes, you do lose something, but I don't think it's a bad trade. I think that, the hall we use here at the Kennedy Center is intimate, and I can put a big band in there or a solo pianist - anything I want - so it's like a large club.
"You just don't have that nightclub atmosphere with smoking and drinking, or the cash register or the big tab. What we're doing is to utilise the talent that we have identified and present it in as many different kinds of situations as possible - free performances if possible - so people can learn what jazz is. What Wynton Marsalis is doing at Lincoln Center is a classic example of what can be done. It's putting jazz on equal footing with opera or with the symphony."
There's no doubt that Taylor is an evangelist. He is a member of countless boards and foundations and has been suitably rewarded by the US for his services. There are, of course, those who might take a different approach, believing that the last way to popularise anything with young people is to use words like "education".
In fact, to some, the whole idea of jazz studies is wrong-headed and completely fails to understand the psychology of the young people you hope to attract. I put it to Taylor that the academic approach to jazz might well be keeping some of the most talented young Americans away - fearful of any external discipline that smacks of school. After all, Taylor learned his own trade listening to Art Tatum in a Harlem club.
"The problem is how to disseminate the information and the experiences that are actually happening with the kids who are experiencing the arts. We have more than 40,000 jazz bands in schools around the US, and if each one of those ensembles has at least 20 people, and each one of those people has three people who care about them, then that's a whole lot of people.
"What we have been able to do, through the International Association of Jazz Educators, is to expand that all over the world. Things are very good. It's working. Jazz is in the healthiest state that I have seen it for many years."
Throughout the 1950s, Taylor led his own successful trio, but he soon began to devote more and more time to broadcasting, and for 14 years he worked as an arts correspondent for the CBS programme Sunday Morning. His work on television and radio led eventually to his much respected National Public Radio series entitled Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center. For each broadcast, he invites eminent musicians to perform with his trio, talk about the music and answer questions from the audience. This year's line-up included Marlena Shaw, Chris Connor, Slide Hampton, Fathead Newman and Wynton Marsalis. Here Taylor is really in his element - he gets to teach and play.
But what of his most famous achievement? That gospel-themed composition called I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free, made famous first in the 1960s and again later by Barry Norman? For once it seems I can get Taylor to talk less about education and more about music. And yet even then, the story turns out to be a little about both. He remembers his little daughter coming home. She was singing a spiritual she had learned at school and, ever the pedagogue, Taylor decided to put her right.
"She was clapping her hands on one and three. I said no, no, no . . . that is not the feeling you're supposed to have on that particular piece of music. I told her it was out of her own history and heritage. I told her it was so much a part of the things that African Americans had developed that I could just make up a song, there and then, that had the feel that I was talking about. She was just a little girl and so she suffered through my parental lecture, but then I sat down and improvised a piece of music which ultimately became I Wish I knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. It's only 16 bars, but it's based on some of the experiences that I had in my grandfather's church in Washington, DC, on Florida Avenue just off Seventh Street. There I really heard spirituals, gospel songs and old music out of the black tradition. I was very pleased about what happened with it in that period of the 1960s - that so many people found it useful. When I was working with Dr Martin Luther King, he used to ask me to play it for him and he could never remember the title - he'd just say, `Billy play that Baptist piece for me'."
Taylor Made Piano, by Dr Billy Taylor, is published by Wm. C. Brown