"O.K., Billy!"

Time: 1950. Scene: Birdland, the now defunct Manhattan cellar where the faithful gathered to hear the latest sounds of bebop. Backstage, the goings on were something less than harmonious, even for bop. The band was taking a vote. It seemed that the house pianist would not contribute to the group's heroin kitty. In fact, he was not interested in drugs at all. That would hardly do, and consequently Billy Taylor was voted out. "I don't know," recalls Taylor, "maybe they thought I was trying to give jazz a good name."

That was one of the few times anybody ever fired Billy Taylor, but only one of many occasions on which he could be accused of giving jazz a good name. As a disk jockey for Harlem's WLIB, Taylor in the early 1960s developed such a following of listeners (and advertisers) that he could schedule five straight hours of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane or "anybody who in those days was considered far out." In 1969 he became the first black music director of a major TV program, the David Frost Show. "O.K., Billy!" was the cue with which Frost kicked off every show.

Every summer since 1965, when he helped found it, Taylor has made sure that the truck-borne bandstands of Jazzmobile have brought performers like Duke Ellington, Carmen McRae, Dizzy Gillespie and Taylor himself to the ghettos of New York and fifteen other U.S. cities. As Jazzmoblie's fundraising, talent-coordinating president, Taylor also gives two lecture-concerts a week in New York City's public schools and conducts a piano class in a workshop program at Harlem's Intermediate School 201 on Saturday mornings.

Get It Done. He is a get-it-done member of a dizzying array of cultural boards and commissions from the Harlem Cultural Council to the National Council on the Arts, which elected him to a six-year membership last summer. He has taught the history of jazz at the Manhattan School of Music, and is working toward a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Massachusetts. He has made more than 30 recordings (some of which, he concedes, "are among the best-kept secrets in jazz"), written a dozen books on jazz piano playing and composed 300 songs.

One of his songs, the gospel-flavored I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free (1954), is used at many civil rights gatherings and black school commencements, and has been published in several church hymnals. Taylor is also a member of a black syndicate that recently bought WLIB, making it New York's first black-owned station. With two other black men Taylor last year also bought WSOK in Savannah, Ga.

At the very least, Taylor, 52, has long since dispelled the notion that a jazz musician sleeps all day. The son of a Washington, D.C., dentist, he studied saxophone, guitar and drums as well as piano--until he discovered that "pretty girls always came and sat on the piano bench." He had his own combos in high school and college (Virginia State, where he majored in music), then headed for New York in 1943 (he was medically exempt from war service). Two days after arriving, he landed a job with Ben Webster's band. Soon he was playing with such performers as Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Finally he established himself as a soloist in Manhattan's plush East Side nighteries as well as clubs on the bop frontier of "The Street" (West 52nd Street).

Nine years ago, Taylor and his wife Theodora moved from Harlem to a five-room cooperative apartment in predominantly white Riverdale. There Taylor likes to relax by sampling the 5,000 LPs and tapes that line one wall (with considerably more pleasure than when he was a deejay looking for broadcast material) and watching reruns of westerns on TV. The Taylors' friends include more doctors, judges and art directors than musicians. Evenings out usually mean a French restaurant and a play or concert--or one of Taylor's innumerable board meetings.

In spare moments Taylor chips away on a piece for piano and orchestra commissioned by Conductor Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony. Because he plays so well in so many styles, it is not easy to define the essential Taylor manner. By turns impish, husky and lyrical, at its heart it is an elegant, note-clustered filigree reminiscent of Taylor's onetime mentor Art Tatum. There is no pain in Taylor's improvisations, nor much funky blues. He firmly believes that jazz is America's classical music, and his playing shows it.

An articulate spokesman for jazz, Taylor is annoyed by the fact that jazz musicians tend to be perversely uncommunicative about their music--witness Parker's off-putting bop lingo, or Louis Armstrong's famous line: "If you got to ask what jazz is, you ain't got it." Says Taylor: "Every chance I get I try to set the record straight. I say, 'Look, I'm not apologizing for this music. I think it's something to be very proud of and I want to tell you about it.' " Beginning next week at Manhattan's Half Note, Taylor will once again be telling about it in the way he thinks he does best: fronting his own trio six nights a week. "Of all the things I do professionally," he says, "I both give and get most from playing the piano."

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