John Taylor

Born on 25 September 1942 in Manchester, Lancashire, England, the self-taught pianist Taylor had become one of Britain’s most highly regarded jazz players by the close of the 1960s, a standing he has steadily strengthened in the decades since. His professional path opened in a dance band, which he left in 1964 upon relocating to London, where he soon joined forces with emerging talents including John Surman, Alan Skidmore and Norma Winstone, the vocalist he would later wed. Additional engagements at the time brought him alongside established figures such as Marion Montgomery, Cleo Laine and John Dankworth. By the late 1960s he was directing his own trio and sextet, whose personnel featured Kenny Wheeler, Chris Pyne, Stan Sulzmann, Chris Laurence and Tony Levin, while also appearing in Sulzmann’s quartet, in the group Edge Of Time alongside Winstone, and in ensembles led by Mike Gibbs. He belonged as well to Surman’s brief yet remarkable Morning Glory, which included Terje Rypdal; the partnership with Surman, responsible for some of the era’s most original and inventive jazz-rooted work, has endured into the present day. During the mid-1970s he performed regularly with the Ronnie Scott quintet.

In 1977 Taylor joined Wheeler and Winstone to establish Azimuth—distinct from the Brazilian group Azymuth—and supplied the bulk of its repertoire. Toward the decade’s end he appeared with Jan Garbarek, Arild Andersen and Miroslav Vitous, and he also recorded or toured in this period with Lee Konitz, John Warren, Graham Collier and Harry Beckett. His rich, fluid style, shaped partly by Bill Evans, stands out particularly in ballad interpretations. An accomplished composer, Taylor has singled out Gibbs as the decisive influence on his writing. Throughout the 1990s he maintained his association with Azimuth, sustained a steady duo with Winstone and led a trio completed by Mick Hutton and Steve Argüelles. The first recording by the Winstone duo appeared in 1998. Taylor’s sixtieth-birthday tour in 2002 placed him with the Creative Jazz Orchestra, and in the opening years of the new century he also worked in trios pairing Marc Johnson with Joey Baron and Palle Danielsson with Martin France.