If you only know one thing Billy Taylor did, it's probably the song. "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" came out of him in 1963 or '64, written with lyricist Dick Dallas, and it became a civil rights standard the moment Nina Simone got her hands on it for Silk & Soul (1967). That song alone would be a life's work for most people. For Taylor it was one piece of a much bigger project.

Because the truth is, Taylor the pianist sometimes got overshadowed by Taylor the broadcaster and Taylor the educator. He hosted NPR's Jazz Alive, did jazz segments for CBS Sunday Morning for years, and basically served as America's friendly jazz professor on television at a time when very few people were trying to explain bebop to a general audience without condescending to anybody. He got a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in his fifties, not as a vanity project but because he actually wanted to build curriculum, build institutions — he founded Jazzmobile in Harlem to bring live jazz and music education directly into neighborhoods that didn't have easy access to concert halls.

Now, the playing itself: Taylor came up in the bebop scene, worked as house pianist at Birdland, played alongside Dizzy Gillespie and in Ben Webster's band, and he kept that bebop vocabulary his whole career, but he never chased the avant-garde or got especially interested in fusion. His trio sound is warm, articulate, blues-rooted, built on clear right-hand lines and a strong sense of swing — closer in spirit to Oscar Peterson than to anybody pushing boundaries. If you put on a Billy Taylor Trio record expecting fireworks, you might be underwhelmed. What you get instead is somebody who clearly loves the instrument and wants you to understand why.

He also spent real energy trying to get jazz institutional respect — pushing for it to be taught in schools, for it to be recognized as what he liked to call America's classical music. He wasn't the flashiest player of his generation and he'd probably be the first to tell you that. But he understood something a lot of brilliant musicians never figure out: that somebody has to build the audience, has to do the patient work of making people care before they can appreciate the hard stuff. Billy Taylor did that work for most of his adult life, on camera and off, and jazz education in America looks the way it does partly because he insisted it should exist at all.

Start with the trio records if you want to hear him play straight bebop and swing without any agenda attached. Then go find the civil rights anthem and sit with how plainly it says what it needs to say. Between those two things you get a pretty honest picture of the man — a serious musician who also happened to believe, deeply, that jazz belonged to everybody, and spent his career trying to prove it.