Billboard : 04/14/1956
Score of 80

In this, even more than in his previous LPs on Prestige, the incomparable modern jazz pianist offers turns and style and facility to satisfy all varieties of piano buyers. The program includes, for example, Cheek to Cheek, the beautiful rarity Too Late Now, All the Things You Are, etc. All are performed with impeccable taste, flawless fingerwork and a real piano tone. The cover is smart and showy, and where the set doesn’t sell itself, it can sell readily on recommendation.

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Cashbox : 04/21/1956

Though the set is appropriately labeled Evergreens (in respect to the standard tunes) Billy Taylor‘s approach to each “evergreen” is strictly a fresh jazz thrill. Taylor can get expertly involved in flourishes of jazz intricacies but not, for the most part, at the expense of losing touch with a tune’s melodic line. Bill has tasteful drum (Percy Brice) and Bass (Earl May) support. Solid entry for jazz fans to discover.

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Audio
Jean Shepherd : July, 1956

Some of the best Taylor available on record. The sound is excellent and Taylor is in his usual tasteful restrained form. Here is one man who avoids cliché at all costs and always has a clean line in everything he does. Sometimes his understatement gets in the way of really getting the point home, but understatement has never been an objectionable quality as far as jazzmen go. A recommended disc.

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Providence Journal
Philip C. Gunion – 05/27/1956

Billy Taylor, a highly creative pianist with a wide knowledge of jazz and an interestingly varied approach, brings his abilities to bear on 10 top standards in ABC-Paramount’s appropriately titled Evergreens. With Taylor are Percy Brice, drums, and Earl May, bass.

Cheek to Cheek, It’s Too Late Now, I Only Have Eyes For You, Then I’ll Be Tired Of You, All The Things You Are, But Not For Me, You Don’t Know What Love Is, Satin Doll, More Than You Know, and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea are charmingly spun out with the thrilling Taylor touch and melodic improvisation which preserves all the beauty of the standard itself, yet fleshes it out into exciting shapes.

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Down Beat : 05/16/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4 stars

Billy Taylor‘s first set for ABC-Paramount is titled, for obvious reasons, Evergreens. On hand are Billy’s polished colleagues, bassist Earl May and Percy Brice. Taylor, finally beginning to achieve some of the wider recognition long due him, is in his customary mature and mellow form here. Among his considerable assets are his unfailing taste and avoidance of clichés; superb touch; clear articulation; diversity of mood-setting; capacities for fresh invention as with his use of separate simultaneous melodic lines in All the Things You Are; two-handed rhythmic firmness; and succulent harmonic sense.

On this set, however, Billy seems to be holding back a little, to be aiming a bit too directly at a “wider audience.” Let me make clear that aside from a rather brittle If Not for Me, everything here is a pleasure to dig. But there is little wailing as such. The session is just a little too consistently well-mannered. This is the one key ingredient Billy’s otherwise wholly agreeable playing on occasion lacks – a lusty shout. The set is certainly recommended, however, as is the recorded sound engineered by Rudy Van Gelder.

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Liner Notes by Whitney Balliett

Jazz has never been a predictable music. It is not really surprising, then, that there should suddenly be more modern jazz pianists than there were heady sonneteers in Elizabethan England. Their names are legion. Their styles, however, like those of most modern jazz musicians, are not. Scratch them, and one finds, like clams in the mud, the queer, solid shells of Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell. One also finds, in discouraging measure, an iron sophistication that disguises, in varied degree, ugliness, ineptness, barrenness, and timidity. Sophistication, these days, is rarely synonymous with emotion. Further, it is difficult at any time to project jazz emotion through the piano. As a result, much modern jazz piano is riblike and cold. It is, in fact, like a greenhouse in the sun: glassy and blinding, but, at the same time, hollow, transparent, and quickly conductive. Some among these mechanized gypsies are, of course, honest and highly creative souls. One is Billy Taylor.

Taylor, perhaps more than any, runs almost directly counter-stream to contemporary jazz pianistry. Where much of it is sullen and chrome-bound, he is gentle and economical. Where it displays a sad ignorance of piano tradition (both classical and jazz), Taylor has written deft, comprehensive piano instruction books on dixieland piano, boogie woogie, and ragtime piano. Again, where modern jazz piano is largely a ululation of Powell and Monk, Taylor’s style speaks of Tatum, Waller, Hines, Nat Cole, as well as Powell and Monk. Finally, where most modern pianists consider immaterial such fundamentals as the sound of their instrument and how it should be struck, Taylor continues to study with Richard McClanahan, a pupil of Tobias Matthay and the teacher of Dame Myra Hess, who approaches the keyboard as if it were a moth’s wing.

Taylor’s style is deceptive. Primarily, one is struck by his delicately round sense of touch, which is equaled, perhaps, only by Nat Cole, Bengt Hallberg, and Hank Jones. Immediately apparent, as well, is his adoption, on his improvised passages, of a Tatum-Powell single-note attack. More puzzling is the fact that Taylor has been appreciated both at the Copacabana and Birdland. One reason for this is that, superficially, his style is unshouting and melodically kind to the ear, and as fresh in sound as pebbles being dropped into a fish bowl. Furthermore, his planned, cocktail-seeming attack contains – for those willing to listen – one of the most inventive improvisational minds in jazz. On a fast tune, for example, Taylor’s creative intelligence works so rapidly that he can construct in one breath a new and uninterrupted melodic line that sometimes stretches for half a chorus or more. In itself, this would of course be a useless feat (cf. Clifford Brown, Art Tatum, Buddy Rich) if the ideas were not as cohesive and logical as the clapboards on a frame house. At the same time, his left hand, unlike the dead, dust-covered appendage that lies over so much of the landscape of modern jazz piano, continually frames countering or supportive chords, or, more rarely, a completely separate, non-contrapuntal melodic line. (This is still an experimental device, and can be heard here on All The Things You Are.) On slow tempos, Taylor’s sausage-machine approach is considerably modified. The phrases are shorter, and often, because there is more time for intensity highly eloquent. (Taylor occasionally drowns in his own great good taste. For his long, exquisitely modeled lines once in a while take on a kind of garrulous, compulsive quality.) Taylor’s rhythmic approach is equally subtle. Although it rarely has the tobogganing drive of Tatum or Billy Kyle, it is so controlled that he can slip abruptly – but without pause – from a long, staccato-like series of notes into a run and back to the staccato, or from the staccato to a phrase that heel-drags at the beat, giving one the pleasant effect of having seen a perfect platoon suddenly skip, change step, skip again, and resume its step. His left hand, as well, is replete with off beats, various accents, and strong underpinning rhythms that provide a striking contrast to the creamy right hand.

Billy Taylor, at thirty-four, is a slight, handsome, well put together man who wears heavy horn-rimmed glasses, neither smokes nor drinks, has a formidable set of teeth, a noticeably well-modulated voice, and a first-rate intelligence. He has, too, an infectious sense of humor, humility and talks as he plays – with ease, clarity and knowledge. This is something I have never been able to explain to myself, he will say typically “I like Bartók. You’d never know it from my playing The reason is, that as much as I like him, I have never been able to assimilate him into what I do. Yet, Bach, Mozart, and Debussy have automatically became a part of my jazz thinking. Don Shirley takes a block of Ravel and puts it in the middle of his My Funny Valentine and builds on it, using it as a basic motif. Sounds good, but to me, anyway, it’s kind of like cheating. You’ve got to stay somewhere near the tradition. To do that, of course, you have to know the tradition. Until recently, Randy Weston had never even heard a Jelly Roll Morton record. But the minute you open these new avenues to a musician, it’s like a stream flowing in. I saw this happen years ago to Thelonious and Bud Powell. Mary Lou Williams took them in hand. One of the things she made them aware of was touch. On some of Powell’s most recent records the sound is so much better. She used to sit down with both of them and say, ‘Now, this is the way it goes.’ She’s helped more young musicians than anyone.”

In addition to being a mellifluous talker, Taylor is a talented and fluent composer with some three hundred tunes to his credit. He has acted on the legitimate stage and on television, lectured on music at schools and colleges, and last summer was one of the most articulate members of the second jazz panel at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Taylor, briefly, was born in Greenville, North Carolina. His father was a dentist and a choir conductor, and an uncle played the organ and sang. After trying a number of instruments, he settled on the piano, playing his first professional job when he was thirteen at a “real dive” called Harry’s Bluebird Inn outside of Washington, DC, where his family moved shortly after his birth. He attended Virginia State College, graduating with a Bachelor of Music. Shortly after this, he moved to New York. On the evening he arrived he was heard uptown by Ben Webster, and two days later was a member of his quartet at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street. Before forming his own trio, he went on to work with a Burke’s Peerage of jazz that included Sid Catlett, Gillespie, Don Redman, Oscar Pettiford, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker, and so forth. (In the Forties, there was still a good deal of jamming and sitting-in going on all over New York. Taylor believes that the eventual breakdown of this custom is one reason why there is so little individuality among young jazz musicians; jamming, as well as big-band experience, was a trying-out where jazzmen listened to another, learned, and separated the men from the boys.)

Half of the ten selections here, all of which are standards, are ballads, and half in medium or up tempo. The trio itself is the same – with the exception of Percy Brice, who replace Charlie Smith on drums about a year ago – as the one originally formed some four years ago. It is a tightly relaxed united that uses its ensemble passages more for recharging episodes and jumping-off points than for bookends. It is also a mildly intricate group that experiments a good deal with Cuban rhythms and with, for example, 6/8 time against 4/4 (All The Things You Are. The trio, as it appears on this LP, is loose enough to allow several bass solos by Earl May and a few brush passages by Brice, who reveals himself as a sensitive, gritty drummer.

A mature, responsible musician thoroughly grounded in the techniques, history, and aesthetics of his music, Taylor is what many “geniuses” never are – a continually inspired, creative performer who plays his instrument with the understanding and beauty it deserves.