American Record Guide
Joe Goldberg : December, 1960

The idea of this album is a worthy one, and does not need the apology and rebuttal-in-advance of the liner notes. There are twelve songs on the record, varying in length between 2:27 and 3:02, the idea being that there can be such a thing as concise jazz. Of course there can, and such a pianist as Thelnoious Monk has demonstrated that over and over by taking only one chorus on several records when his fellow musicians are taking eight or nine. But Monk’s playing is all meat, while pianist Taylor has a prodigious technique which he usually employs only to be ingratiating. The twelve tunes are originals by Mr. Taylor’s wife, and they, too, are pleasant, serving mainly as springboards for improvisation. The time limitation means not much improvisation, thereby throwing an added responsibility on the tunes that they do not deserve. But that is beside the point. Taylor has met this challenge with a vast display of personal vocabulary and little else, except for the lovely beginning of his improvisation on Coffee Break – that, too, dissolves into technique after a while – leaving the impression, extremely unfortunate for this record, that each selection is much longer than it needed to be for the statement being made.

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Army Times
Tom Scanlan : 11/19/1960

Billy Taylor is one of the best jazz pianists although he does not win polls as easily as some enormously inferior pianists do (whatever that means). There is a buoyancy and lilt and bounce to all of Taylor’s work. He plays cleanly with what has become rare in jazz piano, pianistic touch, and his improvisations are melodic, his style distinctive. He also swings.

Taylor’s newest LP includes an even dozen originals written by his wife. The title piece and Easy Like are two of the swingingest. It is not a great record but it is a very good one and is highly recommended.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 02/05/1961

It is difficult to appraise the curious charm of pianist Billy Taylor. He is hard, often jagged, sometimes verging on the bitter, always original, inventive, and, beneath all these other qualities, possessed of an essential lyricism which brings you back, time after time, to the record.

On this album he adds to these qualities a terseness which avoids the overblown pomposity of much contemporary jazz.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

This album offers a dozen brand-new examples of the always tasteful and always swinging piano talents of Billy Taylor, demonstrating once again the often-neglected truth that “maturity” and “smoothness” are not negative words in jazz. Very much to the contrary, in the hands of a driving, witty, thoughtful and almost endlessly varied master craftsman like Billy Taylor, such qualities are guarantees of valid and highly enjoyable music.

And, as the album title is intended to emphasize (and as the title tune and such others as Easy Like and Coffee Break in particular demonstrate), there is also a very substantial degree of warmth and emotion mixed in with all that maturity and craftsmanship – all of which easily adds up to enough reasons to explain Taylor’s widespread and long-lasting popularity.

Casually mentioned in the opening paragraph above is the quite unusual fact that there are no less than twelve selections included here. Very few jazz albums contain that many numbers, and this is actually the first time there have been that many on any Riverside jazz LP. The story behind this particular departure from the usual state of affairs offers some interesting insights into the music mind of Mr. Taylor (which, as many people will tell you, is one of the very best and most clear-thinking minds on the jazz scene).

The story is not that anyone edged up to Billy and whispered: “Hey, let’s get real commercial and do an album full of short tracks.” Actually, the idea for this album did not originate here. It was conceived as a project for one of the largest radio-transcription firms (SESAC), which automatically meant that all selections had to meet the timing requirements of the widest possible air play (in other words: “not too long between commercials, please”). The usual approach in such cases is to take conventional material and play as few choruses as possible. But this is a pretty frustrating way to play jazz. So instead, Billy, who was also thinking ahead to the possible simultaneous use of these performances (if properly handled) on a ‘normal’ jazz record, chose to regard this assignment as a special challenge.

He saw it as an opportunity to fashion performances that would be valid and self-sufficient jazz entities within this arbitrary three-minutes-or-less time limit, by starting out with works written with this problem in mind, rather than by trying to foreshorten standard-length numbers. (In the days of the 78s rpm record, of course, innumerable great jazz performances were created within a time span necessarily less than three minutes. But in the dozen years of the long-playing record, jazz has just about completely lost the habit of being terse and concise. Besides, even those earlier discs used the standard just-a-couple-of-choruses approach and conventionally constructed tunes.) Taking as his base a dozen compositions written for purpose by his wife, Taylor has built an album that is quite literally ‘something else.’

“Of course,” Billy points out, “this is not the way the trio plays these numbers in a club, or the way they’d be played on another kind of record date.” But the basic fact is that these are fully effective ways of playing these particular tunes – not just samples or fragments of them.

But freshness and intelligence are nothing more than what Taylor’s large group of fans have come to expect – and consistently receive – from him. Since Billy first branched out as leader of his own trio in 1952, he has been a regular and favorite performer in the top “piano rooms” of the country. Simultaneously, he has built a unique reputation as an articulate spokesman for jazz, through his writing and lecturing, through frequent TV appearances, and most recently with an excellent weekly disc jockey show over a New York station. His first two albums for Riverside have further demonstrated his versatility and imagination, one being a rich-sounding venture into unusual instrumentation – Billy Taylor with Four Flutes and the second being an exceptionally swinging on-the-job recording by the same trio as is heard here – Billy Taylor Uptown.