One of the most admired and respected pianists in UK jazz history, an influence on a young generation of international musicians as well as the possessor of a healthy critical reputation around the world based on quality and his musical vision, John Taylor turns 70 today. Since the late-1960s Taylor has been a leading fixture on the international jazz scene as a player, bandleader, recording artist and educator. Emerging initially alongside such players as tenor saxophonist Alan Skidmore, the Manchester-born pianist whose style has a still self-completeness to it, English, yet of no country, cerebral at times, but with a warmth that draws people in. A new generation of players, including young award winning pianist John Turville have been favourably compared to Taylor, and it’s extraordinary to think that a band such as Meadow came together because of the path finding Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen’s desire to work and play with Taylor in the first place. A generation of British players from the Loose Tubes school in the 1980s (he’s on Julian Arguelles’ album Phaedrus, for instance) to the current generation emerging from music colleges up and down the country has turned to Taylor’s music becoming aware of the sheer distinctiveness of his approach, with its roots in the style of Bill Evans perhaps as well as classical music and English traditions from choral music to the avant garde, and not forgetting the personalised innovations and style of a pianist few would hesitate to comfortably ignore. In the 1970s, with Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone, Taylor was involved in the ensemble most associated with his name, Azimuth, one of the most influential instrumental/vocals groupings (sometimes referred to, in terms of the vocals, as “wordless") to have come out of England throughout the 90-odd years jazz has been played here. Taylor by that time was working for ECM, the label that has defined large chunks of his career, along with the Italian Camjazz label more recently, and he went on to record many albums with a range of leading artists that has included Jan Garbarek and Enrico Rava. With Wheeler, for instance, hear Taylor on the sumptuous The Widow in the Window, but his own albums have left their own indelible footprints on jazz, and landmarks along the way have included the the languidly enigmatic Ambleside Days an early-1990s duo album with John Surman that once more consolidated his reputation as a fine interpreter, but also as a composer of note. His recent trio with Martin France and Palle Danielsson has picked up plaudits from a new generation coming to his music perhaps for the first time especially on such albums as Angel of the Presence, a landmark of European jazz past, present and in all likelihood, future. Stephen Graham

John Taylor pictured above