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Jazz Pianist Billy Taylor Dies at 89

• Dec 29, 2010 08:49 PM ET
• by Joyce Eng

Billy Taylor, the noted jazz pianist and educator who enjoyed tremendous success on television, has died. He was 89.

Taylor died Tuesday of heart failure in New York, his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson, told The New York Times.

See other celebrities who died this year

A longtime fixture on television unlike many of his contemporaries, Taylor served as cultural correspondent on CBS News' Sunday Morning and was the first African-American to lead a talk-show band when he was bandleader for The David Frost Show from 1969 to '72.

He first made his mark on TV in 1958 as the musical director of NBC's The Subject Is Jazz, the first TV series that ...
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