Jaki Byard
Sunshine of My Soul (High Note) 
A Matter of Black and White (High Note) 
The Late Show (High Note)

THE most eclectically brilliant and versatile pianist of a century of jazz, Jaki Byard — born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1922 — could play everything, in every piano style or genre, from blues, gospel and stride to post-bop and the avant garde.

[[{"fid":"2038","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]As a young man, and later in the US army, he played a host of instruments — piano, trumpet, guitar, drums, trombone, as well as tenor saxophone on which he was excellent.

He played in jump bands like that of Earl Bostic and the big bands of Herb Pomeroy and Maynard Ferguson, before crossing over to join the Charles Mingus Band in 1962, where he found himself alongside fellow free and discovering spirits like Mingus himself, Eric Dolphy, Roland Rahsaan Kirk, Booker Ervin and Sam Rivers.

Many of his years were spent teaching, particularly in the New England Conservatory of Music where he had a huge effect upon his students, even developing a big band among them (the Apollo Stompers) which made several albums.

He died in 1999, murdered in his home in Queen’s, in still unsolved circumstances.

One of his students, the eminent pianist Fred Hersch said of his mentor: “He was one of the all-time great solo players and one of the best pure musicians I have ever met” and three new albums never before issued, of recordings of Byard playing solo at The Keystone Corner in San Francisco in 1978-9 attest to his astonishing solo virtuosity.

Perhaps the most memorable track of the first Keystone album Sunshine of My Soul is Byard’s Mingus Medley.

He includes the lampoon of Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, who stood in the doorway of Central High School in Little Rock in September 1957 with members of the National Guard to block the entry of nine black children.

Fables of Faubus became a musical parable and Byard plays it with both humour and verve, and follows it with a stomping version of Mingus’s Peggy’s Blue Skylight, which he so often played with the Mingus Sextet on the 1964 European tour.

There is also a homage to the great stride pianists of New York like James P Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith in Tribute to the Ticklers, an acknowledgement to complex Latin rhythms in his version of the Mexican Consuelo Gonzalez’s Besame Mucho, references to the huge Biblical canvas of jazz in his Excerpts from Songs of Proverbs and an intensely moving reading of the songbook ballad originally sung by Johnny Mathis, Two Different Worlds: in musical terms, Byard knew and played hundreds of them.

The second album is called A Matter of Black and White and, like the first, it becomes a narrative of jazz history.

There is a Billie Holiday tribute, including God Bless the Child and Lover Man, which radiates her amalgam of triumph and agony, a beautifully lyrical rendition of Byard’s own composition, Seasons,  and a powerful not to one of his brilliant contemporaries, Thelonious Monk, in ’Round Midnight.

He sounds quasi-orchestral on the ballad Hello Young Lovers and in his honouring of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in interpretations of Lush Life, Day Dream and Johnny Come Lately, he plays their melodies after a wave-live introduction, as if they have risen from the sea.

The third album is The Late Show, where Byard’s introductory remarks before his performances are included, to both comic and educative effect, as his cost-of-living jokes show before he plays his own Family Suite.

In his preamble to European Episode he remembers the succession of cities he played “one-nighters” in before evocative and rumbustious piano portraits of them, and in GEB Piano Roll he uses his reinvented grasp of stride to remember three of his brilliant ex-bandmates who died far too young: bassist George Tucker, altoist Eric Dolphy and trumpeter Booker Little.

He plays an astonishing Byardisation of the old ragtime classic Sweet Georgia Brown and finishes with a preciously subdued version of For All We Know (We Might Never Meet Again).

We meet him again on these three records, and to be alone with such an artist for their three hours is to hear a true griot of jazz, one of its great creators but also one of its most vibrant historians. All through these records the story of jazz tells its tales with Byard’s brilliance and love. Don’t miss them.