In the endless line of unsung jazz heroes Mike Taylor is kind of unique. It’s not that his brief recording career so far surpasses others that were his contemporaries. A great deal of his music is simply augmented, weirdo post-bop stuff in small settings. That’s not to say the music doesn’t have merit, it does. But while the pianist’s jazz recordings haven’t become widely available or popular – copies of Trio, though, do go for hundreds of dollars – Taylor’s compositions have been heard by millions of people.

Beginning in the fifties, subsequent to performing in various groups while in the Royal Air Force, Taylor encountered a rhythm section that would eventually change the trajectory of popular music in the UK as well as his own career.

Meeting Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, who were then backing a jazz ensemble, wasn’t probably too surprising an occurrence. All involved were extremely active in London’s jazz scene and it was clear that each possessed a skewed concept of what jazz could and should be. Because of that, the cohort began performing together. That set up received a modicum of notice, but shortly, Baker and Bruce would join Eric Clapton in the power trio Cream – a far cry from the jazz stuff the pair had been working out previously.

With his rhythm section gone, Taylor simply replaced them and continued to gig around a bit. And in 1965 Taylor, backed by a three piece, issued Pendulum. The disc worked its way into open minded jazzbo’s consciousness, but didn’t make Taylor a sensation. He did, however, garner enough attention to continue recording.

His following effort, 1966’s Trio, which finds the pianist reunited with Bruce on a few tracks, raised him to a new level of notoriety. According to legend, part of what made the tracks which would eventually comprise Trio come alive was Taylor’s growing infatuation with LSD. After hearing portions of the disc, that’s not too surprising. But it would seem that Taylor’s version of “Stella by Starlight” owes as much to Erik Satie as drug culture.

Either way, Trio was able to strike a balance between completely out there fair and largely palatable, traditional sounding jazz. “Two Autumns” begins in relatively unsurprising terrain even if those chord changes are all dissonance. The bop styled backing does a bit to mitigate all of that, but the song’s disparate sections eventually display Taylor’s odd sense of the genre.

After completing those sessions, though, Taylor apparently fell into a routine that had more to do with tripping than with music or living properly. Eventually, Baker and Bruce interceded and convinced the pianist to pen a few tunes for what would become Cream’s Wheels of Fire. Contributing three songs to that album spread Taylor’s name around pretty liberally. And after the disc’s release, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to capitalize on the success. Taylor, though, eventually disappeared and his body was found on a beach in January of 1969. There aren’t any answers as to what happened, but there’s always conjecture.