Billy Taylor Trio is featured at the Cornell Jazz Festival this weekend

The Billy Taylor Trio will be the featured group at the 7th annual Cornell Jazz Festival Friday, April 24, through Sunday, April 26. The three-day event also features performances by a handful of jazz greats, among them pianist Randy Weston and trumpeter Donald Byrd.

Taylor has enjoyed over 50 years on the jazz stage and can be heard on countless recordings, the most recent of which are on the GRP label. In addition to performing, Taylor is artistic adviser for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where he hosts a weekly NPR radio show, Billy Taylor's Jazz from the Kennedy Center.

Taylor lectures widely about jazz and serves as jazz correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning, for which he won an Emmy Award. He also is an accomplished author and founder of the Jazzmobile, an organization that sponsors free public concerts and jazz clinics.

Among Taylor's many honors are two Peabody awards and the National Medal of Arts, which he received from President Bush in 1992.

Below is a listing of Jazz Festival events. All are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted:

• a lecture/demonstration by the Billy Taylor Trio, Friday, 3 p.m. in Barnes Hall. Taylor, accompanied by bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Steve Johns, will discuss the history and business of jazz.

• a round-table discussion, Saturday, 1 p.m. at the Africana Studies and Research Center, 310 Triphammer Road, on the "Sociocultural Evolution of African American Music" and the "State of Innovative African American Jazz at the End of the Twentieth Century." Participants include jazz artists Randy Weston, Donald Byrd and George Starks. Professor James Turner and Assistant Professor Karlton Hester, the Herbert Gussman Director of Jazz Studies, will moderate.

• a concert by the Billy Taylor Trio with the Cornell Lab Ensembles, Saturday at 8 p.m. in Statler Auditorium. Advance sale tickets are $10, $8 with a student ID, and are available at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office (255-3430), Hickey's Music Center (272-8262) and Rebop Records (273-0737). Tickets also will be available at the door for $12, $10 with a student ID.

  ·a woodwind workshop by Makanda Ken McIntyre, Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. McIntyre has recorded on the Blue Note, Serene, Steeplechase, United Artists and Prestige-New Jazz labels and has toured widely with Nat Adderly, Carla Bley, Jaki Byard, Bill Dixon and Charlie Haden.

• a concert by the Cornell Lab Ensembles under the direction of Karlton Hester, Sunday at 3:30 p.m. in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

• "Hesterian Musicism," with Randy Weston on piano, April 26 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. Hesterian Musicism is a term coined by Hester to represent the process through which composition and performance merge to create aesthetic environments where musicians, kinetic and visual artists and poets can produce new art forms through imaginative effort. Participants include Hester, Byrd, Makanda Ken Mclntyre, Phil Bowler, Cecilia Smith, George Barron, Janet Barron, Bill Johnson, Edward Smith, Patricia Weiss and Sera Smolen. Tickets are $5 and will be sold only at the door.

The visit by the Billy Taylor Trio is supported in part by grants from the Cornell Council for the Arts and Meet The Composer Inc. Additional funding for the Jazz Festival is provided by the Student Assembly Finance Commission. Other sponsors include WHCD-FM 106.9. The festival is directed by Hester.