IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1965 that Henry Lowther first met Mike Taylor. Lowther, a 22-year-old jazz trumpeter, had wangled a semi-regular residency at Stoke Newington’s Regency Club with his group The Sounds Four, playing in the basement jazz club when it wasn’t being requisitioned by feared London gangsters the Kray Twins.

“We played three nights a week,” says Lowther today. “The Regency had big connections with the whole East End criminal fraternity. The Krays would come in late at night, and we’d have to stop playing so they could have their meetings.”

The shifting line-up of Lowther’s group included a veritable who’s-who of future jazz, rock and prog stars including Manfred Mann and Soft Machine saxophonist Lyn Dobson, future Cream bassist Jack Bruce, and the drummer Jon Hiseman who would go on to form Colosseum. One day, Hiseman started telling Lowther about Mike Taylor, “an amazingly original musician, doing things nobody else was.” The drummer also told Taylor about Lowther’s group.

“One day he visited The Regency,” recalls Lowther, “this smartly-dressed man in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, flannel trousers, polished black shoes, a striped shirt and a tie. It was smart but… too much, you know? Over the top. Meticulous but to the point of unhealthy.”

BORN IN EALING IN 1938, AND RAISED BY HIS GRAND-parents following the death of both parents during the war, Mike Taylor began playing the clarinet and piano in his early teens, throwing himself into the London jazz scene following two years of National Service in the RAF. One early witness to his genius was jazz trombonist John Mumford, who started playing with Taylor at a basement coffee bar called The Nucleus (“The Nuke”) on Soho’s Monmouth Street. “We were beginners,” says Mumford, “emerging from the era of trad jazz. It was an amiable and absorbing chaos.”

The piano players at the Nucleus’s all-night sessions would take a couple of tunes each at the dilapidated upright – but Taylor stood out. “Bill Evans had recently become a focus,” explains Mumford, “but in Mike you also spotted Ellington, Monk, Gil Evans, John Lewis, Ahmad Jamal and Erik Satie.”

Mumford remembers Taylor’s appearance – “tweed jacket, shirt and tie, a well-trimmed haircut, a small military moustache, spectacles, well-polished shoes” – but little of the man himself. “I did visit his flat in Richmond once for a try-out rehearsal for a quintet. The place was sparse but comfortable, suburban, his wife Anne organising tea and sandwiches, Mike silently busy with large and immaculate manuscripts at a window table. I remember going past his car and seeing rolls of wallpaper on the back seat: the only information I had regarding his day job.”

EVEN SO, BY THE TIME THE QUARTET CAME to record their debut LP, Pendulum, at Lansdowne Studios, London, in October 1965, Reeves still saw Taylor as “pretty damned together. There was certainly a sense of, you know, We mustn’t bugger this up. People ask me, ‘When did I notice this shift in his personality?’ I didn’t. I barely saw him after we recorded Pendulum.”

After Pendulum, the sense of disintegration that Reeves identifies as integral to his compositional style seemed to spread to Taylor himself. Poorly promoted, the album failed to sell and, following the financial collapse of his grandfather’s wallpaper company in April 1966, the pianist’s look became more unkempt, his behaviour more erratic. There were concerns that a follow-up album would never be recorded, but the session that resulted in Trio finally began on July 13, 1966, with Hiseman on drums and Jack Bruce and Ron Rubin on bass, playing separately and together: the same line-up Henry Lowther had assembled for Sounds Four.

“I think I was quite instrumental in that,” accepts Lowther. “[And] I think the results are quite beautiful. It’s just a unique and very different album. Mike used to be influenced by Horace Silver’s piano playing, which was quite percussive, so I think that went into his playing, but with Trio he evolved his own thing.”

A mix of four standards and four original compositions, Trio is a work of eerily suspended beauty, modernist in construction yet restless and melancholy in its effect. Reviews were positive, but sales were again disappointing. And by the time of its release in June 1967 Taylor’s appearance had transformed utterly.

“He sat in on a couple of occasions at [John Stevens’ free jazz club] Little Theatre Club in Covent Garden,” says Evan Parker. “That could have been 1967. I would call his look ‘street person chic’. Long unkempt hair, bare feet, maybe sandals. He sat in an armchair with a small clay hand drum, played accents on that and spoke the occasional poetic word or phrase.”

According to Luca Ferrari, Taylor was sleeping on couches and in squats, beset by paranoia. There were reports of the barefoot musician appearing at London tube stations, playing flute for commuters. “He is now almost certifiable and perhaps even dangerous,” wrote Ron Rubin in his journal. “He thinks Dave Tomlin wants to kill him. He is sinking fast.”

Ironically, in that time, a small Mike Taylor revival took place. At the height of their fame, Cream, featuring Taylor alumni Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, included three Taylor compositions on their 1968 double LP, Wheels Of Fire. Then, in September, Neil Ardley’s The New Jazz Orchestra (which at that point included Bruce, John Mumford, Jon Hiseman and Henry Lowther in its 15-strong line-up) included two Taylor tunes on their groundbreaking LP, Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe.

Yet the pianist’s personal decline continued. Ron Rubin recalls a final encounter late in 1968: “He arrived at the door of the London Free School where I was a resident music teacher. Not recognising him, I invited him in and offered a cup of tea. Then, taking a closer look, I saw through the bare feet and shaggy beard my old musical friend Mike Taylor. He would not speak but stayed a few days mostly walking around the streets banging a small drum. Then he disappeared, never to be seen by me again.”

ON JANUARY 20, 1969, THE BODY OF A young man was found washed up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. The corpse lay unclaimed until it was formally identified through fingerprints as that of Taylor. The coroner’s verdict on February 6 was an open one: “Drowning in the sea.” Taylor was buried on February 7, 1969 at Sutton Road Cemetery, Southend-on-Sea, the red granite tombstone bearing a small poem of Taylor’s that reads, “I dive from a springboard/Into cool clear water/And yet I furnish my springboard/With my experience/So that my life is more than my action. MT.”

Since then, many jazz scholars have speculated whether Taylor’s death was an accident, suicide or something else. “We all assumed he’d jumped off Kew Bridge,” says Henry Lowther, “so how did they find his body at the end of the Thames estuary? He must have gone further out. You’d have to go really far out to end up where Mike did because the tide will always throw you backwards.” Taylor’s body would have travelled 57 miles.

It’s tempting to wonder what music Taylor would have made had he lived but more sensible to be thankful for the recordings we have, augmented in recent years by the discovery of Preparation, a rehearsal tape for the Fairfield Halls concert, and Mandala, a live session by Taylor’s regular quartet recorded at the Studio Club, Westcliff-on-Sea in January 1965. “The great tragedy is that there is no chance of any more Mike Taylor recordings being unearthed,” says Tony Reeves. “I mean, imagine if there was a recording of a Mike Taylor Sextet out there…”

There is a well-timed pause.

“Well, I found one,” says Reeves. “Amongst all my tapes that I periodically trawl I found a 7.5-inch binaural tape with my writing on it, that says ‘Mike Taylor Sextet’ and something that says ‘Big Band’, which could be The New Jazz Orchestra with Mike on piano. I’ve sent a copy to John Thurlow at the Jazz In Britain label.”

Mike Taylor’s strange, sad story may have one more unexpected epilogue. Reeves smiles. “That’s a nice note to end on, isn’t it?”