The improviser

Maybe you know him as Fred Taylor, who runs Scullers Jazz Club at DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel in Allston. Maybe you remember him as the guy who owned Boston's fabled Jazz Workshop and Paul's Mall on Boylston Street from 1963 to 1978. Maybe you've seen him at a jazz club, because he's now in his seventh decade of recording, booking, promoting, holding the hand of and otherwise nurturing musicians, which is why he's known in Boston as Mr. Jazz.

But maybe you've never heard of him, and so we introduce him with an anecdote.

For years, anyone telephoning Taylor's condo on Commonwealth Avenue was greeted by a recording of Taylor singing an off-key rendition of a song popularized by Louis Jordan: "There ain't nobody here but us chickens." People called merely to hear the ditty.

At the same time, in order to boost sales, Taylor has never been shy about dressing in ridiculous costumes. One year, he was a parrot, and then to promote New York Voices, he dressed as the Empire State Building. When Sheila Jordan performed at Scullers, after slipping on a banana peel, Taylor appeared onstage as a banana.

One night in 1986, Taylor was on his way to a Halloween party at the Starlight Roof in Kenmore Square, and he was dressed, naturally enough, as a chicken, his skinny legs wrapped in a yellow leotard, his eyes barely visible. As Taylor crossed the trolley tracks on Commonwealth Avenue, a man he did not recognize said, "Hi, Fred."

Flabbergasted, Taylor turned to his publicist, Sue Auclair.

"How did he know it was me?"

"Fred," she said with a sigh, "who else in Boston would cross Commonwealth Avenue dressed as a chicken?"

Sitting in his Kenmore Square office the other day, Taylor, 75, spun star-spangled stories that are part of the history of jazz in Boston over the past half century. At the same time, he talked warily about a crisis he faces with news that the DoubleTree might be sold.What does that mean for Scullers?

"Well, we're waiting to hear," Taylor says. "If it's bought by Harvard, they say it will continue to be a hotel. But three years down the road, will they turn it into student housing? We don't know."

Life revolves around jazz
Taylor's life, night and day, is wrapped around jazz the way Louis Armstrong wrapped his trumpet's silver sounds around those minor keys.

Growing up in Newton, Taylor took piano lessons from Madame Margaret Chaloff, who taught George Shearing, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett. After one year, Taylor was playing Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and, after two, in recital, Edward MacDowell's "From a Wandering Iceberg."

The first record he purchased, in 1944, at age 15, was "The Hut-Sut Song," a novelty tune by Horace Heidt and his trio. Seeing bewilderment on the face of his guest, Taylor launches into song: "Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit."

The second record -- Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" -- changed his life, for he was hypnotized by bebop and by Gillespie's comical interpretation, "salt PEA-nuts, salt PEA-nuts."

On Saturday mornings, Taylor's mother would make him a tongue sandwich with cranberry sauce on rye, and then he'd meet a date from Newton High School. They'd ride the trolley to Boston, to the RKO-Boston Theater on Washinigton Street, where they'd watch an 11:30 stage show -- Duke Ellington, Jimmy Dorsey, or Woody Herman, for example -- then a movie and another stage show.

Taylor became obsessed. He haunted Smilin' Jack's record store on Massachusetts Avenue. He visited radio stations for live broadcasts, and he began to visit jazz clubs.

"Mass Avenue and Columbus was a mecca of jazz -- the Big M, the Savoy, Wally's Paradise, all in a row, and across the street was Club Eddie's, which was up one flight near where Wally's is today. The Hi Hat was on the corner, Estelle's down the block, and across the street and down an alley was the Pioneer Club. I'd sip Croft ale and listen to Sidney Bechet or Edmund Hall or Frankie Newton, who played trumpet with Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday."

At Boston University, he majored in economics because it sounded easy and would allow time for jazz, especially at Storyville in the Buckminster Hotel, where one day Taylor became a part of jazz history.

Having invested $149 in a newfangled gadget called a tape recorder, he'd lug it to nightclubs and record such artists as Marian McPartland and Sarah Vaughan.

"I'd heard about this incredible pianist named Dave Brubeck, and when I saw he was coming to Storyville, I set up the mike where the balance was right, and I recorded him. Afterward, I said, 'Come back to my folks' house, because we have to plug it into my hi-fi.' So, Dave and Paul Desmond and I piled into my car and went to my house. When Dave heard it, he said it was great, that he'd never been caught that way playing 'Over the Rainbow.'

"A few days later, he called and said Fantasy wanted to release it as an album. He gave me $110 for the tape, and they produced a 10-inch LP that was praised twice in The New York Times, first as one of the best new works of the year, despite the amateur equipment, and second, as one of the first recordings to abandon three-minute cuts and to take advantage of the long-play format."

What Brubeck got, as a result, was a contract from Columbia. What Taylor got was notoriety, for the jacket of the album, "Jazz at Storyville Dave Brubeck," says: "Engineered by Fred Taylor."

He was 24 years old.

After college, Taylor went to work in the family mattress business and frequented jazz clubs sometimes listening, sometimes recording, sometimes sitting in as drummer, and sometimes booking acts, J. J. Johnson, Herbie Mann, Joe Williams. In 1963, he and a longtime partner, Tony Mauriello, invested $4,000 up front to buy the Jazz Workshop and Paul's Mall, side-by-side, subterranean nightclubs that presented jazz and in one and comedy and pop music in the other. For Paul's Mall, they booked Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler, and Henny Youngman, and for the Jazz Workshop, Duke Elllington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Sarah Vaughan, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

By 1978, the business had changed. Musicians demanded more money. Production costs soared, and the clubs proved too small to remain profitable. For a decade, Taylor freelanced -- a Richard Pryor concert, a jazz tour to Europe, the Jazz and Blues Festival at Great Woods, and then, in 1981, the telephone rang. It was Davis, who said he was coming out of a seven-year hiatus and needed a gig in Boston. Taylor rented a room in back of a disco called Kix, off Commonwealth Avenue, and the four-day gig by Davis drew critics from Switzerland, France, and Japan. Cuts, including one called "Kix," were included in a Columbia album titled "We Want Miles."

Davis, meanwhile, had been through surgery to replace a hip. Taylor later went through surgery to replace two hips, and the next time he picked up Davis at Logan Airport, he broke the news: "Miles, I gotta tell ya. I've had two hip replacements, which makes me hipper than you."

When the call came to Taylor in 1991 to rescue Scullers, it was a small-time jazz club with a capacity of 80 with overstuffed chairs and a mediocre sound system. Taylor renovated the room, increased capacity to 200, modernized the furniture and began to serve food and to book such national stars as Nancy Wilson and George Shearing. A dinner show he inaugurated now draws 7,000 people a year.

"Scullers used to be the black sheep in the corporate mix, but now it's grossing $1.25 million and still growing."

A quagmire of jazz
You can't know Taylor without a visit to his two-bedroom condo that overlooks the Charles River and Fenway Park, for every room is a chaotic melange of records, CDs, stereos, TVs, and jazz books, so that it's impossible to walk from one side of a room to another without following a circuitous path among the detritus.

"He's sort of disorganized," Auclair says. "You can't find a chair to an sit on, because everywhere you look is filled with press kits and bios and magazines. A couple of years ago, one of his assistants smelled smoke, and when she looked around, realized newspapers on the stove had caught fire."

The walls are lined with CDs, and with sketches of Charlie Mingus, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone. His study is dominated by two computers and a carpenter's workbench with saws, hammers, and screwdrivers. The bedroom is crowded with recording equipment, exercise machines and, in the door jamb, a bar for chin-ups.

Standing in the middle of the muddle in what appears to be the living room, from a stack of LP records, Taylor pulls a CD called "Basie," the cover of which displays, appropriately, an atomic bomb exploding.

"I still have the 901 Bose speakers that I took out of Paul's Mall," he says, "and my Mac pre-amp and Mac275 amp from the Jazz Workshop."

He turns up the sound, and as Count Basie's fingers ripple to "Duet," Taylor sways to the music and may, in fact, be dancing, although because of debris, he's visible only from the waist up. As he sways, he appears to be saying something. His lips are moving, but it is impossible to hear anything above the ear-splitting sound of Basie's piano.

Away from the music, Taylor talks again about jazz.

"It's always under the radar screen, although the CD helped widen the audience. One reason jazz is more popular today is Wynton Marsalis and the Ken Burn series, and another is reissues. You hear young people say, 'Wow, I just heard this incredible new singer, Billie Holiday.' And people may hate this, but smooth jazz has taken jazz to a new population so that a smooth jazz record may sell 50,000 instead of 10,000."

What is smooth jazz, anyway, and why does the phrase grate so?

"It's more melodic. The improvisations are not as imaginative, and it's not as harmonically challenging, and purists hate it."

Asked about the decline in jazz clubs from the 1940s to today, Taylor blames the purists.

"I'm going to get into trouble, but what's missing are clubs that weave different music so that a jazz club can draw a wider experience than pure avant-garde jazz, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, that dissonant sound. For example, Wynton is purist to the point that I'm afraid of what he's doing at Lincoln Center, not allowing anything but pure jazz, and that may take a toll because, first, there aren't that many great players, and second, you can see them at New York nightclubs for less money. That's why Paul's Mall and the Jazz Workshop worked. The diversity that attracted a wide audience, and that's what Scullers is, a mix of my Jazz Workshop and Paul's Mall."

Taylor lives on the 13th floor, and seven mornings a week he takes the elevator to his suite of offices on the second floor and works through the day until it's time to head to Scullers.

"I don't drink. I'm on medication for blood pressure. I used to drink scotch, but never at work. If someone wanted to buy me a drink, it was always ginger ale and why? Do you drink at work? No? Neither do I, because this is my work. It happens to be entertainment, but it's my work.

"And no, I never married. Actually, I'm married to the business. It's funny, at Paul's Mall I'd work seven days a week, sometimes 18 hours a day, and I'd wake up some mornings and say, whoa, wait a minute. What day is this? And then, I'd realize, oh, no! That gal I met a week ago that I thought was great -- I forgot to call her."

Meanwhile, if you're looking for Fred in the next few years, he'll be at Scullers. If the place closes, and he needs to find a new home yet again, he's already decided that he'll either buy an old club or build a new one, maybe bigger, because after 60 years, Mr. Jazz has got the swing of it.

Jack Thomas can be reached at thomas@globe.com.