Jaki Byard was a jazz pianist of rumbling mastery, quick humor and sprawling erudition, never as prominent as he should have been, though he was hardly unheralded in his time. Since his death in 1999, his legacy has been burnished by some posthumous live recordings and, no less effectively, by the continuing testimony of his students, several generations of whom he mentored in music schools across the Northeast.
Yard Byard, which also calls itself the Jaki Byard Project, consists almost entirely of musicians who studied with him at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Formed recently by the flutist Jamie Baum with the drummer George Schuller, it features Adam Kolker on clarinets and tenor saxophone, Jerome Harris on guitar and Ugonna Okegwo on bass.
from http://www.nytimes.com