TOKYO: American jazz legend Cecil Taylor was among three winners of an annual Japanese award for global achievement.

The Inamori Foundation announced yesterday that this year’s Kyoto Prize also went to a US inventor of one of the most widely used integrated circuit memory systems and to a Japanese biologist.

An 84-year-old veteran jazz pianist from New York, Taylor opened new possibilities in jazz with his distinctive musical construction and renditions.

Robert Dennard, 80, also a New Yorker, invented basic structure for Dynamic Random Access Memory, contributing to boosting data storage capacity and cost reduction.