Biography
He grew up in Chicago and went to DuSable high school. He was good at all instruments and had a discipline to practice thoroughly. That is why he was hired by Lionel Hampton as a tenor saxophone player right after his graduation at the age of 17. In late 1940s, he moved to New York because he wanted to do bebop whereas Hampton wanted to continue with swing. This is when he started to become a master of what he does and learn from inventors like Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Elmo Hope. Although he kept coming back to Chicago, he moved to Europe and never moved back to United States. He says “it’s just the way they received jazz musicians in Europe was quite different from what they do in the States, and it’s still like that even today.” “Jazz jas a high profile in Europe. And people just seem to have more leisure time to enjoy the things of aesthetic value than they seem to have over there.” He dies at the age of 80 in 2008 in France.