Another jazz story:

While I was a student at Yale, I was lucky enough to study with Allan Dean, a trumpet player who taught in the Graduate School of Music, but who occasionally would take an undergrad or two as a student for private lessons. Dean was a legendary freelancer for decades in NYC, and recorded on everything from an array of Phillip Glass pieces to NBC’s Olympic Fanfare and the soundtrack to The Wiz.

When he first came to NYC, barely twenty years old, however, Dean wanted to be a jazz musician. So his first night in town, he brought his horn to a jazz club (I think it was the Village Vanguard) for an open jam session. Just as he arrived, an equally young black kid was going onstage with a trumpet in hand, so he put his case down next to his feet, and sat down to listen.

Over the first song, and the ones that followed, Allan started slouching in his chair, scooting the trumpet case further and further under the table. The kid was amazing. Mind-blowingly good. And if the first random kid you heard in a city was that impressive, he reasoned, there was just no way in the world he’d cut it playing jazz professionally. So, he went home, started working on the classical end of things, too, to balance out his skills, and embarked on a commercial freelance career instead.

It was a year or two later when Dean realized that kid had been Clifford Brown, who quickly went on to become one of the two or three greatest jazz trumpet players of all time.