UP TO THE TIME that I moved to Cincinnati in 1943 to join the orchestra there, my musical interests and studies had been primarily in classical music. I had discovered jazz by then, of course, although rather late compared to the average American youngster. That was a function of my spending four years in Germany, in the relative isolation of a private school in a country—Nazi Germany—where jazz was a forbidden (verboten) music from 1933 on. There was absolutely no way I could have heard any jazz during those four and a half years. When I did discover jazz upon my return to the United States and became seriously attracted to it, it was through Duke Ellington's music, which in itself is interesting in that it was the work of the greatest composer in jazz, not its (at the time) more famous and popular white band leaders— Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, etc. As great as Ellington's musicians were and as much as they individually contributed to the final realization of Duke's music, it was the basic compositions with all their originality and innovativeness that really caught my attention and provoked my interest. I suppose that was more or less inevitable, given that my involvement with music up to then was entirely on the classical side, where the composition is the prime procreative element.

In any case, that I as an American would eventually discover jazz was inevitable, given that jazz is our country's one and only homegrown, quintessentially American music, and that between the 1920s and 1950s jazz was one of the only two musical genres that played a central role in the lives of Americans.1 Remarkably, jazz and classical music were at that time equally popular; both were extensively represented on both radio and in live presentations—classical music in concert halls, jazz in ballrooms, dance halls, hotels, and nightclubs—and in size their respective audiences were just about equal.

After my discovery of Ellington's music, and Basie's and Lunceford's and the many great composer-arrangers of the Goodman, Dorsey, Shaw, and Barnet orchestras—Eddie Sauter, Sy Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Eddie Durham—I knew that jazz would have to become an important part of my musical life.