Dallas-Fort Worth Music Greats, Pt 3

In this pre-DFW Record Show installment we focus on two postwar saxophone giants who studied music together for a time at Fort Worth's I.M. Terrell High School. Ornette Coleman began his career in rhythm and blues bands, with R&B great Pee Wee Crayton responsible for his relocating to Los Angeles. There he was drawn inexorably into the L.A. jazz scene, and by the late Fifties had created free jazz records of major significance. 

Coleman's hometown friend King Curtis moved in an almost opposite direction, with promising jazz work giving way to one of the most productive R&B session careers of all time, working with the Coasters, LaVern Baker, Buddy Holly, and Aretha Franklin (among many others) and recording his own successful instrumental sides. It all ended tragically in 1971, when he was murdered outside his Manhattan apartment. Ornette Coleman and King Curtis both had a monumental impact, and one can only imagine their influence on each other during their musical awakening in Fort Worth.