Austin: Kenny Dorham at Anderson High School

Kenny Dorham’s family moved from Fairfield to Austin when he was young, and East Austin became the world that shaped him. The neighborhood east of downtown was the center of Austin’s African American community — its churches, businesses, schools, and music. At Kealing Junior High School on Pennsylvania Avenue, Dorham came under the guidance of band director B. L. Joyce, who recognized his musical aptitude and put him to work first on saxophone, then on trumpet. That instrument switch changed everything.

By the time Dorham reached Anderson High School — Austin’s historically Black high school, forced by segregation to concentrate an extraordinary density of talent — he was already committed to the horn. His classmate Alvin Patterson was also a trumpeter, and the two spent their high school years competing and collaborating inside the Anderson Yellowjackets band. The corridors of Texas’s historically Black high schools were quietly producing the architects of mid-century American music.

Blue Bossa Begins in East Austin

After graduating, Dorham went to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, then enrolled in a New York music school at age nineteen. He never lived in Austin again, but he returned in 1966 for the first Longhorn Jazz Festival at Disch Field on Barton Springs Road — a two-day event featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and Stan Getz alongside a homecoming set from Kenny Dorham. He reunited with Alvin Patterson and Anderson classmates. By then he had recorded Whistle Stop, Una Mas, and dozens of sessions for Blue Note. He had written “Blue Bossa” — first recorded by Joe Henderson in 1963 — which had become a jazz standard played on every trumpet bench from Austin to Tokyo.

In 2008, the City of Austin named Dorham one of the inaugural inductees of the Austin Music Memorial. The school that put him on trumpet, and the East Austin neighborhood that surrounded it, had finally gotten their due. More on Austin’s East Side jazz tradition at the Texas Music Museum.