Kenny Dorham Birthday

Jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham was born McKinley Howard Dorham on August 30, 1924, in Fairfield, Texas. He grew up in Austin, where band director B. L. Joyce set him on trumpet at Anderson High School. He went on to replace Miles Davis in the Charlie Parker Quintet, co-found the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey and Horace Silver, replace Clifford Brown in the Max Roach Quintet, and write “Blue Bossa” — one of the most recorded jazz standards of the twentieth century.

Dorham never received the commercial recognition his peers did, but he is remembered as one of the most complete bebop trumpeters of his era — a player whose touch, harmonic sense, and compositional mind set him apart. He died December 5, 1972, in New York City. Austin named him an inaugural inductee of the Austin Music Memorial in 2008.