Ray Brown did not choose the upright bass out of passion. In 1940s Pittsburgh his high school was flooded with piano players, his father could not afford a trombone, and the one empty chair in the school orchestra was the bass. This episode follows how that pragmatic decision produced one of the most legendary bassists in jazz history. Brown hauled the school's instrument onto the bus every weekend for paying gigs with the Jimmy Hinsley Sextet and the Snookum Russell band, then bought a one-way ticket to New York in 1946, where Hank Jones introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie and he was hired on the spot.

The hosts explain why Brown's study of Jimmy Blanton made him the exact technical solution bebop needed, how the Gillespie rhythm section with Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke and John Lewis spun off into the Modern Jazz Quartet, and how a 1947 Sout ...