Imagine inventing a new genre of music, writing jukebox anthems that define an era, and then rejecting the title of composer because you claim you wrote those tracks by accident while whistling or killing time at the piano. This episode follows Bobby Timmons from Philadelphia, where he was born in December 1935 into a family of ministers and pianists, played in his grandfather's church, studied with his uncle Robert Habershaw, and grew up on the same block as Lee Morgan and the Heath brothers.

The conversation tracks his 1954 move to New York, sideman work with Kenny Dorham, Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, and Maynard Ferguson, and the July 1958 recruitment by Benny Golson into Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, where an eight-bar vamp Timmons played between tunes became Moanin' once Golson pushed him to write a bridge. It follows the hits This Here an ...