The jazz saxophonist and clarinet player Barney Bigard was a highly respected
and popular player during the heyday of the jazz boom in the 1920s and 1930s. He
was born in 1906 into a New Orleans Creole family and as a teenager studied
music under the famous clarinet player Lorenzo Tio. Tio was an enthusiastic
exponent of the jazz solo and his influence helped to shape Bigard into the
outstanding soloist he was later to become. At the age of 21 Bigard joined Duke
Ellington's orchestra in New York and remained in Ellington's ensemble for the
next 15 years during which time he toure...