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"Night after night, as I wandered in and out of clubs, bars, and juke joints with my trumpet beneath my arm and my scores tucked beneath my shirt, a tiny glint of something new began to emerge in my life, something I'd never had before," he wrote in his autobiography. "I had no control over where I lived, no control over my sick mother, no control over my hardheart­ed stepmother and my overwrought father. I couldn't change the attic where I slept, or stop the anguished tears of my little brother, Lloyd, who sometimes cried himself to sleep at night; I couldn't control the angry whites who still called me n***** when they caught me alone on the street, or the bourgeois, high yella blacks who considered me too poor, too dark, and too uneducated to be a part of their lives. But nobody could tell me how many substitute chord changes I could stick into the bridge of 'Cherokee'. Nobody could tell me which tempo to play 'Bebop' or 'A Night In Tunisia' in."

"Music was the one thing I could control," he said. "It was the one world that offered me freedom. When I played music, my nightmares ended. My family problems disappeared. I didn't have to search for answers.