📍Fort Worth, TX, USA
1930 – 1949“I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in March 1930, and grew up poor in a segregated city. My father died when I was about seven, and my mother, Rosa, worked as a seamstress to raise my sister and me. To buy coffee for my mother, I had to walk through an area of wealthy white homes, and I learned early what racism felt like. I first heard after-hours music in Greenway Park, and I asked my mother for a horn. She told me I would have to earn the money, so I spent years shining shoes and giving her the money. Then, when I was about fourteen, she told me to look under the bed, and there was an alto saxophone. I taught myself to play it, playing along with the radio, and learned marches and hymns in the school and church bands, while listening to blues, honky-tonk and rhythm and blues. At I.M. Terrell High School, I played in the band and met Dewey Redman, Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson, who all became great musicians, and a bebop saxophonist, Red Connor, taught me that jazz was an idea, not a pattern. They say I was thrown out of the band for improvising during a march. Before I finished school, I was supporting my mother and sister by playing tenor saxophone in local rhythm and blues bands. I left Texas and went to Los Angeles, and in 1959 I took my quartet to the Five Spot in New York and played The Shape of Jazz to Come, and the world called it free jazz. I won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Fort Worth remembers the shoeshine boy who changed the shape of jazz.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today