Jackie McLean 84
Johnnie Griffin 67
For the ignoramuses among you, Jean-Baptiste "Illinois" Jacquet was a Creole born in Louisiana, who took his name from the Creole word "Illiniwek," meaning superior men, his mother being a Creole.
True story: In 19XX Illinois performed with a big band I played with in college. His featured piece was a solo bassoon version of Somewhere over the Rainbow that he performed after an impassioned don't-you-kids-do-drugs speech, the point of which was that drugs would be the ruination of us all. At the after party a hashish bowl was being passed around and when it got to Mr. Jacquet he said to Jay Friedman, the trumpeter player who had supplied the hash, he said, "What are you, a Jewboy?" due the paucity of hash. And then he sucked all of it down. The irony is that Jay was very very Jewish (despite which he was a passable trumpet player) and that I and the entire sax section were tripping our balls off during the show and after, and not on whatever drugs pass for LSD nowadays, but on authentic Blue Windows.
Good story Doc. I'll give my Illinois Jacquet story even though it's not nearly as good as yours.
I used to buy a series of tickets often to see stuff at Tilles center on LI. So I went to the Illinois Jacquet concert there which so happened to be the same night that St. Johns was playing it's first Ncaa tournament game in a while during the Lopez era. In this pre iPhone era you had no way of knowing what was going on. I left the concert right before the encore and got home just in time to see Felipe clank the potential game winning three against Detroit off the back iron.