There isn’t much to it, in its bare outline. Rick was born in Georgia five or ten minutes before his mother died and some ten days before his father checked out and left him with his seventeen-year-old aunt and her brother. These two worked their way to Los Angeles eight years later and brought him with them; and there he grew up in the way he apparently had to go. He learned to play the piano by fooling around with pianos in churches and roadhouses—any place, in fact, where there was a piano that could be got at and fooled around with. And because he had right in his bones whatever it takes to make music, he became while he was still a kid a very good pianist. But a piano wasn’t exactly right for him, and he turned to brass finally; he earned enough money to buy himself a horn. And then he learned to play a horn—a trumpet, if there’s anybody here who doesn’t know what kind of a horn a horn is—and that was his proper medium. He learned a lot from Art Hazard, the great negro trumpeter, but that doesn’t explain what made him so good.
