Collection: Al Haig

Al Haig was working a cocktail gig around Boston in the early 1940s when he heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on a late-night radio broadcast from New York and changed his plans entirely. He served in the Coast Guard from 1942 to 1944, moved to New York, and within months was inside bebop's founding sessions: he played on the Gillespie quintet's 1945 Guild Records 78s, four sides widely regarded as the first recordings to demonstrate all elements of the mature bebop style. He was Parker's pianist from 1948 to 1950, performing at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street alongside Gillespie, Max Roach and Tommy Potter, and was the pianist on Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" nonet sessions in 1949. Stan Getz hired him from 1949 to 1951. That is a résumé that would sustain a career indefinitely, and it didn't. Haig spent most of the 1950s and 1960s playing cocktail gigs for the society set, in part because of legal difficulties that left him personally marginalised from the jazz world without formally ending his career. The critic Max Harrison wrote that Haig was "a definite influence on Hank Jones and, through him, on other men, such as Tommy Flanagan," which locates him precisely in the bebop piano lineage, influential enough to shape the musicians who shaped the generation after. His rediscovery came in 1974 when Tony Williams, owner of Spotlite Records in the UK, invited him to tour Europe. He recorded "Invitation" for Spotlite with bassist Bibi Rovère and drummer Kenny Clarke, and spent the next eight years building a late-career following in Europe and Japan before his death from a heart attack in November 1982.