10/13/2026
Cannonball Adderley got $64.67 for finishing Kind of Blue with Miles Davis. That was the alto saxophonist's pay for the last recording session of a 1959 album that has since sold five million copies in America. Four years earlier he had a steady job as a high school band director in Florida. He was also a man who checked the arithmetic first. So what made him go?
New York had to ask twice.
On Sunday, June 19, 1955, he carried his alto saxophone into the Cafe Bohemia, a jazz club in Greenwich Village. He was twenty-six and it was his first night in the city. He had come north for summer classes at New York University.
The classes were toward a master's degree. By his own account, the degree was "preparation to make more money teaching." That was the whole trip, a raise.
The house bandleader, a bassist named Oscar Pettiford, was short a saxophone player that night. He spotted the horn case in the crowd and sent a man over to borrow what was in it.
The man came back without it. In one telling, Cannonball would not lend his horn but offered to come up and play it himself. In another, the go-between never asked and simply invited him.
Pettiford agreed, and he was not happy about it. He called "I'll Remember April" and counted it off far above its usual speed. By the usual account, he meant to show the stranger up.
Cannonball sailed through it.
By the end of the night the bandleader had hired him. Class was due to start on Monday.
"I never went to class," he told Down Beat magazine seven years later. "I got a job at the Bohemia?" He called it "a dream come true."
His younger brother Nat, who played cornet, a close cousin of the trumpet, was in the club with him. A stranger walked up and asked Nat the saxophone player's name.
Nat took the man for a union inspector and played dumb. "I don't know," he said, "I think he comes from Florida and he's called Cannonball."
The saxophone player's given name was Julian. Cannonball was a boyhood nickname, bent out of the word cannibal on account of his appetite. Nobody had called him that, Nat said, in six or seven years.
The stranger owned the club, and he passed the nickname along to his customers. It never came off.
Cannonball played the same instrument as Charlie Parker, the most celebrated saxophonist in jazz, who had died three months earlier at thirty-four. Parker's nickname was Bird, and a record label began selling Cannonball as "the new Bird."
Cannonball called that foolishness.
Anybody sold that way, he said, has "got to come out second best." He made his first record nine days after that Sunday. He made one under his own name before July was half over.
Then the summer ended, and he went home to Fort Lauderdale to teach.
He had signed a contract to teach in Florida, his brother wrote later, and he had to go back. The contract was only part of it.
"By this time I was making ten grand a year in Florida," he said. "I had this teaching at five grand, and I was making $150 a week playing at night." He sold automobiles on the side.
"I had that gift of gab," he said. "Old ladies, I could sell them any kind of car."
"It was hard to turn my back on all that," he said, "and come to New York with nothing." New York kept asking.
What was the dream paying?
Less. The offers, his brother wrote, "wouldn't come up to what he was getting in Florida."
The Florida job was a band room at Dillard High School, an all-Black school. He had been hired there in 1948 at nineteen, with students in the room who were eighteen.
A member of Dillard's class of 1948 remembered what the school was handed to work with. "We got secondhand books," he said. "But the main thing: we had good teachers."
The same graduate heard it from the students: the young band director was no-nonsense.
Cannonball stayed through the first half of that school year. His brother, by his own account, "sneaked around and worked all kinds of deals" to get him back north.
On January 18, 1956, Cannonball wrote to the county school superintendent. He was resigning, effective early February.
"I have been given the opportunity of furthering myself professionally in the field of popular music," the letter said, "and feel that I should no longer postpone taking this step."
His principal answered the next day. He wrote, "Best wishes for continued success in the field of popular music."
Cannonball built his first band out of Florida musicians and rehearsed them for two and a half weeks. His manager booked them into a club in Philadelphia. Local players came to stand around and listen.
One of them was a tenor saxophonist named John Coltrane.
The manager came down that first week and heard one set, a single turn on the bandstand. Then he fired everybody but the two brothers. They talked him into sparing the piano player, who had only just joined.
"I found out that you can't fool anybody in Philadelphia," Cannonball wrote. He had been, in his own word, "naively" sure that Florida's best could hold that stage.
Two and a half weeks of rehearsal lasted one set.
New men came in and the band went to work. In May 1960 he laid out what that work had paid, in a magazine called The Jazz Review.
"We were getting about $1,000 a week for five men," he wrote. Then the band director showed his work.
The manager and the booking office took $150. Union taxes took $75, though a third of that came back later. Federal withholding ran about $125, and Social Security maybe $15 more.
That leaves $635.
Each sideman, a hired player in the band, drew $125 a week and paid his own hotel bill out of it. The tax money was supposed to go into a separate account every week. After a while, he wrote, "we began spending that money because we also had gasoline bills."
By September 1957 the band was about $9,000 in debt.
At his Dillard salary, that was close to two years of teaching. The band had been, in his words, "working steadily" the whole time.
"After twenty months," he wrote, "we still couldn't get more than $1,000 a week." He broke up the band.
That fall he was back at the Cafe Bohemia, the room where it had started. The other band on the program belonged to the trumpeter Miles Davis.
Cannonball told Davis he was about to join another star trumpeter's band. Davis asked why he didn't join him.
"I told him he'd never asked me," Cannonball wrote.
He joined in October 1957 as a sideman himself. He was twenty-nine, and his new boss was two years older.
The former teacher got a lesson of his own. "Cannonball, you don't have to play all those notes," his boss told him.
He admitted he brushed off his boss's teaching at first. "I was a little arrogant in those days," he wrote. The trumpeter said later that his new saxophonist soaked things up "like a sponge."
In the spring of his second year in that band, Davis took the group into a Columbia Records studio in New York. They recorded Kind of Blue there in two sessions, March 2 and April 22. The other saxophonist in the room was John Coltrane, the same man who had stood listening in Philadelphia.
For the first session, the trumpeter pressed the label for a $100 bonus for three of his men, both saxophonists among them. The last session paid plain union scale, the minimum the musicians' union allowed, plus a half hour of overtime. Scale that year was $48.50 a session.
Sidemen were paid by the session. The royalties were the leader's.
Cannonball left that band in the fall and started a second one with his brother. Weeks later they were working the Jazz Workshop, a San Francisco club, with a producer's tape rolling.
Before one tune Cannonball thanked the crowd and asked, "Could we have the lights out please, for atmosphere?" Then he explained what they were about to hear.
It was a jazz waltz by his piano player, he said, and it was "simultaneously a shout and a chant." It came out of church music. "I don't mean Bach chorales," he told them.
Who brings up Bach chorales in a nightclub? A band director does.
His producer, Orrin Keepnews, had what he called a "daring idea." He left the talking on the album, almost a minute and a half of it, ahead of the first note. "The album turned into a huge hit," he wrote.
The gift of gab that worked on old ladies in Florida was working on jazz crowds now.
Cannonball had sixteen years left. He would die on August 8, 1975, in Gary, Indiana, after a stroke on tour, at forty-six.
In 1961 a major record company offered him more money than his small label could match. He stayed, the producer wrote, because he felt "at home among friends."
Yusef Lateef played saxophone, flute and oboe in the band in the early 1960s and later earned a doctorate in education. "It was like going to school being in his company," he said.
Cannonball played on friends' record dates for union scale. He was the one who told the label about a guitarist named Wes Montgomery. In 1964, with the label going under, he offered to sign on for another year because the news might help.
In October 1966 Cannonball recorded a tune by a newer piano player called "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." The album cover said it was taped live at a nightclub in Chicago.
It was taped at a Capitol Records studio in Hollywood. The audience was invited and the bar was open. In 1967 the single went to number 11 on the pop chart.
He told his old producer how he had done it. "I finally talked Capitol into recording me the right way," he said, "the way you and I used to do it."
By the end of the 1960s he was taking the band into colleges for a week at a time. At Albany State College in Georgia he met Black students who danced to this music. They knew nothing, he said, about where it came from.
"You should be proud of this music that is black-oriented," he told them, "that was begun, nurtured, and developed by black people."
In 1972 he told Down Beat about the band's week as artists in residence at UCLA. The band gave clinics, seminars and concerts, then sat up at night in the dormitories talking with students.
The man who once printed his weekly take down to the Social Security had new numbers for the magazine. At one California session, he said, "we had something like 4,000 people."
UCLA told him it had also brought in a famous string quartet, poets and painters. The students "weren't really using them."
Getting to that dormitory had cost him a band room, a steady salary and about $9,000. He told the magazine what he got back.
"That really made me feel good," Cannonball said, "because they really used us."
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