I was catching up on posts on this thread over the last week or so tonight and saw a couple of mentions of Gunther Schuller. In addition to being a great writer/jazz historian, he was also a great composer, both of jazz and "classical" music. He organized brass groups in New York that crossed over both styles of playing and made some very interesting records. He played my instrument, the French horn. He was actually principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and wrote a famous book on horn playing. He was a great man and great musician. Had the pleasure of meeting him my freshman year in college when he came to speak at my school. He died in 2015. He can be heard on some classic jazz albums, including Birth of the Cool. He was also good friends with the best jazz horn player of the era, Julius Watkins. He and one of the other top orchestral horn players of the era, John Barrows, can both be heard (in a backup horn quartet) on Watkins' record entitled French Horns For My Lady, recorded for Phillips. Watkins himself was mostly a side man, as you can imagine, playing the horn, but he was leader on a few albums, notably a couple he recorded for Blue Note with a sextet he put together.
