The story described the adventures of a man who stole a milk truck. He drove it through some of Cleveland's better neighborhoods at 5 o'clock in the morning playing "Taps" and other bugle calls on an old trumpet. Eventually he was arrested by Cleveland police. Most people at the time thought it was just an amusing prank. But looking back, that incident was the tragic coda to the career of one of the first top-flight jazz musicians from Cleveland to emerge on the national scene.

The horn player the headline writer called "Gabriel" was Harry "Pee Wee" Jackson, a jazz trumpeter from Cleveland who had played with some of the top black bands in the 1930s and 1940s. Pee Wee Jackson first joined Earl "Fatha" Hines' Orchestra in Chicago. Budd Johnson recalled in Ira Gitler's book Swing To Bop, "Jackson was the first guy we took out of Cleveland." Johnson said Pee Wee Jackson was "a very good trumpet player." According to Johnson, it was Jackson who "pulled our coats" about another Cleveland trumpeter, Freddie Webster. Johnson said the highly-regarded Webster "was never quite the trumpet player that Pee Wee was, but he had that big sound and he used to play pretty."

Jackson joined Horace Henderson's Orchestra in 1938 with another Cleveland trumpeter, Emmett Berry, and returned to Hines in 1940 with yet another trumpeter who had played in Cleveland, Tommy Enoch. In 1941 Jackson, Enoch and Webster, quickly developing what some were beginning to call "The Cleveland Style of Trumpet," went to Los Angeles with Hines and recorded six sides for Bluebird Records.

In 1942 Jackson and Webster joined the high-flying Jimmie Lunceford band. When the band came to Cleveland, young musicians from Central High School turned out in force to cheer their alumni heroes.

Jackson and Webster returned to Hines again in 1942 and played with such sidemen as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine and singer Sarah Vaughan. It was the band many later called "The Incubator of Bop." Budd Johnson remembered, "Freddie would play the big sound and the pretty things, and Pee Wee would play the bop-style songs."

But Jackson apparently began drinking heavily and soon disappeared from the jazz scene. He was not heard from again until that night in Cleveland when he stole a milk truck and drove around some of the better neighborhoods playing "Taps." A few years later the Cleveland jazz pioneer was dead and all but forgotten.

CLICK HERE for last week's "Jazzed in Cleveland"

...unlike later editions of the Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw Orchestras, Mercer Ellington’s version of his father’s band was not a ghost band..."I’m offended sometimes," he says, "when I hear that term `ghost band’ because here it was, a dream come true, even though it was Duke Ellington’s son. We were playing the tunes I had grown up playing, `Take the A Train,’ things like that. I was playing the original manuscript. The page in front of me said `A Train’ and instead of listing first, second or third trumpet on it, it said `Cootie.’ It was Cootie Williams’ original manuscript. Oh, man, this was amazing. I was in heaven!"

Don't miss it...next week in cleveland.oh.us!

You can hear radio versions of Cleveland Jazz History on WCPN/90.3 Monday nights at 9:30 and Friday afternoons at 12:30. Mosbrook's 1993 Cleveland Jazz History book, based on research for earlier broadcasts, is available from some Cleveland area bookstores, libraries, and the Northeast Ohio Jazz Society (216-397-9900).