This Friday at 7:00 pm, Rick Porter and Music Unlimited will perform a Kenny Dorham Retrospective, celebrating the music of BeBop great, trumpeter Kenny Dorham. The performance will be held at the Rollins-Stewart Music Building at Texas Southern University. Admission is $5.00.

The performance and discussion is presented by Jazz Crossroads, The Community Music Center, and Texas Southern University.

Drummer/composer Rick Porter played with Kenny Dorham extensively in various settings since the early 1950s. The retrospective includes a seminar and discussion of this trumpet master's contribution to jazz.

One of the great trumpet voices of the bebop era, Kenny Dorham played with most of the giants of the music in the 1940s and 1950s, then went on to success leading his own combo in the '60s. Throughout his career, Kenny Dorham was almost famous for being underrated, since he consistently was overshadowed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and clifford Brown.

Born Aug 30, 1924, in Fairfield, Texas, Dorham took piano lessons from the age of 7, shifted to trumpet in high school in Austin, Texas. He entered the Army in 1942, where he was on the boxing team, and started playing with Russell Jacquet in 1943. In 1945, he was in the orchestra of Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Eckstine. He recorded with the Be Bop Boys in 1946 and spent short periods with Lionel Hampton and Mercer Ellington. In 1948, he became the replacement for Miles Davis in the Charlie Parker Quintet for several years.

Dorham played around New York City in the early 1950s, then, in 1954, he became a member of the first version of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and for a short time led a group called the Jazz Prophets, which recorded on Blue Note. He later replaced Clifford Brown in the Max Roach Quintet (1956-58) when Brown was killed in a car crash. He recorded several outstanding dates for Riverside (including a vocal album in 1958), New Jazz and Time but his Blue Note sessions of 1961-64 are among his finest. Dorham continued to lead his own groups (including one that featured Joe Henderson 1963-64) and worked and recorded on his own and with others until his death Dec 5, 1972. His best recordings include Whistle Stop and Una Mas for Blue Note and Jazz Contemporary for Time and the standard, Blue Bossa.