George Gozzard was the baby of a pretty large family the jazz trumpeter Harry Roy Gozzard raised. Harry was one of those great working musicians we heard about in the 1930s and through the 1950s who played jazz and dance band gigs interchangeably. These were the days of months long (if not longer) engagements musicians would have, where you could play jazz and make a living doing it.. And in this piece, George talks about finally beginning to understand who his dad was, and how unusual it was even back then, to have a dad whom other people would know not just as a next door neighbor, but the guy who went to work as most others were sitting down to an early dinner, and played hot jazz every night for most of their lives in the company of other great musicians. Here's George's story. —Peter Rubie

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When I was in kindergarten, my teacher Mrs. Mitchell came up to me during class one day and told me how much she had enjoyed watching and listening to my dad perform at the Elmwood Casino the previous night. It was located just across the Detroit River in the beautiful City of Windsor close to where I grew up. At the time, it really didn't register with me that my dad was a famous musician, so I thought Mrs. Mitchell was just acting a little bit strange and it made me feel somehow funny, thinking of my dad in a way I had never done before. After all, my dad made his living playing the trumpet. At that age I thought, Didn't everyone's dad do something like that?

I remember much later, in the late 1970s when I was about 15 years old, my dad, Harry Roy Gozzard, and I were watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. While the band was playing, out of the blue he told me that he and