“Journeyman” is often applied to those in the jazz business, but “stevedore” might be more apt. After all, both individuality and slow recognition are the result of impossibly hard work, and Curson is the rule rather than the exception. Born June 3rd, 1935 in Philadelphia, Ted Curson came to music early on, playing saxophone from age five and trumpet from ten. “When I was a kid, there was a guy who came through the streets selling newspapers, and he had a silver trumpet…so I asked my father for one of those. He really preferred the alto because in those days Louis Jordan was very famous and my father said that if I played [alto], I’d get a new one every year, but if I played trumpet, I’d get just one! I didn’t get my raggedy trumpet until I was about ten.” The Philadelphia jazz community is known for having an extremely strong community of musicians - Lee Morgan, Coltrane, Henry Grimes, Archie Shepp and Kenny and Bill Barron all hail from one of Pennsylvania’s jazz capitals, not to mention the Heath brothers, who lived around the corner from the Cursons. Albert “Tootie” Heath, later a fine postbop drummer, went to school with Ted “and we used to go around meeting all the famous jazz musicians. On Sundays, Mrs. Heath would make dinner for any musicians who were coming to Philadelphia. You could see anyone from Miles to Duke Ellington to Sonny Rollins [at the Heaths’ place].”

Curson and the Heaths were just a few of the musicians whose seeds were sown in the wake of Bird and Dizzy - “there were a lot of us around the same time who got our instruments; I mean, we couldn’t play, but we played badly together.” Curson attended the Mastbaum School (he later attended Granoff) for musical training - Red Rodney, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan among others studied there - and turned professional at 16. It was around his late teenage years that Curson began to get involved with another scene in Philadelphia, those who were trying to do something different with the doors opened by bebop’s architects - people like reedmen Bill Barron and Odean Pope. Curson puts it this way: “I was raised in the middle of the Dizzy Gillespie thing, I was surrounded with this and I knew I’d never play like Dizzy and I didn’t want to. I wanted to see what I could do - what Ted Curson could do with ‘A Night in Tunisia’.”

It was also around this time that Curson met Miles Davis; the teenage upstart was, in his words, “wearing my hair like Miles, I had a tie around my waist, I even made the mistakes that he made. I liked his approach to everything and I still do. He heard me play when I was around 15 or 16 and he gave me his card and he said ‘if you ever come to New York, give me a call.’ There was no conversation - he said that and left - and I kept that thing in my pocket for years. After I graduated, it was about three years before I finally moved there [at age 21] and I called up Miles. Miles said ‘Ted Curson, that little guy from Philadelphia? We’ve been waiting for you for three years! Where the hell have you been?’” The scene appeared to be aware of Curson’s potential, for he was almost signed to Roulette Records at Birdland before making any appearances as a leader, the night Roulette’s A&R man and Birdland co-owner Irving Levy was murdered outside the club.