In Autumn 1981, I reported on the Camden (UK) Jazz Festival for the Columbia Missourian, my university’s daily paper. I spent a night at that festival, and the festival was more than a one-night event, but it was a memorable enough night, nonetheless.

   My report began, ‘Fans had waited patiently for more than an hour for the miracle quintet led by Archie Shepp. But the rough channel crossing set back everyone but the lead, who had come to town early and avoided the ungodly hovercraft. The organizers of Camden’s Jazz Festival could draw up blueprints for plans, but they couldn’t schedule the weather.’

  As the crowd waited in their seats, I was backstage, which was downstairs, amid the caravan of visitors and scribes. An ITV crew was trying to slate an evening of total coverage. An anxious theatre staffer carried huge bowls of food to the musicians. A middle-aged man slipped into the dressing room and emerged to the clap of an autograph album. ‘Made it,’ he exclaimed and left.

   A dapper man in a gray, three-piece, pin-stripe suit cruised by. The man was Charlie McGhee, notable trumpeter. When Shepp left the dressing room, McGhee was next to him. Soon, onstage, there would be no mistaking McGhee’s instrumental wit. The trumpeter’s sulphurous-sagacious strains would play Mr. Perspicacious to Shepp’s wondrous tenor sax.

    However, this reporter had requested some photos, and to meet that request halfway at least, Shepp and his group posed behind the curtain with their instruments, as they prepared to go on. They froze their would-be motions, and I photographed them, two stills, which I would later lose track of, but which would have perhaps made it into a cigarette ad that went through at least the Midwest on billboards, showing jazz greats at work. Their freezing for me seems too improbable to be true, but it was true, though I wish I still had those two negatives to prove that part of this story.

   Suave and buttoned-down refers mainly to McGhee’s style, and when the famed quintet lit up the stage and crowd, McGhee’s perfect harmony with the lead captured the fans’ attention. When Shepp found his form, B-flat horn applauded it. At one point beneath a red banner with Afro-emblazoned shapes, the trumpeter from Mississippi seemed to acknowledge that something long waited for had at last arrived. Near the end, McGhee singed the night air with his haunting, reverberating sounds.