In 1953 a Gary, Indiana couple started what would become one of the most successful black-owned record labels, highlighting gospel, blues, R and B, and jazz.

Throughout the 1950s jazz promoter George Wein ran a Boston nightclub that showcased some of the music’s most notable performers.

Though it received middling reviews, the 1963 concert series included the festival debuts of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, the rollout of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Dizzy For President” campaign, one of jazz legend Jack Teagarden’s last appearances, and a tribute from the Modern Jazz Quartet to Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1961 saxophonist Sonny Rollins returned from a two-year sabbatical, forming new musical alliances as he plunged into a shifting and vibrant jazz landscape.

At the beginning of the 1960s jazz pianist and theorist George Russsell teamed up with trombonist and jazz educator David Baker and other Indiana jazz musicians to form one of the era’s most exciting and innovative groups.

Claude Thornhill was a pianist, composer, and arranger whose 1940s big bands helped shape the sound of modern jazz, with orchestral bop and ethereal ballads tinged with classical influences that set the stage for later masterpieces by Miles Davis and Gil Evans.

Though he recorded with organists Bill Doggett and Jimmy Smith, when saxophonist Percy France died in 1992 he was primarily known and admired among a small circle of his fellow New York City jazz musicians. Now a new website aims to elevate his soulful tenor sound and story.

As a young trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was everywhere, appearing on some of the most landmark jazz albums of the 1960s.

In the 1940s a young jazz singer with a four-octave range and bebop chops burst onto the big-band scene with Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine before going on to establish herself as a solo star.

David Brent Johnson remembers Indiana writer Dan Wakefield.