The Day Duke Ellington's Screaming Trumpeter Was Shot by His Own Landlord

On September 5, 1950, Al Killian — the trumpeter Gunther Schuller called the greatest high-note lead man of the late swing era — was shot dead in his Los Angeles apartment by his landlord, in a dispute over money that had nothing to do with music. Killian was 33. He'd spent fifteen years anchoring brass sections for Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic before joining Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1947, where his stratospheric range was distinctive enough that Ellington wrote a piece named directly after him: "Killian's Lick." A journeyman who never led his own record date, he left behind a tune still credited to Ellington's book — and a death stranger and more senseless than almost anything else in the jazz history books.