Early in the Forties Charlie Parker came to the city as a member of Jay McShann’s band from Kansas City

Early in the Forties, Charlie Parker came to the city as a member of Jay McShann’s band from Kansas City. “When I came to New York and went to Monroe’s, I began to listen to that real advanced New York style,” said Parker. “At Monroe’s I heard a session with a pianist named Allen Tinney.”Driven by a stage-struck mother, Tinney had worked as a child dancer in several Broadway shows. He had also been taught piano and as a boy played in drama productions and local dance bands. His playing was so good that he became rehearsal pianist and assistant to George Gershwin as Gershwin prepared Porgy and Bess for Broadway in 1935.Tinney himself had come to Monroe’s by coincidence. He went there to celebrate his 19th birthday with friends, who encouraged him to sit in with the house trio. When he did, the club’s owner, Clark Monroe, asked him to become his regular pianist and he did, leading a trio that had a young Max Roach on drums.

Soon young musicians from all over the city, including Parker himself, came to play with Tinney.The pianist didn’t like the “jam session” aspect of such informality. “When I got my foot in the door, things started to happen because I always liked organisation. We would play different melodies on the same chord changes as an existing melody, which would make it our song now,” he said.”‘How High the Moon’ was a ballad, for crying out loud, until it was played there,” said Tinney’s bassist, Leonard Gaskin. “And so that’s where Dizzy Gillespie heard of us, and Cootie and Monk and all of those other fellows, they heard of this little band, and they all came around to listen to it.”After his military service in the US Army, Tinney returned to New York in 1946 and was horrified to find that most of the musicians he had worked with had by now become ensnared by drugs.

Gradually he turned away from jazz, returning to it only rarely.He became director of a music scheme at New York’s State Detention Centre and lectured regularly at the University of New York in Buffalo, where he moved to live in 1968. He accompanied visiting jazz musicians there and two years ago recorded an album, Peg & Al, with the singer Peggy Farrell.Steve Voce. Ali Jabri was one of the leading Arab artists of his generation. For many people, Jabri’s was the eye through which they discovered Jordan: his vision, communicated through his work and his life, was equally revealing to both Jordanians and visitors. Ali Jabri, artist: born Jerusalem 1943; died Amman, Jordan 3 December 2002. His enthusiasm and love for everything Jordanian – its landscapes, vernacular architecture, ruins, markets and contemporary downtowns, and above all its people – was the driving force behind his endeavour to leave a record of what he feared would one day be lost.Born in Jerusalem in 1943 into a prominent Middle Eastern family, one of the oldest in Aleppo and famous for its intellectuals and politicians, he was an elder child and only son – his sister Diala was born 12 years later.

He was educated first at Victoria College in Cairo (where Edward Said, amongst many other distinguished figures, had also been a pupil) and then sent to Rugby School in England. His art master there described him as the most artistically gifted boy whom he had taught in his years at the school.But, rather than pursue his artistic studies when he left school, he was persuaded by his father, who had been a civil engineer and Minister of Works in Syria, to concentrate on architecture. Ali Jabri lacked the necessary maths O-level to study architecture in England, so he went to Stanford in California. Art, however, remained his first love and he rapidly fell in with a group of artists, most notable of whom was Ron Kitaj.