Fact #94088

Walter Henri Dyett is born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Beginning in 1931 with his appointment as band director at Wendell Phillips High School, Captain Walter Henri Dyett will train more than 20,000 musicians in the art of playing jazz, until his retirement from DuSable High School thirty years later. Among those who passed through his classes have been saxophonists Gene "Jug" Ammons and Clifford Jordan; trumpeters Sonny Cohn and Paul Serrano; trombonist Julian Priester; bassists Wilbur Ware and Fred Hopkins; pianists Dorothy Donegan and John Young; drummers Wilbur Campbell and Jerome Cooper; violinist Leroy Jenkins, and singers Dinah Washington and Johnny Hartman.