Haas wore leather pants when he performed. He was tall and rail-thin with large hands and an obsession with bebop and hard bop music of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — Charlie Parker especially. When we arrived for that first class he handed out a transcription of the solo from Parker’s tune “Koko” and played the recording from which it came. It was a revelatory experience. I saw the genius of Parker’s instant composition — the nuances, the harmonic development — all over the course of a two-minute piece. The recording ended and I looked up from the paper transformed — I was almost crying. Up until that moment jazz was a blur of notes, an approximation of a form I wasn’t able to grasp, but that recording with the notation unlocked the form for me.

I became possessed and was made despondent by the music. Possessed because there was an infinite reserve of recordings to mine and only a few weeks of concentrated study to crack the surface, and despondent because I was 20 years old and still a mediocre musician.