History and relative oddity aside, the big question for Harley wasn’t why play the bagpipes, it was how. Over the centuries, versions appeared in Spain, Greece, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The first written evidence of the bagpipes showed up in first-century Greece. He researched the bagpipes, finding out that, despite being most widely known as a Scottish instrument, the bagpipes have a worldwide reach. “In fact, every musician in Philadelphia thought I was crazy.” It didn’t matter, though. “The pawnbroker thought I was crazy,” Harley recalled in that same interview. There’s nothing like the real thing, and so that winter, Harley bought a set of bagpipes for $120 from a pawn shop, making him the first jazz musician to make the Great Highland bagpipes his primary instrument. He tried to make his horn produce that sound. “When I heard and saw the Black Watch Bagpipe Band marching across the funeral grounds,” Harley said in a 1982 interview, “I was very impressed with the sound of the instrument. Those low moaning notes falling over the procession were the exact sounds he had been trying to capture in his music. It wasn’t just the sadness of the day, it was that sound. Harley, a Philadelphia jazz musician who at that point had been playing the flute and saxophone, felt something stir in him. In the background, Harley heard a low sound. America had lost its leader, and with ears pressed to radios or eyes turned to television screens, each person witnessed the end of a tragic turn of events. Like most Americans alive at the time, Rufus Harley was transfixed by the Novemreporting from John F.

Jazz bagpipe player