Jazz musician; born in Davenport, Iowa. He was a cornetist, pianist, and composer whose meteoric career began in 1923 with the Wolverines and continued with Jean Goldkette, Frankie Trumbauer, Paul Whiteman, and Glen Gray. He was the first important white jazz artist. His early death from pneumonia, complicated by alcoholism, fueled his legend as the romanticized figure depicted in the novel Young Man With a Horn (1938).