My meme is being difficult apparently, take 2, here.
I love jazz and blues, but I don't know them very well. Always happy to see lists of folks to go look up and better educate myself. 
Once upon a time, I paid a lot of attention to jazz. Blues (12 and 16-bars which is the cornerstone of jazz and much of pop music that's sane), swing, be bop, hard bop, fusion, the list goes on and on. Except it doesn't. Big bands are rarer than hen's teeth (Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band in LA being a notable exception). Count Basie wrote the book on big band blues and he will never be replicated. Trumpeters I failed to mention - Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Nat Adderley (his brother Cannonball Adderley on alto sax), Conte and Pete Candoli (who played with Doc Severinsen in the Tonight Show Band), Doc himself, though Doc is still gigging well into his 90s.
Sigh.
Thankfully, we still have Wayne Bergeron and a delightfully young and energetic trumpeter named Louis Dowdeswell, who is killin' it, and the always dapper Wynton Marsalis and his brother Branford on saxophone, usually tenor.
When I was in Berlin I went to see Dizzy, Chet Baker (about 3 months before he launched himseld out of an Amsterdam hotel room window), Count Basie (Freddie Green on guitar about 2 months before he passed), Billy Joel (who killed it though he's not a jazzer so much), Al Jarreau (OMG, a former taxi driver who just f'n crushed it), and so many more.
A good friend of mine, Chris Burnett, on saxophone, flute, and clarinet, is gigging and composing in KC and he's a monster - served with him 40+ years ago.
There are just so many I can't keep up.....
