Flip Phillips (March 26, 1915 – August 17, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophone and clarinet player. He is best remembered for his work with Jazz at the Philharmonic from 1946 to 1957.

Born Joseph Edward Filipelli in Brooklyn, New York, United States, and over a long career, he played on many albums, retired to Florida for fifteen years, came back to music, and recorded a CD for Verve Records when he was in his 80s. Phillips performed in a variety of genres, including bebop, mainstream jazz, swing, jump blues and East Coast blues.

In the mid 1940s, Phillips was one of the anchors of the Woody Herman band, prior to going out on his own and prior to joining Jazz at the Philharmonic. He also played with the Woodchoppers, a small spin-off group that Herman led. His deep, strong and articulate playing with a very full sound contrasted him to his successors such as Stan Getz in the subsequent Herman bands.^{[citation needed]}

Phillips recorded extensively for Clef Records, now Verve, in the 1940s and 1950s, including a 1949 album of small-group tracks under his leadership, with Buddy Morrow, Tommy Turk, Kai Winding, Sonny Criss, Ray Brown and Shelly Manne. He accompanied Billie Holiday on her 1952 Billie Holiday Sings album.

David Roy Eldridge (January 30, 1911 – February 26, 1989), nicknamed "Little Jazz" was an American jazz trumpet player. His sophisticated use of harmony, including the use of tritone substitutions, his virtuosic solos exhibiting a departure from the smooth and lyrical style of earlier jazz trumpet innovator Louis Armstrong, and his strong impact on Dizzy Gillespie mark him as one of the most influential musicians of the swing era and a precursor of bebop.

Eldridge was born on the North Side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 30, 1911 to parents Alexander, a carpenter, and Blanche, a gifted pianist with a talent for reproducing music by ear, a trait that Eldridge claims to have inherited from her. Eldridge began playing the piano at age five; he claims to have been able to play coherent blues licks at even this young age. The young Eldridge looked up to his older brother, Joe, particularly because of Joe's diverse musical talents on the violin, alto saxophone, and clarinet. Roy took up the drums at the age of six, taking lessons and playing locally. Joe recognized his brother's natural talent on the bugle, which Roy played in a local church band, and tried to convince Roy to play the valved trumpet When Roy began to play drums in his brother's band, Joe soon convinced him to pick up the trumpet, but Roy made little effort to gain proficiency on the instrument at first. It wasn't until the death of their mother, when Roy was eleven, and his father's subsequent remarriage that Roy began practicing more rigorously, locking himself in his room for hours, and particularly honing the instrument's upper register. From an early age, Roy lacked proficiency at sight-reading, a gap in his musical education that would affect him for much of his early career, but he could replicate melodies by ear very effectively.

Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. He owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform in big band and jazz genres. He was one of the first black Americans to host a television variety show, and has maintained worldwide popularity since his death.

Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on Saint Patrick's Day (March 17) in 1919. When he was 4, he and his family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where his father, Edward Coles, became a Baptist minister (Ruuth 31). Cole learned to play the organ from his mother, Perlina Coles, the church organist. His first performance, at age four, was of "Yes! We Have No Bananas". He began formal lessons at the age of 12, eventually learning not only jazz and gospel music but also European classical music, performing, as he said, "from Johann Sebastian Bach to Sergei Rachmaninoff".

Clark Terry (born December 14, 1920) is an American swing and bop trumpeter, a pioneer of the flugelhorn in jazz, educator, NEA Jazz Masters inductee, and recipient of the 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Only three other trumpet players in history have ever received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award: Louis Armstrong (Clark's old mentor), Miles Davis (whom Clark mentored), and Dizzy Gillespie (who often described Clark as the greatest jazz trumpet player on earth). Clark Terry is one of the most prolific jazz musicians in history, having appeared on 905 known recording sessions, which makes him the most recorded trumpet player of all time. In comparison, Louis Armstrong performed on 620 sessions, Harry "Sweets" Edison on 563, and Dizzy Gillespie on 501.

He has played with Charlie Barnet (1947), Count Basie (1948–1951),Duke Ellington (1951–1959) and Quincy Jones (1960), and has recorded regularly both as a leader and sideman. In all, his career in jazz spans more than sixty years.

Leonard Joseph Tristano (19 March 1919 – 18 November 1978) was a jazz pianist, composer and teacher of jazz improvisation. He performed in the cool jazz, bebop, post bop and avant-garde jazz genres. He remains a somewhat overlooked figure in jazz history, but his enormous originality and dazzling work as an improviser have long been appreciated by knowledgeable jazz fans. In addition, his work as a jazz educator meant that he has exerted a substantial influence on jazz through figures such as Lee Konitz and Bill Evans.

Tristano was born in Chicago into an Italian immigrant family from Aversa. He was blind from infancy and studied piano and music theory from pre-teen years, graduating with a bachelor's degree from his home town's American Conservatory of Music in 1943.

Tristano's interest in jazz inspired a move to New York City in 1946. His advanced grasp of harmony pushed his music beyond even the complexities of the contemporary bebop movement, though Tristano was always explicit about acknowledging his enormous debt to Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. Other key ingredients in his style were Nat King Cole and Art Tatum, influences most audible in his early drummerless trio recordings. Though he and his followers remained at something of a slant to mainstream bebop, Tristano did on occasion play and record with bebop's preeminent figures such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and Tristano was a pallbearer at Parker's funeral. Often the "Tristano school" has been contrasted with bebop, however, by being labelled "cool jazz", though this risks lumping his music in with unrelated styles like the West Coast cool jazz of the 1950s.