The college's artist in residence that year was Cecil Taylor, the trailblazing pianist who helped invent free jazz, and he had with him a modern-dance choreographer named Ken Miller.

He was a superb pianist and orchestra leader, and if he didn't invent jazz, certainly no one played or wrote the way he did before his time.

Was the musician who boasted that he had invented jazz the hot-headed, paranoid genius depicted by the Broadway musical "Jelly's Last Jam"?

In his later years, Ferdinand Joseph LaMenthe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, used to boast that he invented jazz.

At the turn of the last century, Buddy Bolden was a wildly popular musician here - and some musicians swear he invented jazz.

Stirring up the crowds with his syncopated music (in Mr. Hines's case, it's his syncopated feet that do the stirring, but no matter), Jelly is soon boasting that "I invented jazz."

Whether he actually invented jazz, as he often claimed, is and will always be debatable.

Sure, "we" bailed out the French in World War II, invented jazz and Hollywood and rap, created celluloid heroes and fostered the Dionysiac psychedelic world of the 1960's.

With albums like "Open on All Sides" and "World Expansion" they're reaching beyond eclecticism to start inventing post-post-modern jazz.

Jelly Roll Morton did not invent jazz, nor did Jerome Kern invent musical comedy, but there would be no bluegrass without Bill Monroe.