Barrie Lee Hall Jr.

In his biography, he relates that Sammy D. Harris, the high school band director, "pointed a few of us in the direction of jazz."

At Texas Southern University he studied piano and trumpet and won soloist awards in big-band competitions.

With a background in gospel music, he was able to lead the Duke Ellington's Third Sacred Concert in 2001, in which he performed as bandleader with a two hundred-voice choir.

[4] Wishing to see more of Ellington's works performed in churches, he brought performances to Yugoslavia to an audience of three thousand in a cathedral, with the music broadcast to an audience of ten thousand people outside the church.

In the last six years of his life, Hall traveled to Switzerland every April and was a guest soloist with a big band made up of musicians from the United States which included Shelley Carrol and Randy Brecker.