Victor "Vic" Coulsen (dates unknown) was an American jazz trumpeter.
[2] Coulsen has often been remembered as having had a seminal influence on the phrasing of early bebop by the likes of Thelonious Monk,[1] Miles Davis,[3] Dizzy Gillespie[4] and several others - Charlie Parker[5] among them.
Parker remembers Coulsen (here spelled "Coulson") "playing things I'd never heard before", and states that the music he heard on those nights at Monroe's caused him to quit Jay McShann's band and relocate to New York City.
[5] These testimonies make Coulsen one of the founding fathers (albeit a minor one) of the bebop idiom.
Unfortunately, Coulsen never recorded, except for some tracks taken in 1944 with an orchestra led by Coleman Hawkins, where he performs in the trumpet section, taking no solos.