Edward L. Vinson Jr. was born in Houston, Texas, on December 18, 1917, and earned his lifelong nickname when a lye-heavy hair-straightening product burned off his hair in patches; rather than hide, he shaved the rest and became Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. He came up in the loud, collaborative Texas scene of the 1930s, touring with the Milton Larkin Orchestra alongside peers like Cedric Haywood and Wild Bill Davis and later working with Big Bill Broonzy. In the big band era, an alto saxophonist had to push enough air and sharpen enough bite to cut through a wall of brass without a microphone, and that boot camp gave Vinson an iron technical foundation and a physically commanding tone.

This episode follows his 1940s breakthrough with the Cootie Williams Orchestra and the recording of “Cherry Red,” his paradoxical vocal style as a blues shouter with crisp, elegant diction, and the long-running controversy over the bebop standard “Four,” usually credited to Miles Davis. It traces how he survived the collapse of the big bands by moving fluently between jump blues, bebop, and hard bop: Cleanhead’s Back in Town for Bethlehem in 1957 with Count Basie alumni Joe Newman and Frank Foster, Back Door Blues with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, a Cherry Red album for ABC BluesWay with Mike Bloomfield, work with T-Bone Walker and Jay McShann, Montreux Jazz Festival appearances in 1971 and 1974, The Original Cleanhead with Joe Pass and Earl Palmer, and 1980s records with Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Etta James, Roomful of Blues, and Oscar Peterson. It closes with his death in Los Angeles on July 18, 1988, at 70, from a heart attack during chemotherapy, the same year he released Cleanhead and Cannonball on the Landmark label.

• How a hair-straightening disaster became a personal brand decades before the concept existed in music
• Why big band saxophonists had to develop a biting tone and diaphragm power just to be heard over the brass
• How late-night jam session culture in the 1940s made authorship disputes like the one over “Four” inevitable
• What mechanically separates jump blues from bebop and hard bop, and how Vinson played all three fluently
• Why he could back Etta James one day and Oscar Peterson the next without losing his own voice