At 19, Sonny Stitt tracked down his idol Charlie Parker in Kansas City, jammed with him for an hour at the Gypsy Tea Room, and was told he sounded too much like him. This episode follows the saxophonist born Edward Hammond Boatner Jr. in Boston in 1924 and raised by the Stitt family in Saginaw, Michigan, through the big bands of Tiny Bradshaw, Billy Eckstine, and Dizzy Gillespie, and the years of being dismissed as a Parker clone.

We examine how switching from alto to tenor saxophone physically forced a new sound, why critic Dan Morgenstern called him the Lone Wolf, his legendary dueling partnership with Gene Ammons, his early adoption of the Varitone amplifier, and his brief tenure with Miles Davis that ended over drinking. We close with his late-career sobriety, the 1972 album Tune Up, the Giants of Jazz, and his death in 1982 at age 58.

• Kenny Clarke’s claim that Stitt’s style would have existed even without Charlie Parker
• How a larger mouthpiece and looser embouchure changed his articulation on tenor
• Why he preferred the friction of unfamiliar local rhythm sections to a steady band
• The Varitone’s sub-octave effect and the purists’ backlash
• Why sobriety in the 1970s produced some of his most fiery recordings