Professor BARRY LONG first encountered his future focus in music as a teen attending summer festivals sponsored by the Central Pennsylvania Friends of Jazz. The Harrisburg native fell hard for jazz and bought three vinyl records one summer: Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Charlie Parker’s Volume 1 and Clifford Brown’s Memorial Album. The music department chair now directs the Bucknell Jazz Ensemble and curates the public performance series Jazz@Bucknell. 
Professor BARRY LONG first encountered his future focus in music as a teen attending summer festivals sponsored by the Central Pennsylvania Friends of Jazz. The Harrisburg native fell hard for jazz and bought three vinyl records one summer: Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Charlie Parker’s Volume 1 and Clifford Brown’s Memorial Album. The music department chair now directs the Bucknell Jazz Ensemble and curates the public performance series Jazz@Bucknell. Clifford Brown was a really important jazz trumpet player from the 1950s. He died way too young, at 25, in a car accident, so this album is a memorial that compiles some of his early recordings. I didn’t know much about him back then and probably bought it because it had a trumpet player on the front, but then spent a lot of time learning his music.
The Charlie Parker record is a recording of a famous concert in Toronto that featured Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, a rare glimpse at the birth of modern jazz sharing the same stage.
These records helped introduce me to concepts of social justice and their connections to jazz. As I got older, I started to realize how intrinsic this music was — and is — to the civil rights movement and social justice. As African American musicians, they were making change, either through direct action or by reaching listeners with their work.
— As told to Lisa Leighton