Frank Tirro is a music historian and former Dean of the Yale University School of Music. He worked his way through college playing swing and bebop, and he earned a bachelor's degree in Music Education, a master's in Theory and Composition, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance musicology. He composed and published the first jazz mass in 1959, the American Jazz Mass, and this work received much attention and numerous performances worldwide, including Europe and Canada. He played and toured with the Jimmy Phillips and Johnny Palmer Orchestras and performed occasional concerts with jazz artists Mary Lou Williams, Clark Terry, Willie Ruff, Dwike Mitchell, and Donn Trenner. With Palmer's Orchestra he backed shows for such diverse artists as Harry Bellafonte, Chubby Checker, and Anna Marie Alberghetti. On the classical side of the ledger Tirro has played clarinet in public recitals with well known artists Aldo Parisot, Sidney Harth, Erick Friedman, Arthur Weisberg, Ronald Roseman, and others, and the repertoire runs from Mozart and Beethoven to Hindemith and Tirro. The photos show him playing Mendelssohn duets with Benny Goodman, the Mozart Clarinet Quintet with Sydney Harth, soloing on Tenor Sax with the Tuxedo Junction Orchestra, and jamming in concert with Willie Ruff, Dwike Mitchell, and Ed Soph. Tirro's first book, Jazz: A History, was very influential and became a standard textbook. His most recent book, The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates, was nominated for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.