Ed Summerlin

ABOUT ED SUMMERLIN

Liturgical, avant-garde, and free jazz pioneer who also taught music and worked as a performer and composer.

While he was attending University of North Texas for his MM, he composed "Requiem for Mary Jo," dedicated to his young daughter who passed away as a baby.

He was the founder and director of the jazz program at the City College of New York for more than a decade.

He married his first wife Virginia Lee Allen in the late 1940s and got remarried to a woman named Mary Elizabeth Bouknight. His third wife, Karen Jones Summerlin, married him in 1974 and they raised two sons.

Summerlin worked in New York as a freelance musician in the 1960s with Don Ellis .