Roger Humphries: Steel City Pulse

Roger Humphries

While Pittsburgh has scrubbed up and morphed into a high-tech center, it’s still a town inexorably dressed in the sturdy steel gown of its industrial past. The blue-collar roots of Steel City means that it has always been a fertile town for jazz talent-from Earl “Fatha” Hines to Art Blakey to Ahmad Jamal to George Benson to Jeff “Tain” Watts.

One of Pittsburgh’s sturdiest representatives is a man of steel pulse at the drums, a man who remains a propulsive force at the tubs, a man known around the town’s jazz haunts as “Dad.”