Julian and Nat Adderley enjoyed a comfortable time of it in their home base of Tampa, Florida: the elder brother taught music in schools, sold cars (his gift of the gab later helped him win over audiences too) and enjoyed the lovely climate. But both were eventually persuaded to move North and try their luck in New York, and 'Them Adderleys' (as an early album for Savoy christened them) were soon a club sensation in the city: 'He was the baddest thing we'd ever heard,' Phil Woods later remembered. The Adderleys toured as a quintet before Cannonball joined the Miles Davis group, staying for such key records as Milestones and Kind Of Blue. In 1959 he re-formed the quintet with Nat, and the combo became one of the most durable groups in jazz, lasting in one form or another until Cannonball's death from a stroke in 1975. During that time, such musicians as Victor Feldman, Yusef Lateef and Joe Zawinul served time in the ranks, and the superb rhythm team of Sam Jones and Louis Hayes were in the engine room. Cannon led his team with a genial authority, and his bonhomie often led critics to accuse him of shallowness or mere populism: it is more accurate to hear him as a generous musician whose commitment to communicating the universal lessons of bop and the blues has endured, many years after his tragically early death. His swaggering sound and delivery were not so much influential as a personification of many virtues in the music, and his updating of Bird's vocabulary for a world which had expanded to allow entry to Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler is still entirely plausible. He liked to help younger musicians and he gave every opportunity to the likes of Zawinul, who contributed such catchy pieces as Sticks and Mercy Mercy Mercy to the band's book. The quintet's funky, pressure-cooker style exemplified the new trend in soul-jazz, and they made many records for Riverside and Capitol; unlike many other outfits, though, their music still stands out for its passionate enjoyment of what might have been mere routine in other hands.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.