Born Milton Rajonsky, Shorty was the biggest name in West Coast jazz. He studied in New York before going into the army, and on his discharge worked first with Woody Herman's First and Second Herds, and from there in the Stan Kenton band of 1950–51. Besides his own trumpet playing, which was delivered in a bright, almost humorously optimistic yet contrarily low-key style, Rogers's writing and arranging were also given early prominence in both bands' books. After leaving Kenton he worked on his own account as one of the busiest professionals on the Los Angeles studio scene, his music helping to create the idea of 'West Coast jazz' – bustling with incident, full of musicianly and quietly challenging ideas, his scores didn't suit grandstand players (with the exception of high-note specialist Maynard Ferguson) and called for a co-operative and very precise kind of executive skill. Partly for that reason, the idiom was subsequently criticized for being passionless and procedural, yet that argument seems absurd if one listens to the brilliant 1953 sessions released as Cool And Crazy (RCA), where Rogers and his Giants (to use the name they often worked under) work through some of the liveliest and most exciting big-band music of its era, even given the complexity of the scoring: setpieces such as Sweetheart Of Sigmund Freud haven't lost their capacity to put the listener on the edge of their seat, even 50 years later. Rogers used the cream of the Californian studio men for these and other dates, and he made a sequence of orchestral records in this vein for RCA all through the 50s, as well as scoring for film and doing some surprising small-group work: his album The Three (Contemporary, 1954), with Shelly Manne, and the remarkable Collaboration: West (Prestige, 1953), with Teddy Charles, show him experimenting with free forms.

In the 60s he was in too much demand from Hollywood to pursue much of a jazz playing career, and the West Coast scene was in any case at a low ebb. But in the 80s he returned to more active duty, and toured with various reunion editions of The Giants: every gig he played found him wreathed in smiles, a musician who loved playing jazz and never lost his taste for the music which got him his start.

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.