"In 1957, a critic referred to Ruby Braff as ‘the 30-year-old traditional trumpet player’. The description implies the slightly barbed subtext that dogged Braff in his early days. What business did a young jazz musician have cultivating an old-fashioned style when his contemporaries were all going in the heady new directions of bebop? But Braff’s status was made even more complicated because he also rejected the approved reaction against bebop, the deliberate archaism of ‘trad jazz’. To Ruby, the real jazz tradition was the kind of rich, melodic invention effortlessly embodied by the star soloists of the swing generation, leading back to Louis Armstrong."