GREG CARROLL

Greg Carroll was raised in the Avondale housing complex in Denver, just across Colfax Avenue from Mile High Stadium. He and other kids would play hide and go seek while adults gathered on a stoop — the one outside the home of the man they knew as “Mr. Ford.” “They’d buy us kids A&W root beer and pizza and listen to jazz and smoke their pipes,” Carroll recalled in a phone interview from his Kansas City home this week. “I’d think, ‘How cool is that?’ One week, I asked, ‘Can I sit with you guys?’ and they said sure. I think I was 12. “They bought me one of those candy pipes with bubble gum, and I would sit with them and listen. The first thing I can remember hearing is Ella Fitzgerald singing, ‘A Tisket, A Tasket,’ and I just fell in love with it.” Soon after, Carroll heard Lionel Hampton playing read more...