Art Farmer, who made many recordings in the latter half of the 1950’s, including with Quincy Jones and George Russell for Prestige, he co-led the Jazztet with Benny Golson (1959-62) and then had a group wil Jim Hall (1962-64). Farmer moved to Vienna in 1968 where he joined the Austrian Radio Orchestra and worked with Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band and had made tour with his own units. Since the 1980’s Farmer has visited the United States more often and has remained greatly in demand up to the present day.

Art Farmer has recorded many sessions as a leader through the years including for Prestige. United Artists, Contemporary, Mercury, Argo, Columbia, Atlantic, CTI, Enja, Sweet Basil and Concord.

In autumn 1936 he formed his own group of eight piece band in Chicago with his brother Joe Eldridge as a saxophonist and arranger, the group broadcast at night, and Eldridge took advantage of his position to save several outstanding extended solos, including Gone and after Wabash Stomp. After a brief period of studying radio engineering in 1938 Eldridge formed ten piece bands, which began the following year began residency in New York at the Arcadia ballroom later to  Kelly’s Stable.

At that time, Eldridge has been widely regarded as the jazz trumpet solo remarkable of his time and he began receiving offers of liberal white swing bands. In 1941 he joined Gene Krupa, becoming one of the first black jazz musicians to be accepted as a permanent member of the brass section of a big white band. If Krupa, he recorded with her famous ballad performance of Rockin ‘Chair and became a national celebrity, especially in a new hit, Let Me Off Up Town, with Anita O’Day. When the band broke in 1943 Krupa, Eldridge has played as a freelance and led his own group in New York for a while before taking a position in the Artie Shaw band in 1944. A year later, after several racist incidents have occurred while the band was on tour, he left Shaw to organize a big band of his own. Like most great jazz ensembles at the time, his group was financially unsuccessful, Eldridge and soon returned to small group work. In 1948 he began a long association with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic.

Although in the early 1940s Eldridge had a major role in the jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in New York, which is then crystallized in bop, he was out of sympathy with this style, and by the late 1940s, its music was considered old. In a crisis of confidence, he moved to Paris in 1950 toured with Benny Goodman. During his years in Paris, he was lionized by the public of French jazz, and made some of his best recordings, including a version of Fireworks duet with Claude Bolling in which both men have reworked ideas shared by Armstrong and Earl Hines to the registration of the same title (1928). After his return to the USA in April 1951, he joined the growing movement of mainstream jazz, performing in small groups, with Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Ella Fitzgerald (1963-5) and, in particular, Coleman Hawkins, with which he made several outstanding albums for Verve. From 1970 until 1980, when he was incapacitated by a stroke, he led a traditional group in Ryan’s in New York. Thereafter, it sometimes plays like a song