I met Freddie Hubbard many years ago backstage at the Clearwater Jazz Holiday. A few people warned me that he could be an asshole. He was a sweetheart. Hubbard was a brassy, fiery player who performed on seminal avant-garde recordings by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, as well as his own, commercially-oriented albums for CTI (Red Clay). His best work was probably in the straight post-bop realm. Here's more on the passing of a jazz titan.

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This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...