Quincy Troupe
| Quincy Troupe | |
|---|---|
| Born | Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. July 22, 1939 St. Louis, Missouri |
| Occupation | Poet, editor, journalist, professor emeritus |
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. (born July 22, 1939) is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.
Troupe is the son of baseball catcher Quincy Trouppe (who added a second "P" to the family name while playing in Mexico to accommodate the Spanish pronunciation "Trou-pay"). As a teenager in 1955, he recalled hearing Miles Davis at a St. Louis, Missouri fish joint, where some fellow patrons identified the 78 rpm juke box record as "Donna" which was Davis' first recorded composition (The record is most likely to have been the Charlie Parker Quintet session recorded for Savoy Records, May 8, 1947).
In his book Miles and Me he recalls the experience:
When I left that joint that afternoon, I felt as though I had undergone a secret initiation, a rite of passage, one that would separate me forever from the rest of the students at Beaumont High School, to which I had just transferred. The school was overwhelmingly white and the students there were "square" to the bone. To my way of thinking , hardly anyone there had any sense of style.
As a young man Troupe was athletic and attended Grambling State University on a basketball scholarship. However, after his first year he quit and subsequently joined the United States Army, where he was stationed in France and playing on the Army basketball team. While in France he had a chance encounter with the noted French Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, who recommended that Troupe try his hand at poetry.
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