The premier protégé of the legendary Lennie Tristano, pianist Sal Mosca reigns among the most gifted improvisers of his generation. Despite collaborations alongside jazz giants including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Billie Holiday, he preferred the intimacy of private study to the demands of public performance, and spent long stretches of his career some distance away from the stage and the studio. Born Salvatore Joseph Mosca in Mt. Vernon, New York, on April 27, 1927, he credited his family's player piano for instilling his appreciation for music, also discovering influential jazz pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller before beginning his own formal lessons at age 12. Within three years Mosca was playing local nightclubs, adopting a fake moustache to disguise his age. In addition, he tutored aspiring players, beginning a lifelong passion for teaching. During World War II Mosca served as a member of a U.S. Army band. The G.I. Bill funded his tenure at the New York College of Music, where he supplemented his classical studies by frequenting the jazz clubs along 52nd Street. After college he studied under Tristano, the Chicago-born pianist who channeled contemporary classical practices into the emerging bop idiom, in effect creating free jazz years before the name or concept entered commercial vogue. Mosca adopted Tristano's musical aesthetic as well as his intense devotion to the near-religious purity of creative expression, a mindset that guaranteed him a lifetime of critical acclaim and commercial anonymity.