Nonetheless, his most wonderful music on the whole came early, and, sadly from the point of posterity, a large amount of it went unrecorded. As luck had it, he didn't made a disc until 1936, when he was already 27. So we have, for example, none of his alto saxophone playing, though Benny Carter, himself a supreme altoist, once told me that he had never heard the instrument sound more eloquent. Nor is there evidence of the sheer fertility of his improvisation, which so struck his contemporaries.