attend University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill as a pre-law major. Just when he was about to enter the graduate law program, the G.I. benefits ran out. Jon met his first wife Colleen "Connie" Moore in Toledo. They were married and eventually had 4 children. One night in 1950, Hendricks got up and scatted at a Charlie Parker gig in Toledo. Parker encouraged him to come to New York and look him up. Hendricks moved his family there two years later and resumed his singing career. Lambert, Hendricks and Ross After several years during which he wrote several songs for Louis Jordan and recorded with King Pleasure, he teamed up with Dave Lambert, who conceived the idea to record a selection of Count Basie's instrumental numbers with voices replacing the Basie orchestra's wind instruments. Jon wrote the lyrics, and they sold the idea to Creed Taylor, who had recently started working as an A&R man for ABC-Paramount Ampar. After a disastrous initial attempt to record the songs with a choir, they decided to multi-track their own voices, with Annie Ross providing the high notes. It was not the first time the technique of overdubbing had been used, but it was an early and innovative example. The result was a best-selling album, Sing a Song of Basie. Its success prompted them to form the legendary vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross (LH&R). With Hendricks as lyricist and Lambert as arranger, the trio perfected the art of vocalese and took it around the world, earning them numerous awards and accolades. In September 1959, they appeared on the cover of Down Beat under the headline "The Hottest New Group in Jazz", which they adopted as the title of their Grammy-nominated fourth album. Hendricks typically wrote lyrics not just to melodies but to entire instrumental solos, a notable example being his take on Ben Webster's tenor saxophone solo on Duke Ellington's original recording of "Cotton Tail", as featured on the album Lambert, Hendricks and Ross Sing Ellington (1960). His lyrics to Benny Golson's "I Remember Clifford" have been recorded by several other vocalists, including Dinah Washington, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, Ray Charles, The Manhattan Transfer and Helen Merrill. From 1957 through 1962, the trio recorded six albums, including High Flying (1961), which won a Grammy for Best Performance by a Vocal Group, before Annie Ross departed due to health problems. She was replaced