Jerry Coker

Jerry Coker (born November 28, 1932) is an American jazz saxophonist and pedagogue. Coker was born in South Bend, Indiana. He attended Indiana University in the early 1950s, but left school to become a member of Woody Herman's Herd. He recorded under his own name in the mid-1950s and as a sideman with Nat Pierce, Dick Collins, and Mel Lewis; later that decade he played with Stan Kenton. In 1960 he began teaching and increasingly turned to music education and composition. He has taught at Duke University, University of Miami, North Texas State University, and started the Studio Music and Jazz program at the University of Tennessee, where he was a professor of music from the 1980s through the 2000s.