Editor Ira is here to talk to you about that smoothest of jazz instruments, the bagpipe.

Ask a group of jazz fans who the greatest saxophonist of all time is and you're likely to get as many different answers as there are people in the room. The same goes for trumpeters, drummers, pianists, and any instrument traditionally associated with jazz. Ask that room to name the greatest jazz bagpiper of all time, though, and you'll probably get a bunch of blank stares and maybe one or two confident replies of "Rufus Harley."

Rufus Harley is rightly recognized as the alpha and omega of jazz bagpiping, both because he was the most visible of the vanishingly few musicians who have ever attempted it, and because he literally invented it. Harley was a 27-year-old multi instrumentalist working for the Philadelphia Housing Authority in 1963 when he found himself mesmerized by the Black Watch Bagpipe Band's performance at John F. Kennedy's funeral. After trying and failing to create a similar sound on his saxophone, he became determined to adapt bagpipes to jazz.

Even laying hands on bagpipes wasn't a simple task in early '60s Philadelphia. Harley ended up traveling to a New York City pawn shop to pick up a vintage set for $120, then set about teaching himself to play. As detailed in an excellent Atlas Obscura profile, adapting the instrument for jazz required him to tune and hold the pipes differently than a traditional Scottish bagpiper. One of the pipes has a range of only nine notes, compared to the 30- to 40-note ranges of many jazz horns, making the bagpipes uniquely ill-suited to most jazz combos.

But Harley cracked it, becoming a proficient jazz bagpiper in about six months. Not satisfied to just play the bagpipes, Harley wanted to truly know them. He researched the instrument's history around the globe and was pleased to learn that some bagpipe precursors originated in Northern Africa. He played his first bagpipe gig in 1964 and dropped his debut album, "Bagpipe Blues," on Atlantic in 1965, less than two years after he first hatched the idea.

Harley resented being taken for a novelty or a gimmick, but that was undeniably part of the appeal for early audiences. Harley's unique stage presence didn't necessarily discourage that reading either. A Black artist from Philadelphia performing bagpipe jazz while wearing a kilt and a Viking helmet was going to draw some eyes in 1965.

Whatever the initial hook might have been, though, people who knew jazz quickly identified him as a genuine talent with a one-of-a-kind sound. Harley became a popular performer on TV talk and variety shows and played alongside legends such as John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dexter Gordon. His act had legs, too – he appeared on Laurie Anderson's groundbreaking art-pop album "Big Science" in 1982 and guested on The Roots' "Do You Want More?!!!??!" in 1995. He performed regularly and toured extensively up until his death in 2006.

Harley's sound can come off as a bit of a shock on first listen. The bagpipes are an unmistakably different kind of sound in a jazz context. Stick with one of his albums, though, and the initial strangeness wears off quickly. Soon enough, Harley and his pipes sound like a natural complement to their jazzy backdrop, creating an ethereal and haunting sound that a New York Times reviewer described as closer to traditional Middle Eastern music than Scottish. Maybe it wasn't the strangest instrument ever to be introduced into jazz (here's Sun Ra playing a squeaky door hinge for 10 minutes), but it's one that overshadowed its own unorthodoxy by virtue of Harley's talent and determination.

For an accessible entry point, I'd recommend Harley's takes on the Bobby Hebb soul classic "Sunny" and The Association's "Windy." To really get a feel for the man and his art, I'd suggest "Keys of Justice," an intimate two-hour live album recorded in the early 2000s that features some of Harley's most impressive work on both the bagpipes and the saxophone, as well as lengthy interludes where he discusses his life, music history, etymology, and whatever else he feels like talking about. It's an ideal introduction to an incomparable artist who decided to be the best there was at a thing that didn't exist and accomplished precisely that.