John Mehegan was born in Hartford, Connecticut on June 6, 1916. (Later he would list his birth date as 1920 or 1922.) After beginning as a violinist, he switched to the piano. He studied at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, but he was largely self-taught. By the early 1940s, he was active as a jazz pianist in New York; he played in clubs, and composed and performed the incidental music for A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. Mehegan was a prolific author; he wrote several instructional works (including the four-volume Jazz Improvisation ), and he worked as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune and other publications. He had a long pedagogical career, teaching at Metropolitan Music School, the Juilliard School, Columbia University, the University of Bridgeport, and Yale University (from 1974 to 1983). John Mehegan died in New Canaan, Connecticut on April 3, 1984.
From the guide to the The John Mehegan Collection, undated (20th century), (Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University)
