Jazz banned
Thirty-year anniversary of KU Jazz Festival reunites alumni once forbidden from performing the style
Lawrence has earned a reputation as a haven for underground music.
That same attribute hasn’t always applied to Kansas University, however.
Prior to 1972, jazz was all but forbidden within the music department. Students from the era recall former fine arts dean Thomas Gorton threatening those he heard playing jazz in the practice rooms to stop or he’d yank their scholarships.
“I was there in the dark years,” says Earle Dumler, a renowned double reed player who attended KU from ’62 to ’67. “The dean wouldn’t even allow us in Murphy (Hall), even though we had a faculty sponsor. We had to rehearse at Bailey (Hall) when the music education department was there.”
Dumler was actually training at KU to become a classical oboist, and he took a job with a symphony upon graduating. But the Russell native had already been bitten by the jazz bug.
“I had gone to a Stan Kenton clinic,” he says of the prominent jazz bandleader. “(Kenton) called me out of the blue to play baritone and bass saxophone. I jumped ship on the symphony, went out on the road for peanuts, and I ended up in Los Angeles for good.”
Dumler — now a four-time Grammy winner — is one of 50 or so alumni who are returning to perform at the Lied Center as part of the 30th annual KU Jazz Festival.
The festival, which features educational opportunities for students and live concerts for the general public, also coincides with the 35th anniversary of the KU Jazz Studies Program.
“It’s been a challenge to track down a lot of these people who played in the program the last 20 or 30 years,” says Dan Gailey, KU jazz director. “It’s been fun finding out what’s been going on in their careers. A lot of them are musically doing great things that we had no clue about.”
Gailey decided this year that the festival should only feature artists who were alumni. So many are returning, though, that he split the musicians into two bands over consecutive nights.
“We were able to put together really balanced big bands. I think there are maybe 16 saxophone players, 12 trumpets and 15 trombones — something like that,” he says.
One saxophonist in that group is particularly noteworthy, according to Gailey. Gary Foster, who came to KU in 1956, stands as the reigning “most famous alumni” to hail from the jazz department.
Equally versed at clarinet and flute, Foster recalls playing both the first jazz concert the university ever sponsored (at Swarthout Recital Hall in 1972) and the first KU Jazz Festival 30 years ago.
The musician says he got hooked on jazz at the age of 13 while trying to learn it by mimicking recordings spun in his Leavenworth living room.
“I was pretty sure by then that music was it for me,” Foster says.
He earned degrees in performance (with clarinet) and music education at KU, but indulging his love of jazz wasn’t so easy in those days.
“There was a lot of great jazz activity, but not with the blessings of the music department,” Foster remembers. “We certainly didn’t do any jazz concerts in the music complex. ... We played dance jobs and we had an old church that the local union owned out in the country. Several of us had keys. Sometimes we’d go out there at 11 p.m. and jam for two or three hours.”
Oscars gig
Foster left Lawrence for the Los Angeles area in 1961, and since then he has become one of the industry’s go-to session artists.
“I love to play jazz and do it every chance I get. But with most art music — which is what jazz is — unless you’re Wynton Marsalis or someone like that, you can’t count on making a full living at it,” he says.
In fact, last Sunday he was “paying the bills” by performing on one of the world’s biggest stages: as a pit orchestra member at the Academy Awards.
“It’s kind of interesting to watch the stars and what their various attitudes are and where their success leads them,” says Foster, who estimates he’s worked 25 Oscars ceremonies.
He did use this year’s show as an opportunity to meet fellow Leavenworth musician Melissa Etheridge, who performed her eventual Oscar-winning song “I Need to Wake Up.”
“She was coming out of the door where we enter the orchestra pit. I said, ‘Hello, I’m class of ’54 for Leavenworth High School.’ It was a nice moment. It was about 10 minutes of jabbering about Leavenworth and all of our friends there,” Foster says.
So does his upcoming homecoming concert in Lawrence seem small by comparison to the glamorous Hollywood scene?
“No. I think playing jazz at KU is the payoff,” he says. “Many of us who love to play jazz, we find ways to support our habit.”
Read more about Gary>> HERE...
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