It Began with Sound
Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest musical memories are of listening to Stan Kenton records as a child. I was fascinated by what happened when a familiar melody passed through the hands of a gifted arranger and a powerful ensemble. It could come out bigger, stronger, more dramatic, and emotionally more powerful than the tune I thought I knew. That caught me very early.
What drew me in was not only the sound itself, but the shaping of it. I responded to the way music could build tension, release it, change direction, create color, and move a listener from one emotional place to another. I became interested in how that worked, and in the possibility of doing it myself. Jazz was the force that pulled me in most strongly, and it has remained central to the way I hear, think, and work.
The Day Everything Changed
The first time I saw the Stan Kenton Orchestra, in March 1972, something became clear to me in a way it had not been before. It was at a Kenton Clinic in Columbia, South Carolina, and what I heard that afternoon made a lasting impression. This was not simply a fine band. It was music made on a grand scale, with discipline, color, sweep, and real purpose behind it.
What stayed with me was the combination of power and control. The writing was bold, the playing was exacting, and the whole thing carried a seriousness that I recognized immediately. I left with the sense that this was not just music I admired. It was music I wanted to understand from the inside.
A Life in Composition and Performance
I have spent decades performing, composing, and arranging, first as a working jazz musician and later across a broader range of settings that includes big band, chamber music, orchestra, and works that move freely between traditions. Early in my career, I toured with the Glenn Miller Orchestra as a bass player and contributed several arrangements to its book. That experience taught me a great deal about how music lives in performance. It sharpened my sense of craft, pacing, balance, and what has to happen for an arrangement to work night after night in front of an audience.
As the years went on, my work broadened, but the central impulse stayed the same. I kept writing for jazz ensembles, especially large ensemble, while also moving more deeply into chamber music, orchestral writing, vocal music, and projects that do not sit neatly in one category. I have never felt much need to separate those things too strictly. To me, they belong to the same musical life. The materials may change, but the underlying concerns remain much the same: shape, clarity, energy, feeling, and the sense that a piece has a real reason to exist.
Jazz has remained one of my deepest musical homes, and the big band tradition in particular continues to mean a great deal to me. It offers force, refinement, wit, color, elegance, and drive, all within a single musical world. I have never lost my fascination with what can happen inside that sound.
Teaching
For more than thirty years, I have been a university professor at a distinguished liberal arts university, teaching composition and jazz studies and directing the University Jazz Ensemble. Teaching has been one of the central parts of my life. I have never seen it as separate from composing or performing. It is part of the same larger process.
Working with students keeps me engaged with fundamentals in the best sense. It keeps me thinking about what matters, what lasts, what can be taught, and what has to be discovered through patient work. Technique matters, of course, but so do curiosity, discipline, independence, taste, and the gradual shaping of a real musical voice. One of the great satisfactions of teaching is watching students become stronger musicians, more serious listeners, and more perceptive human beings.
I have always believed that students should be treated as musicians in the making, not as passive receivers of information. They need standards, challenge, encouragement, and the chance to rise to serious work. To take part in that process over many years has been one of the great privileges of my life.
Building Musical Communities
A large part of my life in music has involved building things, not only pieces, but ensembles, concert series, institutions, and opportunities for musicians and audiences to meet serious work in meaningful ways. I have never wanted simply to compose in isolation. I have also wanted to help create the conditions in which strong music can be heard, performed, discussed, and valued.
The Vosbein Magee Big Band has been a central part of that effort. It has given me the chance to write for superb musicians and to hear large ensemble music brought to life by players with real personality, precision, and imagination. There is a special satisfaction in writing for musicians you know well, because you can write not only for their instruments, but for their sound, their instincts, and their strengths.
SonoKlect, the concert series I have directed for many years, has been another important part of that work. Through it, I have helped bring adventurous music and distinguished artists before audiences in a setting that invites real listening and engagement. I have long believed that presenting music matters almost as much as composing it. If the musical world we want does not fully exist, part of our task is to help build it.
The Stan Kenton Research Center
The Stan Kenton Research Center grew out of a lifelong engagement that began in listening and deepened into study, preservation, and advocacy. What first reached me as excitement and musical discovery gradually became scholarship and stewardship. I wanted not only to admire this music, but to help preserve its record and make it available to others in a serious way.
The Center represents both gratitude and responsibility. I remain grateful for the music that changed the course of my life, and I also feel a responsibility to help preserve and illuminate an important part of American musical history. Music history should not sit untouched on a shelf. It should be heard, examined, argued over, taught, and kept alive in the present.
Through the Center, I have tried to connect that history with musicians, scholars, students, and listeners who care about what this music was, what it achieved, and what it still has to say. The past matters most when it continues to speak to the living.
What Connects It All
If there is one thread running through all of this, it is a belief in the lasting power of beautifully made music. Composition, performance, teaching, scholarship, and collaboration have never felt like separate pursuits to me. They are different expressions of the same commitment: to make something honest, shape it carefully, and bring it to life as fully as possible.
I have been fortunate to spend my life among gifted musicians, serious students, generous colleagues, and engaged audiences. I do not take that for granted. The work has changed over the years, but the core of it has remained much the same: listening hard, working carefully, and trying to make music that has shape, character, and feeling. That is still what matters to me, and it is still what keeps me going.
