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32 nd Annual
Achievement Awards
Jim Widner
Jim Widner sees his jazz camps as opportunities
to provide talented young jazz musicians
one-on-one interactions with professionals.
“As Stan Kenton used to say, you take a
bath in jazz for a week,” Widner said.
The bassist/educator referenced Kenton for
a reason. He toured with the Kenton
Orchestra, started a clinicians service while
working in Kenton’s office in the early 1970s
and worked at Kenton’s innovative summer
jazz camps for 10 years.
When Kenton died, he expressed in his
will that there would be no Kenton ghost
band, and his camps would not continue
under his name. However, in 1988, Widner
stepped forward to start a jazz camp in
“Kenton’s manner, not his name.”
“This is a necessary
component of
jazz education,”
said Widner, who
for the past six
years has also
served as director
of jazz studies at
the University of
Missouri, St. Louis.
“Stan’s dedication
to jazz education
was the main influence
for the camps,
watching students
get involved and
passionate about
the music.”
Widner held his
first camp at the
University of
Missouri, Columbia. This lasted only one
year, so he moved it to Drury University, the
school at which he helped start a Kenton
camp. “It lasted at Drury,” he said. “We
picked up where we left off from the Kenton
camp.”
This summer, Widner will host four
camps: big band camps at the University of
Nebraska, Omaha and California State
University, Sacramento; and combo camps at
University of Missouri, Kansas City (with
Bobby Watson) and University of Missouri,
St. Louis. He used to run camps for seven or
eight weeks every summer, but turning 63 in
June, Widner has cut back his workload a bit.
But this does not mean that the vigor behind
his mission to spread jazz to young people has
subsided.
“We expose up-and-coming musicians to a
higher level of musicianship,” he said. “I feel
obliged to do this.”
Rob Klevan
On a Tuesday morning in early April, Rob
Klevan had a chance to catch his breath. The
Monterey Jazz Festival’s Fifth Next
Generation Festival had taken place the previous
weekend. It was a success once again, as
about 60 high school and college instrumental
and vocal jazz bands from around the world
converged on Monterey, Calif., for a weekend
of jazz competition and camaraderie.
“We had nice weather, so a lot of tourists
got to see the bands perform on the outdoor
stages,” Klevan said. “These are all the top
groups. They sit and listen to the other groups.
Then they play on other stages for fun, at
Cannery Row, Fisherman’s Wharf, Monterey
Live! The vibe is great.”
With the demise of IAJE, the Next
Generation Festival has become perhaps the
premier annual gathering of the world’s top
student jazz bands. Klevan has played a primary
role in this expansion of what started as the
National High School Jazz Competition almost
40 years ago. A native of the Monterey area,
Klevan, 56, had taught music at Stevenson
School in Pebble Beach for 27 years before
coming on board as the Monterey Jazz
Festival’s director of
jazz education in
2002. He has used his
experiences as a
teacher taking his
bands to the National
High School Jazz
Competition to guide
his work with the festival.
“It’s morphed,”
he said. “I wondered
why when we got to
the fairgrounds, there
was an old warped table, someone would
check your name off, and then you’re on your
own—find the building, warm-up room. At the
festival, the grounds are nice. But they weren’t
that nice in April. We’d have auditions for the
Next Generation Orchestra in closets and bathrooms.
When I came on board, I said this had
to change.”
In addition to the Next Generation Festival,
which now takes place in downtown
Monterey, Klevan has overseen the expansion
of the all-star Next Generation Orchestra,
launched the Digital Music Education Project
and expanded the festival’s Traveling
Clinicians Program. He approaches all of these
activities with an attitude that the more enthusiastic
he is about the music, the kids will see it
and become more enthusiastic.
“They’re savvy,” he said. “There’s a reason
why we call it playing.”
Jim Culbertson
Thirty-five DownBeat Student Music Awards
are just a part of the numerous accolades that
Jim Culbertson has garnered with the jazz
program at Douglas MacArthur High School
in Decatur, Ill. Over the course of 31 years at
the school, he has built one of the premier jazz
programs in the state. At the roots of the program
is a solid concert band.
“The jazz program feeds off of the concert
band program,”
Culbertson said. “I
make sure that the
students play their
horns right. The
after-school jazz
program falls in
line. Without a
strong concert program,
you don’t
have a good footing
for jazz.”
MacArthur’s
jazz program has
won such Illinois
high school jazz competitions as the Oak
Lawn, Rolling Meadows, North Shore and
Eastern Illinois jazz festivals. He has taken his
groups to the Montreux, Umbria and North
Sea festivals in five European tours, and taken
his band to Japan. Not bad for a small school
of about 1,000 students in central Illinois, in a
blue-collar town that’s suffering economically.
“Our enrollment is dwindling every day,”
Culbertson said.
With fewer students, Culbertson has seen a
strain on his program. But when he sees a talented
student coming to his high school, he
knows how to nurture their talent and build
their enthusiasm for the music.
“For a long time I taught fifth and sixth
grade,” said Culbertson, 58. “I look for talent
at this age—who should be a bass player, who
can improvise. Then, I can teach them in middle
school and high school.”
Culbertson has familial experience grooming
a burgeoning jazz talent. His son, Brian
Culbertson, is a popular touring smooth jazz
multi-instrumentalist. For five summers, Jim,
who plays trumpet, toured with his son, hitting
the road for gigs such as opening for Barry
Manilow for three days and then returning to
Decatur to direct the town’s municipal band. It
may have have been a lot of work, but it’s all
been part of a fulfilling career.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
“Where else can you go into work every day
and do what you love, try to make music and
strive for excellence”
—Stories by Jason Koransky
96 DOWNBEAT June 2009