Breeden, Leon, 1921-2010

Harold Leon Breeden (3 October 1921 – 11 August 2010) was a jazz educator and musician.

When he was three his parents moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, where he grew up and graduated from high school. He attended Texas Wesleyan College in Ft. Worth on a scholarship and later transferred to Texas Christian University where he completed both his bachelor's and master's degrees. While doing graduate work at Columbia University in New York City, he studied clarinet with Reginald Kell who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1948. Benny Goodman began studies with Kell in 1949.

Breeden used his given name "Harold" only while serving in the Army. During the early part of World War II, he served in the 69th Infantry Division band as music librarian and played in the band at Ft. Bliss.

In 1944, after military duty, he became the Director of Bands at Texas Christian University and later served as Director of Bands at Grand Prairie High School from 1953 to 1959. In 1959, M.E. "Gene" Hall, Founding Director of Jazz Studies at the University of North Texas College of Music, recommended Breeden to replace Hall as Director of Jazz Studies, where Breeden remained until his retirement in 1984. A classically trained clarinetist, Breeden also played saxophone and studied composition and arranging at Texas Christian. He was a teaching assistant under Don Gillis, whom he worked with in New York City from 1950 to 1952 as his assistant.[1] He married Bonna Joyce McKee, whom he had met while working on his master's degree at Texas Christian.[2]

Gillis was producer of the NBC Symphony, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Breeden met with and wrote arrangements for Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops. Gillis recommended Breeden for work. In 1950, after hearing his first arrangements for the group, Fiedler offered Breeden a position as staff writer and arranger for the orchestra, but with an ill father, Breeden declined and moved back to Texas. He worked as music coordinator for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth, known at the time as WBAP-TV.

In the last several years of his life, Breeden frequently soloed on clarinet with The Official Texas Jazz Orchestra.[3]

Breeden died of natural causes on August 11, 2010 in Dallas.[4] The Associated Press release of Breeden's death referred to him as a legendary director who made the One O'Clock Lab Band internationally famous.[5][6]

Career
Breeden was the chairman of Jazz Studies and director of the One O'Clock Lab Band at the University of North Texas College of Music from 1959 to 1981. The One O'Clock Lab Band is the highest level of nine big bands at the College of Music. The College of Music is a comprehensive music school with the largest enrollment of any music institution accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music[7] and the first in the world to offer a degree in jazz studies at the collegiate level.

Breeden took the One O'Clock Lab Band to London, Paris, Portugal, Russia, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. The band played throughout the U.S. and at the Spoleto Music Festival. The band performed at the White House for presidents Johnson, Carter, and Reagan and for the U.S. visit by the King and Queen of Thailand. The band has accompanied Ella Fitzgerald and has produced musicians for the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands. There are more than 600 recordings of the jazz band's performances in the North Texas School of Music archives.

His students included Dee Barton, Herb Ellis, Paul Guerrero, Galen Jeter, Marc Johnson, Bobby Knight, Sparky Koerner, Lou Marini, Lyle Mays, Byron Parks, Neal Ramsay, Jim Riggs, Marvin Stamm, and Lanny Steele.

Awards and honors
1965 The University of North Texas student body honored Breeden with 'Fessor Graham Award, the highest honor bestowed annually by students to a faculty member
1976 University of North Texas recognized Breeden as an Outstanding Professor
1981 By unanimous vote, the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Senate in the 67th Legislature proclaimed May 3, 1981 Leon Breeden Day
1985 Breeden was inducted into the International Association for Jazz Education Hall of Fame
1987 In a surprise One O'Clock Lab Band reunion, more than 400 of Breeden's former students traveled from all parts of the world to honor him
1995 The Texas Chapter (Alpha Chapter) of Phi Beta Mu, an international bandmasters fraternity, inducted Breeden into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame (note: neither the Alpha Chapter of Phi Beta Mu nor the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame is affiliated with the Texas Band Masters Association)
1990 Dallas Jazz Orchestra produced an album honoring Breeden titled Thank You, Leon
2001 Texas Christian University gave Breeden an honorary doctor of letters degree
2003 The North Texas Jazz Festival established the Leon Breeden Award for the best middle school or high school big band
2009 The University of North Texas awarded Breeden with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree[8]

Leon Breeden, new band director at Grand Prairie High's Gopher Band, succeeding Andrew G. Grant, [who] resigned, will hold his first meeting with the summer-active musicians at 7:30 o'clock Tuesday night at the Gopher band room at the high school.

The handsome, 31-year-old wintertime director of the Hundley High School band is employed full-time by WBAP-TV, Fort Worth, as music arranger for fashion shows, the Texas News in Review and background music for other WBAP programs....

Breeden is a graduate of Wichita Falls High School, class of '39, attended Texas Wesleyan College, took his bachelor of arts in music and his master of music education from TCU, Fort Worth. He has done work toward his Ph. D. at Columbia University, and is about half finished, he told The Texan Friday by telephone.

He taught at the Technical High School, Fort Worth, and was band director at TCU for five years. For the past two years, he was director of the Hundley High School and junior bands. Breeden belongs to Phi Mu Alpha, honorary music fraternity...

During World War II, he served two years with the 69th Division and was [arranger] and librarian for the division band...

BREEDEN, LEON (1921–2010).Leon Breeden, musician, arranger, educator, and band director, was born on October 3, 1921, in Guthrie Oklahoma. He was the son of Alvin and Marie (Sanders) Breeden. When he was about three years old, his family moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, where his parents operated a service station. Breeden recalled that, as a young boy, he sold a Coke to a young couple at the station; he later found out that the pair was Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Breeden learned the clarinet at an early age and later took up the saxophone. After graduating from high school, he briefly attended Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth.

During World War II, he served as music librarian in the Unites States Army’s Sixty-ninth Infantry Division Band at Fort Bliss. He then attended Texas Christian University, where he studied composition and arranging, and earned a B.A. degree in 1945 and a master’s in music education in 1948. He was a band director at Texas Christian University from 1944 to 1949.

In the early 1950s Breeden lived in New York, where he worked as an arranging assistant to Don Gillis, producer of the NBC Symphony, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Breeden also wrote arrangements for Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler, who offered him a permanent position as the orchestra’s staff writer and arranger. Breeden, however, declined the offer and returned to Texas to be with his ailing father. Back in Texas, he became a band director at Grand Prairie High School from 1953 to 1959.

In 1959 Breeden was recommended, by outgoing director M. E. “Gene” Hall, to head the Jazz Studies program at the school of music at North Texas State College (now University of North Texas). Breeden served as director of the program from 1959 until 1981. During his tenure, he dedicated his work to elevating the profile of the jazz program from an understated study in “dance-band” music (the term “jazz” had carried a disreputable connotation) to a highly-respected and recognized music curriculum that served as a model for other educators and institutions throughout the United States.

As head of the program, Breeden personally directed the music department’s popular Lab Band. Originally performing every afternoon at two o’clock, he changed the band’s rehearsal schedule to one o’clock and subsequently changed its name to the now famous One O’Clock Lab Band. Under his leadership, the band garnered international distinction and numerous awards. In 1967 the One O’Clock Lab Band performed for Lyndon Johnson at the White House along with jazz legends Stan Getz and Duke Ellington. The band performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1970. Breeden initiated the tradition of the band recording an album annually, and the ensemble received its first Grammy nomination in 1976. When the group accompanied Ella Fitzgerald at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1970s, the singer was so impressed that she requested the band to tour with her, but Breeden had to decline because of class schedules. The ensemble toured the United States, Mexico, Europe, and the Soviet Union and also performed for presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In the process, Breeden and the band raised the overall stature of the music department and the university.

Breeden was named Outstanding Professor by the University of North Texas in 1976. The Texas legislature proclaimed May 3, 1981, to be “Leon Breeden Day.” Other honors included induction into the International Association for Jazz Education Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame in 1995. He received an honorary doctorate from TCU in 2001 and from the University of North Texas in 2009.

Breeden married Bonna Joyce McKee in 1945, and they had three children. After his wife’s death in 1988, he married Bennye Wayne Reid on June 18, 1990. Leon Breeden died at St. Paul Hospital in Dallas on August 11, 2010. He was survived by a daughter; two sons and his second wife had preceded him in death. He was buried in Roselawn Memorial Park in Denton.

DENTON - Leon Breeden, legendary director of the University of North Texas Jazz Studies program who helped make the school's One O'Clock Lab Band internationally famous, died Wednesday. He was 88.

Longtime friend Richard Cox said Mr. Breeden died at St. Paul Hospital in Dallas of natural causes.

Mr. Breeden led the jazz program and One O'Clock Lab Band from 1959 to 1981. Under his direction, the band began to tour internationally, and in 1967 it became the first college band to perform at the White House by presidential invitation.

Under Mr. Breeden's leadership, the One O'Clock Lab Band toured from Moscow, Iowa, to Moscow, Russia. It was the official big band of the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

The One O'Clock band began recording albums in 1967 and has been nominated for several Grammy Awards over the years.

Mr. Breeden's start at UNT was less than auspicious, he once recalled in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.

"The first day I walked into my office, I found an empty lard can on the floor," he says. "There was a dead rat in it!"

It wasn't a bad indicator of what his early days at the university would be like. Mr. Breeden's predecessor, Gene Hall, warned him about administrators' dim view of jazz education. Indeed, for years, the music faculty gave Mr. Breeden the cold shoulder.

"They thought I wanted to push Beethoven out the back door," he told The News.

But among the greats of jazz, he and the program won great acclaim. Admirers included Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and big-band leader Stan Kenton, who had willed his entire music library to UNT when he died in 1979.

Among Mr. Breeden's students were future jazz pianist and composer Lyle Mays, veteran studio musicians and sidemen "Blue Lou" Marini and Marvin Stamm.

Mr. Breeden, who was born in Guthrie, Okla., and grew up in Wichita Falls, was a clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and arranger in his own right.

Before arriving at UNT, he had been music director at Grand Prairie High School and band director at Texas Christian University. He played in studio bands at NBC Radio and had written arrangements for Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops.

Mr. Breeden carried his love and commitment to jazz well into his later years.

"They should start every session of the United Nations with some Dixieland - maybe a Kenyan on drums, a Swede on piano and an American on cornet," he told The News in 2003. "Then everyone could get down to business. MEMORIAL SERVICES

Funeral services for Leon Breeden, the legendary former director of the University of North Texas jazz studies program, are planned for 3 p.m. Monday at Denton Bible Church, 2300 E. University Drive.

Leon Breeden, the longtime director of jazz studies at the University of North Texas, who half a century ago transformed the program from a clandestine enterprise into the international Mecca for jazz training it remains today, died on Wednesday in Dallas. He was 88.

The cause was complications of an abdominal infection, said Richard Cox, a family friend. Mr. Breeden, a resident of Denton, Tex., for many years, had lived most recently in Dallas.

A respected clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and arranger, Mr. Breeden ran the North Texas program from 1959 to 1981. He also led the university’s One O’Clock Lab Band, the most prestigious of its nine big bands and the first college band to be nominated for a Grammy Award.

Today, the division of jazz studies, part of the university’s College of Music, offers bachelor’s and master’s of music degrees in jazz. Students may concentrate in areas like instrumental and vocal performance, composition, arranging and pedagogy.

Well-known alumni include the saxophonist Lou Marini, the trumpeter Marvin Stamm and many past members of the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands.

The One O’Clock Lab Band — named for the afternoon hour at which it meets — records extensively and was nominated for six Grammys between 1975 and 2009.

In 1959, when Mr. Breeden arrived at what was then North Texas State College, the school could already boast of having the oldest degree-granting “jazz” program in the nation. The trouble was, the boasts could only be whispered.

The program was founded a dozen years earlier by M. E. Hall, who had first taught a class in dance-band arranging at North Texas in 1942 as a graduate student there. Appointed to the faculty in 1947, Mr. Hall was charged with developing — quietly — a degree program in jazz.

It was a dangerous mission. In those years, upright citizens were inclined to think jazz disreputable, scarcely fit for nightclubs, much less for an institution of higher learning. For its own protection, the major Mr. Hall created was euphemistically called dance-band music.

On Mr. Hall’s departure in 1959, Mr. Breeden was hired to replace him. Little by little, he brought jazz out of the closet and into the limelight.

Under his stewardship, the One O’Clock Lab Band performed at the White House with Stan Getz and Duke Ellington in 1967, toured worldwide and in 1970 appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

As Mr. Breeden told United Press International in 1981: “I knew what we were doing in the program here in the beginning was good in spite of the fact that some were saying, ‘Aw, playing that jazz music’s going to destroy their tones, it’s going to ruin ’em, they’re going to become bad players, they’re going to become dope addicts.’ ”

Harold Leon Breeden was born on Oct. 3, 1921, in Guthrie, Okla., and reared in Wichita Falls, Tex., where his parents owned a service station. (As a youth, he enjoyed recounting afterward, he once served a Coke to a handsome young couple who had pulled into the station. Their names, he later learned, were Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.)

He took up the clarinet as a boy. “I would go to the cow barn to practice,” Mr. Breeden told The Dallas Morning News in 2004. “I’d hit a wrong note, and the chickens would jump up and down.”

Mr. Breeden earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education from Texas Christian University. During World War II, he played in the Army’s 69th Infantry Division Band.

After his discharge, Mr. Breeden worked as a band director, first at Texas Christian and later at a Texas high school, before joining the North Texas faculty. In the early 1950s, wishing to remain in Texas with his family, he turned down an offer by Arthur Fiedler to become a staff arranger for the Boston Pops.

Mr. Breeden’s first wife, Bonna, whom he married in 1945, died in 1988; his second wife, Bennye, died in April. A son from his first marriage, Daniel, was killed by a drunken driver in 1968; another, David, the longtime principal clarinetist of the San Francisco Symphony, died from complications of multiple myeloma in 2005. Mr. Breeden is survived by a daughter, Vicki, and three grandchildren.

He is also survived by hundreds of skilled jazz musicians. Though many were already superb players by the time they passed through Mr. Breeden’s hands, they were students first and foremost, a fact of which he rarely lost sight.

That fact was perhaps never more evident than one summer in the late 1970s,, when the One O’Clock Lab Band accompanied Ella Fitzgerald at the Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston, S.C. Impressed, Ms. Fitzgerald asked if she could take the band on the road with her.

Mr. Breeden respectfully declined. He could not countenance having his charges miss so much class time.