STETSON UNIVERSITY
STAN KENTON (191 1-1979)
Stanley Newcomb Kenton was born in Wichita, Kansas, on December 15, 1911,
and grew up in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from high school, he
played in several small groups in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas. He studied piano and composition, first with his mother, Stella, who sparked his profound
interest in the Impressionists, and then with Earl "Fatha" Hines, whose piano lessons were often conducted in Hines's hotel room, using a cane-backed chair with
a Masonite seat for a keyboard (both had good enough sense of pitch that they
didn't need the actual piano).
In 1933, Stan was offered the piano chair in a band which played at the Rendezvous
Ballroom in Balboa Beach, California, and whose book included charts by another
youngster, Gil Evans. After piano jobs with the NBC-Los Angeles house band and
the orchestra for Earl Carroll's 'Vanities," he decided the only way to realize his
creative ambitions was to start his own band. In 1941, he wrote the arrangements
and compositions that became the core of the book for his own band, including the
song that would become his band's theme, "Artistry in Rhythm."
Kenton's orchestras produced a string of alumni whose influence on jazz is incalculable, from folks everyone knows (June Christy, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz,
Maynard Ferguson, Kai Winding) to folks who you'd never associate with Stan
Kenton's music (Stan Getz and Laurindo Almeida). For many of his young players,
touring with Kenton would be the high point of their careers.
Kenton is so well known for his alumni and for the arrangers who wrote for the
band, including Bill Holman, Lennie Niehaus, Johnny Richards, Hank Levy, and
later Dee Barton, that it is often forgotten that his own compositions and arrangements were the cornerstone on which all his arrangers built It is significant
that Stan's music is found in the jazz section and not the "big band" section of
most record shops even today.
By 1964, the bandleader's attention was on jazz education. By conducting a countless number of clinics and making his charts available to college and high-school
stage bands, Kenton insured that there would be many bands that sounded like
his, and the inverse result was that his own young orchestra sounded like a professional college band. Kenton continued leading and touring with his big band up
until his death in 1979. By constantly pushing audiences to accept more challenging music, and by hiring the very best musicians and pushing them even harder,
Kenton made it clear that his heart was always in the future of jazz, not in its nostalgic past And in the process, he reaffirmed that audiences like good music.
STETSON
UNIVERSITY
School of Music
421 N. Woodland Blvd., Unit 8399 | DeLand, FL 32723
stetson.edu/music | concert line 386-822-8947
STETSON JAZZ
A Tribute to Stan Kenton
Don Waldrop, director
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 j 7:30 p.m.
Stetson Room, Carlton Union Building
