The dean of high-school jazz

"It all goes back to Hal," saxophonist Tamara Danielson Schultz said, standing in a buzzing corridor packed with young musicians, in the Hilton New York. "Hal is the whole reason I am where I am now."

Schultz, a 1980 graduate of Kent-Meridian High School and now a successful professional musician, is one of hundreds of jazz players who might well say the same thing about legendary band director Hal Sherman.

Sherman was invited to conduct the Bellevue Community College Monday Night Band at the 2006 conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators, in Manhattan. The conference, held last month, is the most important jazz gathering of the year, attracting more than 7,000 musicians, educators and industry honchos.

Though local fans may have the impression high-school jazz begins and ends with Garfield and Roosevelt High School, those schools actually inherited a local tradition of excellence. Sherman is a founding father in that tradition.

"Hal is a legend in the whole country," said Roosevelt jazz-band director Scott Brown, whose ensemble also played the New York conference. "There was a triumvirate — John Moawad, Waldo King and Hal."

Starting in the late '60s, Sherman's Kent-Meridian bunch regularly swept almost every state competition and was the centerpiece of the Kent-Meridian Jazz Festival, which packed the old Seattle Center Opera House (now McCaw Hall) every year. Since retiring from K-M, Sherman has been somewhat under the radar, but he has kept a firm grip on the baton. He has also kept fit and youthful.

An enthusiastic, open-hearted talker, Sherman, 75, isn't shy about sharing his opinions but is modest about his accomplishments.

Growing up in Portland, he studied music at Portland State University ("terrible program, back then") and played trumpet in local swing bands.

"How lucky I was," he recalled, reminiscing after a rehearsal in Bellevue. "Every Saturday night, going to Jantzen Beach or the Crystal Ballroom, hearing those bands, live. Maynard [Ferguson] was 18 years old, and we thought he was a freak. How could anyone play that high? My brother and I used to buy all the records, and play them a million times a day. My mother would go crazy."

After graduating, Sherman and his wife, Madeleine, moved to Seattle. Concerned about this young music major's prospects, Sherman's father-in-law set him up in a string of jobs, first at Hopper Kelly, Seattle's old downtown music store, then as a salesman at a used-appliance store, Bergman luggage, and a Ballard shirt shop run by a "thug" uncle.

While working at a crab processing plant, Sherman decided there must be something else. He looked into teaching, starting out as a substitute, in 1959, in the Highline School District.

It was not an auspicious debut.

"The first day, all the kids switched instruments," he said. "I thought I'd die. But I stuck with it. I found something inside me that was incredible — the emotions of the music, conducting — it just went on from there."

Building excitement

In 1968, Sherman moved to K-M.

One of the secrets of his success there was the professional quality of the arrangements, which were often transcriptions from records.

"Publishers back then didn't release these charts they do now," he said. "We did 'Little Pixie,' the Thad Jones thing and some of the hardest stuff from the Kenton book," the library of arrangements played by the great California experimental band led by Stan Kenton.

"I'd play records of the tune and tell the kids, 'This is what we're going to do.' You couldn't help but get excited."

The technique worked.

"Hal has an innate sense of picking music that fits the strengths of his bands," said Schultz, the saxophonist. "And he had charisma. He could get his point across in a funny way."

Kent-Meridian soon branched out from local competitions to Reno, Nev.; Wichita, Kan.; Vancouver, B.C.; Montreux, Switzerland; and Berlin.

"Wichita was a big one," Sherman remembered fondly, a trip that netted him the first Charlie "Bird" Parker Memorial Foundation Bronze Medallion ever awarded a school band director. "We went there four or five times. Thad Jones, Buddy Rich, Milt Hinton, Clark Terry, Carl Fontana, Oscar Peterson — I could go on and on. We were such a freak, being there, they had never heard a band like that."

In 1973, Sherman inaugurated the popular Kent-Meridian Jazz Festival, inviting guest artists such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Michael Brecker and Frank Rosolino.

In 1988, a change of administration prompted Sherman to leave Kent-Meridian. For a few years, he taught at the University of Puget Sound, and even went back to elementary school and junior high. He also directed a student group for the Imperials (now Music Works Northwest).

Busy "retirement"

Sherman, who celebrates his 55th wedding anniversary in December, has two sons and three grandsons. One of the grandkids, 13-year-old Cameron, is carrying on the jazz traditions, playing trombone in the Beaver Lake Middle School Jazz Band, in the Issaquah School District.

Ten years ago, after officially "retiring," Sherman started at BCC.

His Monday Night Band there is actually an adult "kicks" band Sherman adopted as a continuing education class.

No bunch of weekend duffers, the group includes local hotshots like Dennis Haldane (trumpet); University of Washington student ace Jenny Kellogg (trombone); Seattle Pacific University music professor Bill Park (bass trombone); and the director of Seattle Central Community College music, Brian Kirk (drums).

These guys actually pay tuition to play in this band. The big attraction is Sherman's library.

"You just don't hear these arrangements anywhere else," said baritone saxophonist J.D. McLaughlin, who teaches in the Northshore School District. "They're kind of obscure, and they're difficult to play."

Sherman favors bright, splashy, blistering, highly punctuated jazz with roots in late Count Basie, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson and the Kenny Clark-Francy Boland Band. Interestingly, this modernist approach has fallen out of favor, supplanted by the new traditionalism of Wynton Marsalis.

"They all go back to that Ellington thing," Sherman lamented. "But that was Ellington a long time ago. Things have changed. [Late] Basie, the voicings are more up to date."

But Sherman's too busy to waste time complaining.

Standing proudly on the podium in New York, he turned to the crowd and said, "After 47 years of teaching, being up here with this band is probably as big a thrill as anything I've ever done."

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com