Memories of annual festival help jazz up school’s legacy

Emma Downs - The Journal Gazette
In 1993 there was a reunion at Elmhurst High School.

It wasn’t a traditional high school reunion, though. No one showed up just to see whether the cheerleaders had grown fat or the bookworms became rich. This was a reunion of the high school’s jazz band, and anyone who’d ever been involved in the program’s preceding 25 years was invited.

Robert Meyers, founder of the jazz program at the school and the Elmhurst Jazz Festival, was flown in from Florida. His presence was an essential part of the reunion, says Robert Drummond, Elmhurst graduate and part-time saxophone player.

“We wanted to give thanks to this man who touched our lives,” Drummond says. “To honor what he taught us in terms of doing something well.”

The group – 80 musicians – gathered in the school band room and revisited some of the music they had played years ago.

“We were sitting next to people we’d gone to school with, in the same room, playing the same music,” Drummond says. “It was the closet thing to time travel I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

Photo: Samuel Hoffman - The Journal Gazette > Elmhurst music director Micah Roddy led the effort to reinvigorate the school’s jazz tradition

Until the jazz band was cut from the music curriculum a couple of years ago for financial reasons, jazz played a major role in the school’s music program. From 1970 to 1994, the Elmhurst Jazz Festival hosted performances by jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Doc Severinsen and Maynard Ferguson. “It’s unreal,” says Micha Roddy, a first-year instrumental music director at the school. “To look at the stage 20 feet away from me and think, Duke Ellington was here. There’s so much history here.”

Roddy’s goal upon landing the job at Elmhurst was to rebuild the jazz program. This year he began adding music by Ellington and Dave Brubeck to the concert band’s repertoire. Roddy considers jazz programs at other schools – such as North Side’s Wildsiders and Northrop High School’s jazz festival (which this year featured jazz trumpeter Larry McWilliams) – as carrying on Meyers’ and Elmhurst’s torch.

“The jazz festival ended in 1994,” Roddy says. “But jazz is still alive in Fort Wayne.”
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