April 9, 2024
The Earlham School music department has a serious situation that needs to be dealt with quickly.
“I walked up into the band room just now and I’m looking up at all of my storage cases,” said band director Logan TeKolste. “I’m going to have to start finding new places to keep trophies, because I think I’m out of room!”
Miss TeKolste delivered that line without an ounce of arrogance after the jazz band placed 8th in Class 1A at the Iowa Jazz Championships on April 2. It is what it is. Earlham’s jazz tradition runs deep, and the hardware has piled up over the years. Not counting COVID years, Earlham has now placed at the Jazz Championships 9 years in a row. The band finished first in 2017, 2nd in 2019, 3rd in 2015 and 2018, 4th in 2014 and 2022, 5th in 2013 and 2016, and 6th in 2023. From 1982 to 1999, the band placed 7 times.
Jazz excellence in Earlham goes back much farther than that, of course. As Earlham’s band director in the 1950s, Jack Oatts literally invented the concept of high school jazz bands. There were no competitions at the time, so there were no trophies to be won. But eventually, other schools caught on to what Earlham was doing and the terrific programs that are in place all over the state today can be traced to his legacy.
Miss TeKolste, and the older students in this year’s band who have been to the championships multiple times, make sure that younger musicians understand the tradition.
“My couple seniors like to tell the younger students, ‘This is what our band can do,’” said Miss TeKolste. “I definitely think it’s a source of pride for the students who are currently in the program, in addition to the alumni.”
With a brand new band director fresh out of college and a whole bunch of new, young musicians in the band, nobody would have thought twice if the streak at IJC came to an end this year. But everyone stepped up and got it done. From day one, the band kept on improving and peaked with their excellent performance at the Scheman building at ISU last week.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished this year as a band, especially for the jazz band,” said Miss TeKolste. “We got our picture from jazz champs and I was putting it up in our booth outside the band room. I looked at last year’s picture and compared it to this year’s and half of our band is new this year. They are either freshmen this year or didn’t do jazz band last year. To have that and still place at the Iowa Jazz Championships, I was really proud of the work they did and what we accomplished.”
The band had been playing five different tunes during the jazz season, but needed to select three to play at IJC. Miss TeKolste let the band decide.
“They voted on which ones they wanted to play, and I think that really helped motivate them and work towards that final performance, because they had picked what they wanted to do,” she said. “And we had several kids that wanted to get up and do a solo. We worked on improvising and some strategies and skills for that. Which I think upped the overall quality of our performance between our last regular season competition and the final one.”
Turning any art form into a competition is always an interesting situation. Beauty is in the eye—or ear—of the beholder, after all. Bands must concentrate on just being the best they can be and express themselves musically, but also be cognizant that there will be experts breaking down everything they do and comparing them to other bands.
“As their teacher, I think it’s important to keep in mind at the end of the day, it’s three people who they have never met before are the judges on a random Tuesday in April,” said Miss TeKolste. “Yes, it’s important that they all have good feedback and we got some really good comments from them. But it’s also, at the same time, more important to focus on the band’s progress between performances, not necessarily their progress in relation to other bands that are performing there that day. It’s fun to compete, but that’s not necessarily what it’s all about. I think the kids understand that and it helps take some of the pressure off and let them just have fun with it.”
Going into the competition with so many first timers—including the director—there was plenty of opportunity for nerves to get the better of the band. But when Miss TeKolste made the schedule, she made time for her and the kids to listen to other bands and just enjoy the atmosphere.
“I went to listen to the 1A groups so I could hear what was going on and have an idea of where we’d be at,” she said. “So that was a big thing for me to get in that room and hear some other bands. So I knew going into the performance itself; ‘This is how loud our bass amp needs to be;’ those kinds of little fine performance details. When you focus on those things, you don’t have a lot of time to stress too much. The fun part for me, especially as a first-year teacher, was just getting to watch all the students have fun listening to other bands, kind of joke around with each other, and have fun for the final part of the season.”
Founded in 1976, the annual Iowa Jazz Championships event showcases 60 of the state’s finest high school jazz ensembles, featuring 15 groups from each of the four Iowa high school classifications. All ensembles perform in the daytime preliminary competition, and the top two bands from each classification perform in the evening finals competition.
All Iowa high school jazz programs are eligible for an invitation to the Iowa Jazz Championships. Automatic invitations are issued to the first and second place bands in each class of the six district jazz festivals. In districts where there are only two bands in a class, only the first-place band is issued an automatic invitation. In districts where only one band competes in a class, that band is issued an automatic invitation. Each district is empowered to operate their own district jazz festival to determine automatic qualifiers. Wild card invitations are determined by the Iowa Jazz Championships Board of Directors every March.
Members of the Earlham Jazz Band are Skylynn Akin, Donovan Braet, Haley Coil, Natalie Dempster, Audrey Dobbins, Kate Doud, Joel Green, Kayl Gulling, Gabrielle Little, Londyn Mapes, Morgan Mapes, Kyla McDaniel, Valerie Meyer, Elizabeth Nichols, Adam Parker, Brianna Redmond, Erik Redmond, Landon Sheffield, and Emily Smith. Elizabeth Nichols was recognized as Earlham’s outstanding soloist for her transcription and solo of the band’s second number, Ellington’s Solitude.
Earlham Echo 
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