UNT jazz program leader, Leon Breeden, dies at 88

07:14 AM CDT on Thursday, August 12, 2010

Leon Breeden, legendary director of the University of North Texas Jazz Studies program who made the school’s One O’clock Lab Band internationally famous, has died. He was 88.

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

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.

When Breeden took over jazz studies at UNT, the program had 75 students and four lab bands.

When he retired in 1981, it had 500 students, nine lab bands and a library of 4,000-plus arrangements.

Among his students were future jazz pianist and composer Lyle Mays, veteran studio musicians and sidemen “Blue Lou” Marini and Marvin Stamm.

He and the program won the admiration of many jazz greats, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and big-band leader Stan Kenton, who willed his entire library to UNT.

Breeden, who grew up in Wichita Falls, was a clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and arranger.

Before arriving at UNT, he had been music director at Grand Prairie High School and band director at Texas Christian University.

He played in bands at NBC Radio and had written arrangements for Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops.