Hal Sherman is nuts for jazz: 'I listen to it, and something just goes off inside me'

Who: Hal Sherman, jazz-band leader, Bellevue Community College.

An early passion for jazz: Sherman, 72, recalled the free and easy days just after World War II, when the country was free from the threat of fascism and swinging to the toe-tapping rhythms of big-band jazz. He still wears a bomber jacket from the era, emblazoned with Glenn Miller's name on the back. He and his friends went to Saturday-night dances in Portland, but while his friends may have thought it a trifling diversion, Sherman was mesmerized in a way associated more with '60s psychedelic rock than '40s big band. "I heard a trumpet solo, and I thought I would freak out. How do you explain it?" he asked.

Education: He earned a scholarship to play the trumpet at the Roman Catholic-affiliated University of Portland — not always easy for a Jewish boy — but a free education made the mandatory chapel worth it, he said. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in music.

When his mother-in-law first met him as a young artist, she was alarmed. "A musician? He's a musician?" she asked incredulously, he recalled. "The first thing anybody thought of was Charlie Parker shooting up."

A working life: Sherman had brief, failed careers managing a music store, selling luggage and furniture, and then working in a fish hatchery. "And I hated every minute of it."

He began teaching in the 1950s and ended up at Kent-Meridian High School, where he taught music and was the jazz coach until the mid-1980s. He led the band to championships in competitions, which he compared to the fiercest high-school basketball rivalries.

After a move to an elementary school, then one year at a middle school ("I thought I would commit suicide," he said of his time with the younger students), he became the band conductor at the University of Puget Sound in the late '80s, where he stayed until he thought he would retire a decade ago or so.

So much for retirement: Sherman couldn't stay away from jazz, though. "I listen to it, and something just goes off inside me." He's now in his eighth year at BCC, where he began a jazz festival seven years ago. This year's appearance of the One O'clock Lab Band from North Texas State is a culmination of sorts. The Grammy-nominated college band has traveled around the world sharing its truly American sound.

Sherman's ear is less xenophobic than it once was, having expanded beyond big-band sounds. Before, when people asked him why he stuck to big band only, he said he told them if it was good enough for Duke Ellington and Count Basie, it was good enough for him.

"But as I got more exposed to it," he said of later jazz and funk and their eventual fusion, "when I'd hear it, that thing went off in my head, that thing that grabs you."

J. Patrick Coolican: 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com