UNT: Where Jazz Became a Subject Worth a Degree

In nineteen forty-seven, at what was then called North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, a young music educator named Gene Hall launched a program that the rest of the academic world considered somewhere between eccentric and dangerous: a university degree in jazz. It was the first such degree anywhere in the world.

Jazz had existed for roughly four decades by then. It had produced Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. It had shaped American popular music, influenced European composers, and crossed every cultural barrier imaginable. And yet no university had decided that it was worth studying formally, on the grounds that jazz was improvised music, vernacular music, music that happened in nightclubs and not conservatories.

Hall's program at North Texas changed that calculus. His thesis, written in nineteen forty-two while he was a graduate student here, laid out the case for a formal jazz curriculum. When he returned to teach in the nineteen forty-six to nineteen forty-seven school year, the program launched. The One O'Clock Lab Band, named for the time slot of its first rehearsal, became the world's first student jazz ensemble for which players could earn academic credit.

The One O'Clock Lab Band has since been nominated for seven Grammy Awards and has toured across six continents. The UNT College of Music, with more than fifteen hundred students enrolled across undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, has grown into one of the largest public-university music programs in the United States.

Alumni include jazz guitarist Herb Ellis, saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre, and singer Norah Jones. Bill Moyers studied here. Pat Boone sang here first.

Denton gave jazz a transcript, and the world of music education has never been the same.