[Dixielandjazz] Wm. P. Foster, obit. Founder of FL A&M Marching 100 band

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML and Musicians and Jazzfans list

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Here’s a NYTimes Story 8/29 about famous bandleader ,  William P. Foster, of
the Florida A&M Marching Band.  Mentions Cannonball and Nat Adderley.  The
Adderley brothers’ attended FL A&M and father was a faculty member there.
This was literally  Big Band Jazz!




  _____  

NEW YORK TIMES            

August 29, 2010


William P. Foster, Pioneer of Florida A&M’s Marching 100, Dies at 91


By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/richard_goldst
ein/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 


William P. Foster, who revolutionized the once-staid world of collegiate
marching bands as the founder and longtime director of the high-stepping,
crowd-wowing Marching 100 band of Florida A&M University, died Saturday in
Tallahassee, Fla. He was 91. 

His death was announced by the university. 

When Dr. Foster arrived at the historically black Florida A&M campus in
Tallahassee in 1946, football halftime shows around the nation generally
offered a rendition of the home team’s fight song and a smattering of John
Philip Sousa marches. 

Dr. Foster introduced shows that infused black popular culture into his
routines, blending contemporary music, often jazz or rock, with imaginative
choreography, his green-and-orange uniformed band members carrying their
instruments at a 45-degree angle, legs bent to the same angle. 

College and high school marching bands around the nation drew on the Florida
A&M style. 

“It’s gotten to the point where I can’t remember the last time I saw a
halftime show that featured traditional marches,” Fred Tillis, emeritus
director of the University of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_massachusetts/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Massachusetts fine arts
department, told The Florida Times-Union in 1998. 

Dr. Foster said there was “a psychology to running a band.” 

“People want to hear the songs they hear on the radio; it gives them an
immediate relationship with you,” he told The New York Times in July 1989,
when the Marching 100 headed to Paris, having been selected by the French
government to represent the United States with renditions of James Brown
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/james_brown/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per>  at the parade marking the French Revolution’s
bicentennial. “And then there’s the energy. Lots of energy in playing and
marching. Dazzle them with it. Energy.” 

Sometimes his band moved at a step every three seconds or so, what he called
the “death cadence” or “death march,” then zoomed to six steps a second. 

It didn’t exactly march. 

“It slides, slithers, swivels, rotates, shakes, rocks and rolls,” as Dr.
Foster once put it. “It leaps to the sky, does triple twists, and drops to
earth without a flaw, without missing either a beat or a step.” It often
became an animation show, simulating palm trees with branches swaying or an
eagle flapping its wings. 

Dr. Foster became known on campus as the Law, for what could be an
intimidating presence, but he began with only 16 bandsmen in 1946. He soon
called his musicians the Marching 100 because he envisioned reaching that
number at some point. 

The Marching 100 has grown to 400 or so musicians, drum majors and
flag-bearers. It has played at the Super Bowl
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , presidential inaugurations and the Grammy
Awards
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_award
s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  and in nationally televised
commercials. 

William Patrick Foster was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Aug. 25, 1919. He
played the clarinet as a youngster and studied music at the University of
Kansas
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_kansas/index.html?inline=nyt-org> . He hoped to become a conductor,
but, as he recalled, a dean told him no musical companies would hire a black
for that role. 

“That was when I decided that I would develop a black band that was equal
to, or finer than, any white band in the country,” he told The Atlanta
Journal and Constitution in 1998. 

He got students and parents to round up used instruments at his first job,
music director for the ill-funded and segregated Lincoln High School in
Springfield, Mo., then moved to the historically black Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama, where he built a band. 

His Florida A&M band first gained recognition on a limited scale by playing
numbers like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in the Orange Blossom Classic, when
the Rattlers would face another historically black school at Miami’s Orange
Bowl. By the 1960s, as segregation began to bend, the band played at the
Orange Bowl game itself and ultimately emerged as a scintillating presence
with a wide audience. 

Dr. Foster received a bachelor’s degree from Kansas in 1941 and a master’s
degree from Wayne State in 1950, both with a concentration in music, and a
doctor of education degree from Teachers College at Columbia University
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbi
a_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  in 1955. 

He was the author of the memoir “The Man Behind the Baton” and “Band
Pageantry: A Guide for the Marching Band.” 

He retired as the Florida A&M band director in 1998. 

He is survived by his sons Anthony and William Jr. and several grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. His wife, Mary Ann, died in 2007. 

When Dr. Foster arrived at Florida A&M, he looked to innovative performances
as a way of building its music department. His protégés included the
renowned jazz musicians Cannonball Adderley, on the saxophone, and his
brother, Nat, on the trumpet and cornet. 

“Everything he did was new,” Nat Adderley once told The St. Petersburg
Times. “No one had ever seen anything like it.”