Cultivating Thanks with Kelly James, the Leader of the Band

I learned something about thanks my second year of college and the lesson came from the band director Kelly James.

Kelly, as we called him, had been the band director for many years by the time I arrived in his clarinet section, and since I wasn’t a brass player (the UCLA band is known as having a “solid gold sound”), I didn’t catch his eye very often.

Which was probably just as well. The band had only been integrated with women two years before I arrived. Kelly wasn’t sure we should be there.

During his last years at UCLA, Kelly was also the Marching Band Consultant at Disneyland, which brought with it some perks. We marched down Disneyland’s Main Street all three years it took me to graduate from college.

Playing in a band is a glorious experience and the players in the UCLA band were terrific musicians. That solid gold sound swelled through and took over the band room whenever we played.

A wall of pure sound moved toward listeners, coursing through the body in a physical way that set your feet to tapping and your bones to thrilling.

I loved the band.

And when Kelly cut us off, the wall of music stopped on a dime, like a switch going off between dark and light.

You could hear a pin drop, or a spit valve, in the silence that loomed after that cutoff.

Truly magnificent.

So, one day early in the fall as we were practicing he cut us off and surveyed the entire 200 member band.

He reminded me of a wise, truculent owl. With his blonde-white hair combed straight back, his beaky nose and his round pre-Harry Potter glasses, he stared with an unblinking gimlet eye.

We waited.

Klingbeil!

These sudden cutoffs usually meant he needed to shout,”Klingbeil!” at a lanky curly-headed trombonist.

Kent often dropped something.

But this day he looked around and then began to speak in a calm, musing voice.

(I wasn’t taking notes, but this is what has stayed with me and changed my life.)

“It’s always important to give thanks when you see something well done.

Too many people go through life without stopping to appreciate artistry–whether it be in music, costumes, art, anything.

But I think it’s important to admire and appreciate things well done.”

We were college students in the 1970’s. We shifted in our chairs.

He raised his conductor arms for silence.

Thank you

“You never know if you’ll be the only person who tells someone ‘thank you.'”

He’d never spoken to us like this before–it was always about the sound or the arrangement or marching orders or “Klingbeil!”

Kelly smiled.

“I was at Disneyland this summer, walking about the park and I stopped to admire the artistry that went into everything in the park, whether the buildings, the gardens, even the Disney characters.

Pluto was nearby and I stared at the tall character. I admired his floppy ears, his pink tongue hanging out and how well put together the costume was for a child to really think it was Pluto.

And while I stood there, Pluto shifted several times and then from deep within, a voice said, “Good afternoon, Mr. James.”

We all laughed.

Kelly waved at one of those trombone players (I don’t think it was Klingbeil), who stood up and took a bow.

(Saxophonist Bill Whipple tells me it was Andy Nemitz).

A baton in hand to the end

Kelly conducted the UCLA Marching Band at the Cal football game in Berkeley (where he went to college) in 1980 and while there suffered a stroke. He never recovered.

Those who had loved him–and cantankerous and exasperating though I often found him, I loved him–always appreciated that he died with his baton in hand, as it were.

The University of California obituary read as follows:

“Kelly James was more than a band director. Above all he was an educator. His concern was for something far greater than the band, it was for the growth and development of his students.

“He touched the lives of all his students with his sincere interest in them. During his professional career he was mentor and friend to thousands of young people, always urging them to be the very best that they could be.”

I will be playing Sons of Westwood in my coffin, my fingers moving up and down the clarinet as they did so many times while I marched in the band (and played in the basketball band as well). But of all the things I learned at UCLA, Kelly’s lesson about stopping to appreciate and to give thanks to those who make it possible, was the most important.

I cultivate that attitude of gratitude–giving thanks–every single day.

In the UCLA Marching Band archives, I found a picture taken at a basketball game in Pauley Pavilion.

I’m the girl in the second row on the left. Kelly James is standing in the right-hand corner.

Thanks, Mr. James. I appreciate the lesson you taught me many, many years ago.

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