Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Harold Leon Breeden was born on October 3, 1921 in Guthrie, Oklahoma. At three his parents moved to Wichita Falls, Texas where he grew up and graduated from high school. He attended Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth, Texas on a scholarship and later transferred to Texas Christian University where he completed both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. A move to New York City had him doing graduate work at Columbia University, he studied clarinet with Reginald Kell with whom Benny Goodman studied.

In 1944 after military duty he became the Director of Bands at Texas Christian University and later served as Director of Bands at Grand Prairie High School, then Director of Jazz Studies at the University of North Texas College of Music, where Breeden remained until his retirement in 1984.

Breeden also played saxophone and studied composition and arranging at Texas Christian. As a producer of the NBC Symphony, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, he declined a position as staff writer and arranger for the orchestra to take care of his ill father. Moving back to Texas he worked as music coordinator for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth, known at the time as WBAP-TV.

In the last several years of his life, Leon frequently soloed on clarinet with The Official Texas Jazz Orchestra. In 2009, The University of North Texas awarded him with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

Clarinstist, educator, composer and director Leon Breeden, who made the One O’Clock Lab Band internationally famous, died of natural causes on August 11, 2010 in Dallas,Texas.

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