April 22, 1972: Art Dedrick and Kendor Music publishers
The Original
Kazoo Company in
April 22, 1972
Dedrick: Specialist in Student Music
IT TAKES about an hour to get to Art Dedrick’s house from the
city. After the Aurora Expressway ends and you pass the
A single traffic signal. Then up a
stubborn hill and once the slope eases, you turn and climb a little more.
There’s his nephew’s dairy farm. It was
Art’s brother’s farm when he gave up his trombone playing and arranging for
Vaughn Monroe’s orchestra in 1943 or so, when Vaughn Monroe had one of the top
three bands in the land.
He came up to work “essential labor”
because all the hands had gone into the Army. He, his wife Jessie and infant
daughter Sandy moved into the hired hands’ house.
Art says it’s nearly 150 years old, one
of the first frame houses in the area. They planted the cluster of trees which
surround the two tall ancient pines out front and did some homey neo-colonial
remodeling.
From a couple of rooms at the rear of
the place, you can see Bluemont ski area. Back here is where Art and Jessie go
through arrangements, some 400 a year, sent in for the music publishing company
– Kendor Publishing. Ninety percent are rejected, though the Dedricks are
constantly shifting titles in a catalog of some 1,500 numbers.
Among the several boxes of Kendor music
are various titles for Almitra Music Co. (named after a seer in Gibran’s “The
Prophet”), which manages the collective careers of three of the six Dedrick
children – Sandy, Chris and Ellen, known professionally as The Free Design.
Mostly, Art works by phone. A secretary
comes up from the office down in Delevan once a day with mail for Art to
answer.
Sometimes he’ll drive down for an hour
or two and work from his car. Usually it’s too much of a hassle, he says, to
get the wheelchair out.
Right after the war, while he was
teaching music at his alma mater,
Nights he’d been playing dates in
* * *
ART BECAME
arranger for the one at WBEN, which had 16 instrumentalists and five singers.
It appeared on eight programs a week.
“When TV came in,” Art recalls, “within
three or four months every staff musician was unemployed. I suppose it happened
in all the major cities. It was a blow, a real blow.”
Art’s father had played trombone and Art
picked it up and played in his high school band. When he was a senior, his
teacher, Frank Gullo, a
Art came in first there. And first in
the state competition in
* * *
“I STARTED to get offers from colleges,” he says, “and it sort
of pushed me into music, really.”
It was 1933 when he went to Fredonia.
Music supported him through college with gigs in the numerous neighborhood
taverns which opened after Prohibition ended.
“All the students who played jazz would play those weekend things in the gin mills,” Art says. “You could earn $2 or $3 on a Saturday night, which was more than you could get doing anything else in those days. That was The-e Depression.”
Jessie was a music major in Art’s class
and they married right after graduation. Then she got a teaching job while Art
went on tour.
“She had a terrific understanding,” Art
says. “Whatever I wanted and wherever I needed to go for my career, I could
assume it was all right with her.
“When I graduated, I just figured I
wanted to play. The first thing I did was get a job with a
* * *
“WE HAD a bus and the guy we used to pass on the circuit all
the time was Lawrence Welk. He was very commercial even then. We had a
converted school bus. He had a sleeper coach.”
After a year, Art came to
In
“We did the Camel Caravan Show,” he
says, “and we were recording for RCA Victor. We went into the studio every two
weeks and recorded. For nine months, we played the Commodore Hotel in
It was his arranging skill that
determined his career after the WBEN radio band was let go. When he returned to
teaching at Delevan, there were only traditional music scores available for his
students.
Standard jazz band chart books were too
difficult for students, so Art started writing his own big band stuff for them.
At music teacher conferences, Art got to
trading arrangements with his old Fredonia roommate, Lester Chappell, who was
teaching in Kenmore, and
* * *
“THERE WAS a vacuum in the market,” Art says. “For three years
we had no competition. Everything we put out sold like hotcakes.”
These days the company has about 20
employees and prints from a former Odd Fellows Hall in Delevan. Ray Cornwall, a
printer, has replaced
“We were told we had to have a big city
address,” Art remarks, “that we couldn’t do it out of Delevan.
“Actually, there’s more here than meets
the eye. There’s space, a post office, a bank and beyond that, the labor pool.
We don’t need a store. All our business is mail order.
* * *
“THE FACT that we were music teachers helped a lot. We can
still relate to the guy on the scene. We know his problems and how to help him
solve them.
“The strong educators are the ones
interested in all kinds of music. Even after a lifetime of music, I don’t want
to put in two hours with a heavy classical program.
“And what about parents and students who only know popular music? That’s why I think every concert should be a balanced concert.”
The box/sidebar:
Now Doing Jazz-Rock
“From the outside, it looks rosy and glamorous,
but playing music for a living is tough,” Art Dedrick says.
“Everybody who came to me for advice
about it, I told them for god’s sake get your teaching degree first, then go
on.”
His four oldest kids – Sandy, Bruce,
Chris and Ellen – followed his advice about going to college and followed his
example by giving the music business a try.
* * *
IT BEGAN with Bruce, Chris and
They called themselves The Free Design
and Art talked them into making a tape, which he took around to old contacts,
hoping to sell the songs. Instead, everybody asked: “Who’s the group?”
“Kites Are Fun” was written just prior
to their first studio session for Enoch Light’s Project 3 Records (his was the
best of three offers). Art was among those who urged that they record it.
* * *
IT BECAME a mild hit and The Free Design was besieged with TV
appearances and, of all things, offers to make commercials. They’ve done about
40, including one for McDonalds.
Since “Kites,” Ellen has replaced Bruce
and Chris has served three years as arranger for the Air Force’s Airmen of
Note. Chris has written all the material for five Free Design albums and,
happily, Enoch Light allows complete studio freedom, though his record
distribution hasn’t been too helpful for them.
Recently they’ve gone in for successful
symphonic jazz-rock programs with orchestras from
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO: Jessie and Art Dedrick.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Kendor Music
still is based in Delevan and continues to sell arrangements for high school
musicians, including all the ones that Art Dedrick wrote. These days Kendor
does business via downloads from its website at kendormusic.com. It’s also
accepting new submissions.
The website notes
that Art passed away in 1980. By 1989, when
A writer in allmusic.com
notes: “(Art’s) work as an arranger and composer may inevitably be taken more
seriously than the brass instrument he lugged around, especially considering
his importance in the development of the school jazz ensemble. He began
publishing his own stage-band pieces in 1954 with his own Kendor firm (Buyer’s
story says it began in 1952), eventually coming up with more than 300 works.
The more the merrier, because at the time Dedrick started out there were very
few quality arrangements available for school ensembles of this sort. The
catalog is, by any standards, a somewhat amazing series of both original
compositions and unique arrangements of classical material, including trombone
duets, solos for various saxophones, a tuba solo, a trumpet trio, and a duet
for clarinet and bassoon. '19 Progressive Trombone Duets' is a filet
mignon in terms of concept-extending writing.”
As for Art’s
wife, Jessie, her obituary in 1991 notes that she was a native of Australia and
taught music in the Delevan-Machias schools for 30 years. It also reports that most
of the Dedrick kids were in
Oddly, the exploits of Art’s
more famous older brother, Lyle “Rusty” Dedrick, don’t come into the picture
here. Indeed, I wasn’t even aware of him until just now. Rusty went to Fredonia
before Art did, albeit briefly, and became renowned as a jazz trumpet soloist,
building his reputation with the Red Norvo Orchestra. He went on to play with
Claude Thornhill and had a long career in Manhattan’s commercial jazz scene,
working with the likes of Urbie Green and Lionel Hampton, as well as doing TV with
Ed Sullivan and Sid Caesar. When this article was written, he'd just become director of jazz studies at the
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