The U’s father of jazz has died, but family members say his legacy will live on in the music of his students.
William Fowler, 91, died last week at a hospital in Valencia, Calif., shortly after the death of his wife, Bea. The former U music professor and composer is survived by his five sons, Bruce, Edward, Steven, Thomas and Walt, his 10 grandchildren and two great-grand children.
Before spending his last years in the Golden State, Fowler played music everywhere from the dimly lit speakeasies of the 1920s to the bombed-out shores of Nazi-occupied France. But where he made his legacy was in the music halls of the U.
“He enriched the lives of so many people,” said his son, Thomas Fowler. “He elevated jazz to, in my opinion, its rightful place in Salt Lake.”
Although it has spread across the globe, jazz is uniquely American in its origin, as would be a man such as Fowler, born on July 4. Jazz’s freestyle form, often untethered to sheet music, is a natural choice for a man who couldn’t read music until he was 21. Growing up, he wouldn’t let musical illiteracy or the Great Depression hold him back from success. Fowler taught himself the blues harmonica, dirt-band mandolin and Dixieland tenor banjo until the U.S. Army accepted him into its marching band.
After his stint as a military musician who kept American spirits high during World War II, Fowler’s final musical conquest was the jazz guitar. It was an accomplishment he decided to share with fledgling young musicians.
In the 1960s, Fowler founded the jazz major and guitar programs at the U, where he graduated as a music major. He spent 20 years giving students the gift of his musical experience, but he didn’t want to limit them there. Henry Wolking Jr., director of jazz studies, said Fowler was a visionary. Fowler wanted to expand the jazz program into its own department and fill it with the country’s top musicians and composers until it became one of the biggest programs in the West, Wolking said.
However, the administration never materialized Fowler’s ambitions. The frustrated visionary tried again at Westminster College in the mid 1970s, but to no avail, Wolking said. Fowler left Utah and finished his scholastic career at the University of Colorado in Denver before retiring in Los Angeles with his family. There, he reveled in the success of his five sons, all of who took after their father’s musical talent.
“They are such a strong musical family, all of them,” Wolking said.
When Walt Fowler left the California hospital the night his father died, he said in a statement that he looked up at the sky, saw a crescent moon hovering in eternity by the side of a glowing, gold Venus and knew that his mother and father were OK8212;in death, still watching over them.