Join Priscilla Rahn as she hosts Doug Tideback, a renowned music educator, in a lively discussion about the evolving landscape of music education. Doug shares invaluable insights from his extensive career, from working alongside legendary musicians to pioneering music programs in schools. This episode delves deep into the challenges and joys of fostering musical talent and the importance of inclusivity in educational settings.
00:00:03 Introduction to Restoring Education in America
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author, leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Rahn, and I’m so excited that you’ve decided to join the conversation today. You know, I love to talk about all things education, and one of my favorite things to do is to talk with another fellow educator. Today, I’m really lucky because I’m talking to another fellow music educator, and I’m going to bring him onto my stage today. Welcome, Mr. Doug Tideback. Hi.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, Priscilla. How are you today?
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m doing great. We’re going to have such a great, fun, jazzy musical conversation, I’m sure. But before we start talking, I’m going to share your bio for our listeners who may not know who you are yet. Doug has a bachelor’s degree in trombone performance and jazz pedagogy from the University of Illinois, a master’s in music technology and recording arts from San Jose State University, and did his doctoral work in music education and trombone performance at the University of Arizona. Doug has performed with the Temptations, the Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Natalie Cole, Harry Connick Jr., the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, Bobby Blue Band, Champagne, Frankie Avalon, the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, the Monterey Symphony, the San Jose Symphony, Symphony of the Rockies, the Littleton Symphony, and many, many others. Doug is the founder of the Heartland Jazz Orchestra, the Arizona Jazz Academy, the Tucson Jazz Institute, the Colorado Jazz Ambassadors, and he founded the Central Catholic High School Music Department in Bloomington, Illinois. Doug has taught at the University of Illinois, Bradley University, Heartland College, San Jose State University, Hartnell College, the University of Arizona, West Valley College, the Tucson Jazz Institute, and has been a clinician for jazz at Lincoln Center. As a director and educator, he has led ensembles to numerous award-winning performances all over the U.S. and internationally. And Doug currently directs instrumental music ensembles for five schools in Douglas County, Colorado. Oh, my goodness. I had to cut down your bio, Doug.
SPEAKER 03 :
There’s still more, but that’s really good. I know when you got all that.
SPEAKER 02 :
I spoke really fast just to get as much as I could get in because you’ve done all of this amazing work and you’ve worked with all of these awesome talents and you’re so humble. You’re just cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I hope I can live up to that resume because that’s the kind of resume that you read.
SPEAKER 02 :
And you know, one of the reasons why you’re a really good friend is because when we have a barbecue at Casa de Rahn, you always bring… the right desserts yeah custard yes yes so yes Annie’s custard and so you are lifetime friend of the Rahns okay all right something appeared on the news and I want to get your quick take okay um At Kent State University, there’s a vocal ensemble called Vocal Intensity Acapella. Did you hear about this story?
SPEAKER 03 :
I did not. I’m looking forward to it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, so you might not like this. So they were having auditions and they implemented a policy restricting certain solo audition opportunities only to people of color. So if you were white and you wanted to audition for a solo, you were not allowed to audition. So one of the students who was a three-year member of the acapella group who was the beatboxer in the ensemble complained to the university and said, this is discriminatory. You know, if someone who’s not Black wants to audition for a solo, they should be able to audition for the solo. And he was put on probation because he dared to protest this. And eventually he just quit the ensemble because the pushback was more than what he you know was okay so you’re a musician you’ve performed with all kinds of people what can you believe this is 2025 and there’s a university saying you have to be a certain color to audition for um a solo what i i want to get your take on that as as a musician um
SPEAKER 03 :
I don’t discriminate. In the ensembles that I run and I direct and I audition for, the best person gets the job. It doesn’t matter who they are, what color they are, what sex they are. The best person for that part, musically, is how I consider their opportunity within that ensemble. And I would hope that most universities would encourage that among their clubs. I’m not sure if that group is a club or is it a class? Do you have any more information on it?
SPEAKER 02 :
I don’t. I just know that it’s the Vocal Intensity Acapella Group at Kent State University. And it’s not a, you know, a Black-only ensemble. They just decided on a particular song that if you’re not Black, you can’t audition. And we know as musicians that there are lots of different people who come with great talent and great soul and are able to emote the emotion of the music, which is really what we should be teaching young musicians is no matter what the genre of music, fall in love with the music and go for it. And I just have a hard time thinking that this is happening.
SPEAKER 03 :
and the musicianship of that person who’s bringing their talent forward to the group. That’s what you look at, the soul of that person and how it fits musically. I’m not sure if it’s like a quota thing, which I don’t support anymore, but I can see maybe we had a need for that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, but in today’s world, I don’t think we need to have that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you know what’s amazing, Doug? Okay, so you know my husband, and he’s traveled all over the world just like you. He’s played with artists from all over the world, all different kinds of backgrounds. And they never argue. It’s just like so much respect and so much love for each other. Because you can blow. Can you blow? Can you play? Are you great? Then you’re in my tribe. We can hang because there’s this mutual respect. And if professionals behave that way, I believe that’s what we as music educators should teach our students, that we should be making harmony and we should fall in love with music. Because it’s the same argument when people have said, oh, classical music, And playing strings and orchestra, the cello, that’s not typically for Black kids. And they say classical is a white genre. And I’m like, we’re not going to put a skin color on genres. We’re going to understand and study the musical differences and the elements of the music. And if someone loves it, then they love it regardless. of their skin color. We shouldn’t put a skin color on genres of music and style. And it’s a testament to your bio that I just read and all the people. If someone were to limit you, Doug, and say, because of your shell on the outside, you couldn’t perform with Aretha Franklin?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I haven’t experienced that kind of discrimination in my career. Maybe other people do, but I don’t know them. In the professional world, at the mid to highest level, people don’t care what you look like. They care what you can do and how much you love the music, how much you can project the music and fit into that ensemble musically. All the groups that I direct, they know my saying. I don’t play favorites. The best person gets the job. If you want a solo on this particular tune, all you have to do is come in and show me that you can play. There is no question about your background, your ethnic background, your race, your religion, whatever it is. It’s all about the music and the love for the music.
SPEAKER 02 :
If you’re just tuning in, my special guest today is Doug Tideback. He’s an Uber music educator, connoisseur. And we’re so lucky that we have him because every time I’m talking to you, you’re either going to a rehearsal or going to a show performance or coming back from a performance. And your life is so amazing. You’re around all of these great musicians. But take us back about the journey, your journey to starting music education. How did you get your start?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, that’s interesting. I was just, I mean, before this broadcast, talking to one of my former high school bandmates, because my high school band director just passed away a month ago. I was very fortunate to go visit him in Nebraska, where he had retired to live with his daughters. He didn’t teach in Nebraska, but when I knew him at college, LaSalle Peru High School, basically a little farm town in central Illinois. And he got me teaching middle school students private lessons. It was a way for me to earn some income and also for me to contribute to his program. He often would encourage more talented people, people in the program that wanted to share their skills to with younger players to help bring them to matriculate them into his program. I didn’t realize that’s what he was doing. I just thought, wow, I’m making a couple of bucks and having fun, you know, teaching. But when I went on to the university of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, my junior year, um, The director of the program, John Garvey, asked me if I’d be willing to direct one of the jazz bands. We had at that time seven jazz big bands, but only two full time jazz educators at the university. So sometimes grad students or sometimes section leaders would get offered the opportunity to teach. I was terrified the first time I was in front of the band. I had the number seven jazz band, bottom band. And a lot of those guys, they were grad students, and they thought they should have been in the sixth band or the fifth band. And here they were, stuck with me, this undergraduate trombone player. So in that band, there were some really talented people. And the piano player, his name’s Lawrence Hobgood, he became, later on, the musical director for Curt Elling for about 18 years of Curt Elling’s career, the great Chicago vocalist and a Grammy Award-winning vocalist. And Lawrence was with him at that time. But he was particularly upset that he was stuck with this trombone player directing the band who’d never taught before. So he refused to play in the number seven jazz band he said we need to call it something else. So I allowed the band to have some, some direction and what we call that we were the University of Illinois, new one to see jazz unit. That’s the name that they voted on. And after a couple of weeks of being in front of the band, I started feeling more comfortable, finding the right tunes for the band so the band could show off. We ended up playing a lot of gigs that year, more gigs than a lot of the other jazz bands in the program. And I was sold on teaching. I was so excited about being in front of that band and helping them to be excited about being in the band and using the band as a vehicle for other aspects of their life. Often, as a music educator, you know, we’re not educating the next Mozart of the world, the next Miles Davis of the world. We’re educating the next pilots and the next entrepreneurs, the next engineers, and using music to enhance their process, their journey, and the ways that they choose to do it. And the new Watusi Jazz Unit taught me that I was good at doing that, and I could do it, and I could provide that service. And so the next year they gave me the number three jazz band. And then I graduated and went on to other things.
SPEAKER 02 :
So, Doug, what are some of those skills that you think are important for young musicians to learn?
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, there’s a myriad of skills. First of all, you need to have some discipline so that if you want to improve yourself, you have to have the discipline to sit down and practice and listen and apply what you’ve learned in the classroom into your real life. Teamwork, being able to work with a diversity of people from all different backgrounds. You don’t even have to like each other in music. You just have to respect each other. And that’s a very important lesson to learn, that we don’t have to agree with each other politically, spiritually, in any way. But we have to respect, we get, it’s an opportunity to respect each other and work together for a common goal of creating a musical event. Using music to open up different channels of your being. I mean, it’s the only activity that’s an audio activity. We experience audio, a visual activity, because you’re reading it, you’re looking at each other, and you’re connecting that way. It’s… an emotional activity. So you’re bringing your emotion into it. So you’ve got audio, visual, physical, and emotions all wrapped into one thing. And it’s almost always, especially if you respect the group, you’re at a healing thing where you feel better after coming out of it. And you, that affects the rest of your day, the rest of your night, whatever you’re going into. So that’s another important aspect of being part of musical ensemble. Yeah. having humility because no matter how good you are there’s somebody better there’s somebody who can do something that is so true right so it’s it’s it’s it’s inevitable and it’s it’s um it’s a really beautiful experience to to hear somebody doing what you’re trying to do better than you’re doing it realizing first of all that you’re if they can do it you can do it so you just have to do the things that they did to get there
SPEAKER 02 :
Let’s talk about the students that you’re teaching in Douglas County. You’ve created multiple. You don’t just have one band. You’ve got tons of students in different schools that you’re working with. Talk about the work that you’re doing in Douglas County School District.
SPEAKER 03 :
well um this is before i moved here but about 12 years ago i think douglas county eliminated elementary school band programs all the elementary schools had a set of percussion vibes xylophones music stands a collection of music and they it was part of their curriculum they eliminated that so A woman in town, Debbie Davidson Stanfield, decided to create a before and after school music program for parents who want their young ones to be exposed to instrumental music. So I’ve been given four schools that I teach before school and after school to build those programs up. It’s a matter of going in and going to school assemblies and getting kids so excited about playing. The kids, they don’t care who I played with. They don’t care what level I play. What they’re interested in is who I am as a person and will I be fun to be with. And will I help make their day a little bit more exciting? And that’s how you recruit into a program like that. But that program’s been going for, I think, a dozen years now. And in my programs, I think I average about 35 students per band. I’ve had bands as big as 55 students, but I don’t think smaller than 20. But that’s what I do. four mornings and four afternoons a week before and after school. The other things I’m doing, I teach, I’m the director of bands at Arapahoe Community College. I do the wind ensemble and two jazz bands. And I started the youth ensemble, mostly from kids from Douglas County that I knew that were getting middle school age and high school age that wanted to continue working with me and the way that I teach. So I created a program called the Colorado Jazz Ambassadors. The kids come to Arapahoe Community College now one afternoon, Saturday afternoons, and they have the opportunity to play either in a middle school or a high school or somewhere in between ensemble and study jazz, learn to improvise, and the poise that that gives you, that improvisation is a whole other aspect of music education that we could talk about. Everybody should improvise. I encourage all my students, even my classical students, to put the book down, pick the instrument up, and just play one note after another and see what that feels like. See what it sounds like. Where do you want to go with it? And sometimes just brilliance happens, and I want to learn those licks that those kids play. It’s just so much fun to hear what they come up with. So, improvisation is something that I can’t escape from and that’s something I really like to have kids explore. Now, I’ll never make somebody play a solo. I don’t want them to have a traumatic experience on their first solo and, you know, quit playing just because of that. But when they’re ready to play, they’ll raise their hand and say, I want to play now. And when they do it, it’s an amazing experience. And everybody can feel that personal energy, that personal creativity that they’re bringing to the room in that moment. And it’ll never be that way again because it’s improvised. So I’m sorry if I’m talking too much. I could talk for a long time about it.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know what? I think that’s what’s transferable as a musician and playing jazz is you’re talking, you know, Darren says when he was in college, his saxophone professor said, Darren, if you don’t have anything to say, you’re not invited to the conversation. And that was a musical thing, right? It’s like you have to have something to say in order to be in the conversation. So I love that you have something to say because I think that’s reflective of you as a musician. So Doug Tideback, tell me about how you get parents to buy into the program. Where do you get your funding to do these performances?
SPEAKER 03 :
The funding with Douglas County Schools. most of the concerts are sponsored by the feeder high schools that they lead into the concert we did today had 175 beginner musicians all playing together and then also the middle school band from castle rock they performed so kids can see where they’re going to matriculate to where it’s going to lead to then the high school band plays so they all um relate to where they’re going to and they relate to they can see for the one of the schools i teach at for instance the soaring hawk so when they call soaring hawk all the kids that went to soaring hawk stand up in the middle school band stand up at high school so they can see who they will become and they can connect with it it’s not just a number it’s not just a theory it’s not just something that they’ve heard about they can see those kids they and they’re playing with them they’re performing with them and uh And those performances are created and funded, I’m sure, by the high school. Mr. Seller, Mark Seller, who teaches at Castleview High School, was the emcee today. He was fantastic. And as you probably know, he knows Darren and speaks so highly of your husband. And he’s a tenor saxophone player also. But he was the emcee today and did a great job making sure that these kids felt included. Now, one of the ways he matriculates also is when my beginner students all get there, these are fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, and for some of them, many of them, it’s the first time they’ve performed. So they’re terrified, they’re nervous, they’re anxiety, they’re shaking, they’re trembling. He assigns his high school students to each group section so the trombone players work with beginning trombone players the trumpet players and helps take all the butterflies all the fears away and helps these kids have an incredibly positive experience so the majority isn’t expense the majority is human love of each other and human love of the music and how they’re going to impart it and encourage the greatness of that music in each of the young people that he brings into that program. So that’s where the concerts come from.
SPEAKER 02 :
So I would imagine the parents are very proud, and that’s really exciting to see, that trajectory. That’s important for building a program. That’s really, really critical. Now, your salary, because you’re not volunteering your time for free, right? I mean, you got to capitalism.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wait, I get paid? When is this going to happen?
SPEAKER 02 :
We’ll work. We’ll play for food, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. Pretty much. I’ve done that all my life. So the kids pay, the parents pay a tuition for the before and after school program. Now, students that can’t afford it. And believe me, there are students in Douglas County that can’t afford the tuition. It’s not expensive. It’s about $400 for the whole year. for the whole year. But for some families, that’s too much. And there are scholarship opportunities and there are ways that parents can contribute their skills and their abilities to the program so that they don’t have to pay financially.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s beautiful. So you’ve got so many students. How do you maintain high standards and high expectations for your students?
SPEAKER 03 :
um several ways um first of all i invite people to come at what level whatever level they are i told students because many of these students just started an instrument the beginning or end of september if you can play one note You come to that concert and you play that note the best that you can play it. If you can play two notes, play two notes. If you know one song, play that song. And the rest, you can sort of play along and watch what other people are doing. And no one will know if you made a mistake. And the bottom line is you’re going to participate at your highest level. In music, ensembles, as you know, nobody sits on the bench. like they do in sports. There might be 20 kids on the basketball team, but they’re constantly only playing the five best players that fit the team at that moment. And music is not that way. Everybody plays whatever level they’re at, and they’re all aspiring to a higher level. And they can hear that level because they’ve heard it demonstrated in class day after day, and they see some of their peers achieving that level. And so if their peers can do it, they can do it. They might not be able to do it today or tomorrow, but maybe the day after they’re going to get it. Doesn’t matter when you get it. I was the worst trombone player in Illinois history for probably five years. But I couldn’t read music. I’m dyslexic and I have an audio processing issue that and I was considered ADHD. Back then they called it hyperactive. So my band director, Mr. Campbell from Mendota, Illinois, he said, if you have to make it up and it sounds good, just play, fit right in. So I watched what the other players slides were doing, what the trumpet players valves were doing. I listened and then I played something that fit in. And until I could read music and play at that higher level, you never know which kid is going to get it and when they’re going to get it. I had a flute player a year ago, and she was my hoot owl, and she wanted to play flute. And flute’s a pretty challenging instrument to start at, and she’s very slender and of slight build, so it was very hard for her to even lift that flute into the right place and see her fingers and blow across the hole, you know. So every song she played, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, Hoo, hoo, same note. She is a hoot owl. I kept talking to her and talking to mom. I said, you know, maybe she should think about clarinet. Your fingers are in front and blah, blah, blah. No, she wants to play the flute. She loves the flute. She practices for hours, you know, on that note. And I kept thinking, well, maybe she’s just not good. I don’t know what’s going to happen here. After spring break, something happened. Everything clicked and she could play everything. So it’s not a matter of maintaining that high standard at the moment. It’s a matter of setting that high standard and helping kids see where they’re at in relationship to it, but feel good in the process of getting there.
SPEAKER 02 :
That is so beautiful. And I am a flute player. So I understand the agony of that journey at the beginning. It’s, you know, it’s funny. The students, they hear how beautiful the flute sounds, but they don’t realize that that front loading takes a lot of work. Well, Doug, I’m looking at the time and I’m sorry, we’ve got to land our plane. The time goes by so fast.
SPEAKER 03 :
I thought I was just warming up here. I’m ready to play the concerto.
SPEAKER 02 :
We’ll have you back for the encore, okay?
SPEAKER 03 :
I appreciate what you’re doing here. You’re making a difference in this community. And I’m excited about it. I want to support you in any way that I can. And all my bands would do the same thing. So if you ever need, if you want to have a band come out and play, we’ll do that.
SPEAKER 02 :
I love that. Okay, I’ll take you up on that offer. So thank you again. And to my listeners, thanks for tuning in and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
