JIM WARRICK retired after thirty-eight years of teaching jazz, concert, and marching bands at the high school and college levels. He was the Director of Jazz Ensembles at New Trier High School (Winnetka, Illinois—a public school in the northern suburbs of Chicago) for twenty-eight years. There he taught three of the school’s four curricular 24-piece jazz ensembles, which rehearsed every school day, and one of the four wind ensembles. He also coordinated eight combos that met once a week. With the help of his students, Jim designed and installed a 32-track recording student and 8-camera video production studio called "Soundtraks" which were all run by students. New Trier was the first school to broadcast concerts live worldwide over the internet... something that is quite normal now internationally.  Before New Trier, he taught jazz, concert, and marching band for six years at Lakewood High School (Lakewood, Ohio).
 

Jim has been an adjunct instructor of the Symphonic Band at Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois) and served as a sabbatical replacement directing the Lee University Jazz Ensemble (Cleveland, Tennessee) and teaching the Music Business class. He has also been a guest lecturer in music education classes at Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota (where he is ABD for a Ph.D.), the Percussion Instructor at Marshall University, and guest lecturer at DePaul University.
 

At New Trier High School, Jim created the nationally known, highly non-competitive Frank Mantooth Jazz Festival, which recently completed its forty-third year. About fifty jazz bands perform and receive coaching during the day from leading jazz educators. The festival ends with an evening performance by the New Trier Jazz Ensemble I, followed by professional ensembles such as the Wynton Marsalis Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Woody Herman Orchestra directed by Woody Herman (twice), the Count Basie Orchestra (five times), Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, DIVA Jazz Orchestra (three times), and the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band directed by Dizzy Gillespie. Many other internationally known bands have appeared over the past forty-three years at the evening concert, which has always sold out.
 

Jim’s high school jazz ensembles have also performed with Clark Terry, Bob Mintzer, Buddy Rich, Dizzy Gillespie (pictured above with New Trier Jazz), Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Jeff Coffin, Wayne Bergeron, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Lew Tabackin, Bobby Shew, Mercer Ellington, and the rhythm sections of the Tonight Show Big Band, the Count Basie Orchestra, and the Tito Puente Orchestra. Believing that his students are the best trophies a teacher can earn, his jazz ensembles did not participate in competitive music events.
 

Jim has commissioned twenty-one arrangements or compositions for jazz ensemble; almost all have been published and performed by professional big bands. Several commissions (with links to the publishers) include works by Sammy Nestico (I Remember Clifford and Two Sides of the Coin), Bob Mintzer (Heart of the Matter), Gordon Goodwin (Whodunnit?), John Fedchock (J Birds), Matt Harris (North Shore Morning), Eric Richards (Pure Imagination), and Fred Sturm (Chronometry). Working with so many commissioned composers has given him insight into the process of arranging music specifically for an ensemble.
 

His jazz ensembles have performed six times at the Midwest International Band Clinic and at several IAJE and JEN conventions. He has guest-conducted fifteen all-state junior high and high school jazz ensembles. In 2005 Jim received the “Lifetime Achievement Award For Jazz Education” presented by DownBeat magazine. New Trier jazz students and ensembles have received over eighty Downbeat Student Musician Awards.

He served for ten years as Senior Editor of The Instrumentalist magazine and has published more than 125 articles in national and international music education magazines and juried journals. He also received an award for "Outstanding Educational Journalism", presented at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. For the past sixteen years, he has been one of a small group who select the recipients of DownBeat magazine’s "Student Musician Awards" for public and private high school and junior high jazz combos, and for all the college jazz ensemble divisions.

Jim and Judy live in Ocoee, Tennessee, where they built their dream house on a mountaintop overlooking the Cherokee National Forest, near whitewater rafting on the Ocoee River. (A photo from their back deck is the basis of the website logo.) They regularly see black bears near their yard and, at night, hear the wail of coyotes politely answered by their Yellow Lab, “God’s Amazing Gracie,” who recently celebrated her twelfth birthday. Jim has served as a part-time chaplain at the Bradley County Jail (Cleveland, Tennessee), the DuPage County Jail (Wheaton, Illinois), the Illinois State Prison (Joliet, Illinois), and the Louisiana State Prison (Angola, Louisiana).