The John E. Morris Memorial Fund was established to honor John Morris (1941-1987), a celebrated Johnstown jazz musician and teacher.
A graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Berklee School of Music, Mr. Morris taught instrumental music in Johnstown elementary schools for 25 years. He arranged and composed thousands of musical pieces, taught jazz improvisation classes at IUP, and studied at prestigious national jazz clinics in the summers. Mr. Morris won several awards for his music, including a Down Beat award for arrangement in 1964, a Music Journal Award in 1968, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and scholarships to jazz workshops across the country.
Mr. Morris is best known for founding the Johnstown Jazz Workshop, a 20-person ensemble dedicated to the “big band” sound. Organized in 1986, the workshop’s original lineup included teachers, college students, high schoolers, mill workers, city employees and a doctor. It became a prized Johnstown institution, sharing a stage on two occasions with jazz legend Stan Kenton and his orchestra (who played a number of Mr. Morris’s original compositions and arrangements). These concerts—and the material Mr. Morris composed for them—put him on “the front line of contemporary composers and arrangers,” according to his colleagues.
As he battled cancer toward the end of his life, Mr. Morris told his friends his dream: to start a fund that would give private music lessons to Johnstown’s low-income students and sustain the Johnstown Jazz Workshop. His friends began organizing almost immediately, elating the beloved music teacher. “Please don’t ever feel sorry for me or pity me,” he wrote in a letter thanking his supporters, “because my cup truly runneth over.”
John Morris’s dream became a reality in 1987, soon after his passing. “John impressed all with his consummate musical ability,” wrote his friend and colleague Robert Fuhrmann. “He provided many hours of listening with both large and small groups, but my greatest memories are of times when few people were present. After the hustle-bustle of a school day, he would sit down at a piano and play whatever happened to be in his fertile jazz mind at that moment. This was John Morris at his finest.”