When Fred Tillis died in May 2020 at the age of 90, the University of Massachusetts Amherst lost a seminal figure from the school’s arts programs: a former director of the Fine Arts Center, a founder of the school’s jazz program, a professor of music, and a noted composer and musician himself.
And for months now, COVID-19 has prevented the university from staging some kind of musical celebration to honor Tillis, who first came to campus in 1970 (though last fall the school did rename its main concert stage in the Fine Arts complex after him).
Now, though, the university’s Department of Music and Dance is pulling out the stops for Tillis in a Feb. 20 show, at 4 p.m. in the Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall, that will features dozens of musicians — faculty, students and guest artists — performing his compositions as well as related music.
Student groups include the Vocal Jazz Ensemble and Graduate String Quartet, and guest artists feature the likes of composer and jazz bassist Avery Sharpe, a UMass grad. Faculty performers include Jeffrey Holmes, director of the school’s Jazz and African American Music Studies program and a good friend and former musical partner of Tillis. Some duos will also also be part of the concert.
“We’ve wanted to put something like this together for months, and now we’re finally ready, knock on wood, to pull it off,” Holmes said in recent interview. “It’s a bit of a scrapbook of all the different things Fred was able to bring to the university through his playing, his compositions, and his leadership.”
Indeed, admirers of Tillis say one of his key strengths was his ability to bring top-flight musical talent, such as jazz legends Max Roach and Billy Taylor, to UMass as faculty members and performers. He also was a cultural ambassador for the university, performing with other faculty members and musicians across the region and the country, as well as overseas.
Holmes noted that Tillis recruited him to UMass in 1980 to head the new Afro-American Music and Jazz Studies program, as it was called then, and the two quickly hit it off.
“I think part of our bond was that I played trumpet, and that had been his original instrument,” Holmes said. Tillis excelled, he said, especially on the soprano saxophone; the two played regularly for years as a duo, with Holmes on piano and Tillis on sax, and recorded two albums (and a third as members of another jazz ensemble).
Tillis was a prolific composer, Holmes said, and not just in jazz. His writing embraced elements of the blues, classical music, and in particular African-American spiritual music. “He infused so much of what he wrote with a real spiritual consciousness,” Holmes said. “He really covered a lot of ground.”
The two later got involved in starting the Jazz in July program at UMass, among other things, and contributed to each other’s classes with guest lectures. “We were joined at the hip for a lot of things,” Holmes said with a chuckle. “I’ll always be grateful Fred was part of my life.”
The Feb. 20 show, which is slated to run about 90 minutes, is free, but attendees must be masked and are required to present evidence of COVID vaccination or a recent negative test. The concert will also be livestreamed on the Music & Dance Department’s YouTube channel.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.