Overview

Paschedag's career as a flute player in silent movie theaters withered in 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer, the first talkie. When the theaters stopped hiring musicians, Paschedag came to West Frankfort, Illinois, as an employee of the C. G. Conn Musical Instrument Company. What he had to do was impossible: prepare 74 untrained children for a concert in one month. A major obstacle was that the Conn salesman had sold 22 alto saxophones but no drums. Astoundingly, the concert went well, featuring that rarest of all musical combinations, the saxophone octet. Conn extended Paschedag's contract for another month, and by the end of that time he had become the music man of West Frankfort. After 21 years, Paschedag quit teaching to devote full time to his music store. In his eighties today, he still works in that store and still conducts the Southern Illinois Concert Band.

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Thomas J. Hatton, Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, plays saxophone in Theodore Paschedag's Southern Illinois Concert Band.

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