Paul Tanner, a UCLA alumnus, professional trombonist and former jazz professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, died on Feb. 5 from pneumonia. He was 95.
Tanner is remembered by his students and colleagues as a warm, patient teacher who led by example.
“After class, students ran up to him like he was their uncle,” said Gary Gray, Tanner’s colleague and the director of woodwind studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Tanner received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from UCLA.
He took a break from his undergraduate education in 1938, though, because he was hired as a trombonist in the Glenn Miller Orchestra, said Fred Selden, a woodwind player and Tanner’s former student. The Miller Orchestra was the top jazz band of the 1940s, Gray said, and Tanner played with them until 1942.
“Even though he had one foot in Hollywood, he always did everything honorably,” Gray said.
Tanner’s trombone work in Hollywood included session work, the ABC orchestra, the television series, “My Favorite Martian,” and Alfred Hitchcock movies, Selden said. Tanner was unusual for a jazz player in that he was curious about electric instruments. Through this curiosity, he created his own electric theremin instrument, which he played on the Beach Boys’ hit song, “Good Vibrations.”
Although he was an exceptionally talented musician, Tanner also had a real gift for teaching, Gray said. Jazz music and history were not very well known during the 1960s when Tanner was working in the music department at UCLA, Selden said. But Tanner created and taught a class about the history of jazz in 1958, which was the first of its kind at UCLA, he added.
“(Tanner) was the only one at school who accepted jazz as a valid art form,” Selden said. “I really don’t know how I would have gotten through school without him.”
Tanner would sometimes invite Gray to play clarinet for his classes and the live music was why students loved him so much, Gray said.
Tanner made jazz history popular among the students and eventually among the faculty, he said.
“I took everything I could from (Tanner),” Selden said. “I met him on my first day at school. We had an instant rapport.”
“He filled Schoenberg Hall’s 500 seats quarter after quarter (in his “Development of Jazz” course),” said Donna Armstrong, the chair’s assistant of UCLA’s ethnomusicology department.
Tanner taught the course until 1981 when he left UCLA, Armstrong said. Both music and non-music majors raved about the course and about his teaching, Armstrong added.
“Paul Tanner exuded a good spirit and was a great musician – that’s rare,” Gray said. “He brought out the best in his colleagues and students, and left a big positive footprint here on earth.”
Tanner is survived by his wife, Jan, and two stepsons according to the Los Angeles Times.
Email Levin at ylevin@media.ucla.edu.