Tom Tallman

Tom Tallman earned Masters and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in trumpet performance from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

He retired in 2019 from College of DuPage, where he taught courses in music theory, ear training, and American music history; he built and led the school’s jazz performance program for 29 years, putting jazz legends and students on the same stage and making a major contribution to family and children’s jazz programming with a series of interactive and occasionally unruly Kidjazz! performances designed to blur the line between audience and performers while introducing the music of jazz legends.

Since 1998, his commissioned compositions and arrangements for jazz ensemble and concert band have been performed by numerous middle school, high school, community and professional ensembles in the Chicago metropolitan region.

In 2018, his arrangements of the music of Reginald Robinson and James Reese Europe were performed with the Robinson at the piano as part of the 25th Symphony Center Presents jazz series in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall.

He has worked as a clinician and judged a variety of competitions in Florida, Texas, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois, and is a two-time ILMEA director at the district level. His latest recordings with The Jeff Benedict Big Band are Holmes (Maroon Creek Music, 2014) and The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful (2019), and he contributed a chapter to Volume 2 of Teaching Music through Performance in Jazz (GIA Publications, 2015).