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Thales Thomas “Skipp” Pearson, South Carolina’s ambassador of Jazz Music, played professionally for the first time at the age of 14 and leading his first commercial band at age 15. Upon completion of his formal education, Pearson spent 4 years in the United States Air Force. An enlisted man with a distinguished military career, Pearson also performed professionally throughout the United States and in Western Europe while faithfully serving his country.
In 1965, Pearson enrolled in Claflin College, now Claflin University, to complete a Bachelor of Arts degree in music education. As a career educator, Pearson has taught scores of public school children the importance and benefit of having music in their lives. For 30 years, Pearson served as the general music teacher and band director in the Bamberg and Clarendon School Districts to children in those areas, building the first band programs which still survive today. After many years of community service activities, Pearson officially retired from the South Carolina National Guard Band in November of 1997.
Over the years, Pearson’s amazing professional career has allowed him to share the stage with renowned musicians Sam Cooke, Wycliffe Gordon, Patti LaBelle, Chris Potter, Otis Redding, George Smith, Drink Smalls, Sonny Thornton, Fred Wesley, David Haynes, Ron Westray, Wynton Marsalis, and many, many others. Pearson’s numerous professional music credits include performances given in Western Europe and across the United States. In 1998, Pearson was inducted into the South Carolina Jazz Music Hall of Fame. Throughout his career Pearson has been the subject of numerous South Carolina Public TV programs, local, regional, and statewide news articles, and interviewed by syndicated radio and television talk shows hosts.
In 2002, 2004, and 2006, the South Carolina State House of Representatives and Senate presented Pearson with a commendation in honor of his extraordinary contributions to the world of jazz music and to congratulate him on an outstanding career and to name him South Carolina’s ambassador of jazz music. In 2003, Pearson received the state of South Carolina’s highest artistic honor, the distinguished Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for individual artistic excellence.
Pearson’s contributions to the community of musicians as well as his musical ability are greatly valued by his peers. In a letter of recommendation for the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts, Wynton Marsalis wrote: “In the artistic community, someone who has achieved ‘super special’ status as a jazz musician is referred to as a ‘local legend.’ The local legend is a repository of unrecorded history, a hands-on educator, a personal mentor to aspiring artists and above all, a first rate performer. In Columbia, South Carolina, that man is Skipp Pearson. Skipp embraces the highest ideals of American democracy through the art of jazz. When I have had the opportunity to share the bandstand with Mr. Pearson, his big-blues-drenched tenor saxophone resonates with the true meaning of Southern hospitality.” Skipp Pearson has received a number of honors such as Induction into the South Carolina State University Jazz Band Hall of Fame in 1998, a commendation in 2002 by a resolution of the South Carolina State House of Representatives “for his extraordinary contributions to the world of jazz music and to congratulate him on his outstanding career and accomplishments,” and the 2003 Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts in the category of Individual Artist. Skipp Pearson is a worldwide jazz legend.
Mr. Pearson will play the Kennedy Center in June 2015, but you can see and hear this living jazz legend at Blues Boulevard Jazz Greenville on April 24 and 25 for two very special nights.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18538973