“I worked hard labor. Really hard labor.”
Mr. Jon Hamm has been working since he was nine years old, and he has the memories to prove it. He’ll talk about baling hay in Indiana when he was twelve. Working construction. Mowing lawns with a push mower. Being an undefeated arm-wrestling champion and setting a powerlifting record in high school. He’s full of extraordinary stories. But the one constant throughout his life has been his love for music—a love that, combined with his winding pathway through so many different professions, created the Mr. Hamm we know today.
As the Chair of RE’s Performing Arts Department and the Director of Instrumental Music, Mr. Hamm teaches many classes at RE and heads a variety of programs, several of which he created himself. When he arrived in 1997, he started out teaching Symphonic Band, which had always been a part of the curriculum. He turned Jazz Band—which was an after-school activity—into an actual class and, through his love of guitar, began teaching Guitar 1 and 2. Since then, he’s created many of RE’s signature music programs, including the nationally recognized RE Combo.
Mr. Hamm’s musical adventure began when he was a small boy in Indiana. His parents both sang, and there was always music in the house when he was growing up—and even when he left the house to go to church. His first interaction with an instrument was when his father taught him how to tune a ukulele that was in the house. He later taught himself to play using songbooks and ordinary folk tunes from his family. “Even at family gatherings after dinner, the Ukulele would come out and people would sing songs when I was maybe four or five,” he said.
The next stage of his musical journey began at the age of six, when Mr. Hamm started singing in the church children’s chorus. He would rehearse on Wednesdays and perform for his choir on Sundays. He loved the feeling of performing in public, and it led him to pick up several other instruments. “In fifth grade, I began playing the trombone in the school band and the string bass in the orchestra,” he said. In sixth grade, he sang Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” for a school concert while playing the electric bass. You might say he was the original Geddy Lee.
Throughout his teenage years, Mr. Hamm played bass for a rock band power trio, and by age 19, he was routinely gigging and getting paid.
Mr. Hamm later moved to Miami in the mid 80’s, and things were a little different. Back in the Midwest, gigging was straightforward. There was a leader, a ‘book’ which is a compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards, and a repertoire of songs that everyone knew. But when he moved to Miami and began gigging, it was a very different story. Gigs had been three hours in Indiana. Now they were five-hour marathons with few to no breaks.
“From my first gig, I was like, ‘Hey man, where’s the book?’ And everyone was like, ‘Nah dude, there’s no book. You just gotta play,” Mr. Hamm reminisced.
He knew about a thousand tunes and could fake the ones he didn’t know. And then, eventually, he hung up his tuxedo and picked up a conductor’s wand full time.
In his 26 years of teaching at RE, Mr. Hamm has made his mark—and then some. “He really loves what he does, and his energy is infectious,” said Mr. Shawn Constantino, RE’s Director of Arts. He makes it clear that he still cares about his job with the time and effort he puts into his bands. He voluntarily gives private lessons to his beginning bass players and hosts symphonic band practices in the morning and during lunch to make sure they are at their best. He also remembers students’ names well after they graduate and specific memories of alumni.
When he arrived in 1997, the spot where the performing arts building is now was a parking lot. S-105—a low-ceilinged classroom known as the “dungeon,” now the headquarters of Speech and Debate—was the band room. The size of the room didn’t allow sound to leave, but he wanted them to play it loud anyway. “I still have hearing loss now because of that,” Mr. Hamm said.
As for Mr. Scott O’Donnell, a close friend and colleague who teaches strings, he knew Mr. Hamm was the real deal from the moment they met. “A half-hour job interview lasted about an hour and 30 minutes,” he said. “That’s how interesting he is.”
