The music man of Columbia Falls

His love for music hasn’t waned one bit. Every day, Don Lawrence sits down at his desk in the brightly lit east room of his home in Columbia Falls and writes arrangements.

Lawrence is the music man of Columbia Falls. He started playing the baritone horn at the age of eight. Everyone in his family played something. At the age of six, he moved from South Dakota to Kalispell. In high school, he played the sousaphone for the band.

“I weighed 104 pounds,” he recalled. “The horn weighed half as much as I did.”

But the young Lawrence loved jazz and big band music — musicians like Duke Ellington and Woody Herman. After high school, he started his own band, “The Eager Beavers,” while he worked a job at the county courthouse.

But the military called during the Korean War, and he enlisted in the Air Force in 1951. While he was stationed in Texas he really cut his musical teeth.

There was a lot of down time where he could experiment and learn from other musicians. He was playing slide trombone then and starting to write his own arrangements.

“I learned some real fundamental stuff,” he said.

At 25, he was discharged and attended the University of Montana, where he studied music. Once again, he formed his own jazz band, “The Blue Hawks.”

Jazz was a dirty word back then and the college, while it gave Lawrence and his band members school credit for the work they did, classified his band as a “mixed wind ensemble.” Still, Lawrence said, it was the first jazz band at UM to receive college credit.

He graduated in 1959 and got a job almost immediately in Columbia Falls, teaching music in the junior and senior high schools.

His love for jazz didn’t wane, however. Lawrence started the Columbians, the high school jazz band, his first day on the job. In 1970, the concert band and the Columbians performed in Germany. Students looked forward to playing in the Columbians.

“I never had an unexcused absence,” he recalled.

The band members practiced Monday evenings at 7 p.m. The school cleared the calendar so athletes could play.

“Monday night was sacred,” he said.

The Columbians are still going strong today, one of the top high school jazz bands in the state.

When he retired from teaching in 1984, Lawrence started the Don Lawrence Orchestra. They embraced the big band jazz sound, playing arrangements crafted by Lawrence. Lawrence’s crowning achievement came about five years ago when the DLO put out a CD called “Heavenly Jazz.”

“I was raised in a fundamental church where jazz was a dirty word,” he said, but he knew that some of the old hymns could be arranged into jazz tunes.

In three studio sessions, DLO members recorded Lawrence’s hymn arrangements at the Pope John Paul II Catholic Church in Bigfork because it had great acoustics. The CD was well received, and DLO performed at the Church of the Nazarene, in Kalispell, the same denomination Lawrence grew up with. The pastor and the congregation loved it.

A couple of years ago, Lawrence handed over leadership of the band to his son, Dave. Lawrence still plays trombone occasionally for the orchestra. Today, he leads a small band called the “Bavarian Echoes.” He also books talent for the Columbia Falls Lions Club’s summer concert series.

And he writes arrangements. He’s working on some new ones he hopes to have done by this summer.

It’s been a great journey.

“I’ve had so many wonderful things happen to me because of music,” Lawrence said.