Ernest H. Lampkins (left), his grandson Levi Kirkland III, and Pitt Jazz Studies Director Nathan Davis.

Last November, University of Pittsburgh alumnus Ernest H. Lampkins left his home in Louisiana to attend the annual Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert, as he does nearly every year.

“But this time, he came as Mayor Lampkins,” noted his friend Nathan Davis, Pitt Jazz Studies director, proudly referring to the 76-year-old Lampkins’ late-life plunge into politics.

Following his retirement, Lampkins (FAS ’76), a veteran music educator and bassist, had been urged to run for local political office in Greenwood, La., a suburb of Shreveport. Greenwood’s mayor had asked him to run on five different occasions, according to Lampkins. But each time, Lampkins declined.

“I told my wife I didn’t want to get involved in politics because I was retired and wanted to travel,” Lampkins said. “But after the fifth time I was asked, she said, ‘Maybe you should get involved.’”

Lampkins ended up running for alderman-at-large on Greenwood’s town council. He won by four votes, he says.

Soon after the election, Lampkins and other council members began hearing reports of financial misconduct by Greenwood’s mayor and town clerk—allegations that Lampkins would help to investigate. A state audit eventually revealed that $136,172 was missing from the town’s funds.

Lampkins ran against the incumbent mayor in the 2004 election and won, becoming Greenwood’s first Black mayor.

His first day on the job wasn’t easy.

“The previous mayor had locked the office and taken the key,” Lampkins recalled. “A locksmith had to let me in. The room was bare, with not a scrap of paper in it. The computers were trashed. All of the town records, including the payroll records, were destroyed. We had to reconstruct all of the town’s business.”

Even after Lampkins had settled into his new office, members of the previous mayor’s entourage would barge into town meetings, using profanity, according to Lampkins, who said he had to threaten to have the troublemakers arrested to stop the harassment.

Lampkin’s political career is just the latest episode in a life rich with interesting experiences, which have included performing jazz on The Ed Sullivan Show and flying his own Cessna 182 to play gigs around the country.

His first contact with Pitt came during the 1970s, when he was director of the Grambling (La.) State University Jazz Ensemble and was a volunteer fundraiser for Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push in Chicago. In the latter city, Lampkins got to know jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd, whom Lampkins later hired as a consultant to his Grambling State program. From Byrd, Lampkins heard thatt Nathan Davis, was recruiting students to enroll in Pitt’s then-embryonic Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology.

Lampkins applied for the program, was accepted, and assumed a teaching fellowship here. He took a five-year leave of absence from his job at Grambling State, learned to pilot a plane, and would fly from Shreveport to Pittsburgh and back two or three times a week to complete his doctoral work.

“That way, I could get back home to see my family,” Lampkins explains.

“I thought that was great,” Davis recalled with a laugh. “Ernest had a plane and a boat! He had already been very successful, not only as an educator but also as a businessman.”

Lampkins earned the Ph.D. degree in ethnomusicology here in three years and then returned to Louisiana, where he became school music supervisor for northwestern Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport.

“I still come back to Pittsburgh for the Pitt Jazz event every year, and I’ve brought Nathan down to the Shreveport school district’s jazz program eight or nine times,” said Lampkins, who is credited with establishing the first jazz program ever in a Louisiana high school. “Nathan and I have performed together many times. He’s a tremendous musician and a good person.”

A classically trained musician, Lampkins played bass for eight years with the Shreveport Symphony, but his musical heritage is rooted in the Deep South. His grandfather learned music in the 1840s as a houseboy on a Louisiana plantation, listening to the owner’s children practice the piano. After honing his own abilities, Lampkins’ grandfather entertained plantation guests, reciting poetry and playing the violin.

Lampkins’ father was a jazz pianist. “I studied bass so I could play with him,” Lampkins said.

But Lampkins would fight an uphill battle for most of his musical career, trying to establish jazz programs in city high schools.

“You can have a marching band, a concert band, a chorus, and a string program, but not a jazz program,” he commented, adding that most high school band directors are not trained in improvisational technique.

However, Lampkins scored some major victories—for example, establishing the Louisiana School of Professions (a vocational training school in music and related fields) and instituting a citywide music program in Shreveport through that city’s Department of Parks and Recreation.

While in Pittsburgh last fall, Lampkins attended a Pitt Jazz community outreach program at the Afro American Music Institute in Homewood. The program’s founder and director, James Johnson, also received the Ph.D. degree in ethnomusicology at Pitt.

“He was one of my students at Grambling State and in Grambling’s jazz ensemble,” said Lampkins, smiling. “I encouraged him to come to Pitt.”

Lampkins’ grandson, 14-year-old Levi Kirkland III of St. Louis, Mo., came along on Lampkins’ November trip to Pittsburgh. A budding drummer, Kirkland got some one-on-one training with the 2004 Pitt Jazz Concert’s featured drummer, Idris Muhammad, who gave Kirkland a new pair of red-and-gold drumsticks.

“I really think people who like music should make it an avocation,” says Lampkins. “Not everybody is going to be a professional musician, but you can enjoy listening to music. And you can enjoy making music.”