EVERGREEN PARK, IL —  For this year's spring concert at Evergreen Park Community High School — Ken Kazin's last after nearly 40 years as EPCHS' band director — the band will perform a piece commissioned specifically for Evergreen Park.

“Evergreen!,” a work of the well-accomplished composer William Owens, will premiere and be directed for the first time by Kazin at the concert scheduled for 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7 at EPCHS’ Marshall Batho Auditorium. 

“The piece will be upbeat, energetic and very eventful,” Owens said. “I wanted to make sure it was representative of Ken’s career and matched his personality.” 

Anyone who has been in band at EPCHS for the past 38 years (more than half of the school’s entire existence) knows Ken Kazin, who has held the band director role since 1987. Yet Owens’ own connection with him goes back even longer. The two were classmates at VanderCook College of Music in Chicago in the early-to-mid 1980s. 

“Ken was always a really dynamic, conscientious student and a great musician,” Owens said. “He was one of those people who, even back then when we were still in college, you knew would go on to do great things.” 

Owens and Kazin have kept in touch over the years, meeting up at occasional conventions. Owens spent more than 30 years as a band director in Texas and has amassed hundreds of commissioned pieces for concert bands, string orchestra and small ensembles for high schools and middle schools nationally and abroad. 

When he was approached about a year ago to commission one for his college friend, Owens “couldn’t say no.” 

“I didn’t have a second thought,” he said. “This is Ken Kazin, and we have to do this for him.” 

The piece will include the choir, at Kazin’s request, with a “very energetic, very lush lyrical section” occurring amid the concert band’s performance. 

Owens said he spends anywhere up to six months on commissioned pieces. He will be live at the Batho Auditorium when Kazin becomes the first to conduct “Evergreen!” at the spring concert. Before the concert, Owens will conduct a clinic for EPCHS music students. 

Owens’ work on the piece was made possible by a generous donation from the estate of Kerm Krueger, the former pastor of First United Methodist Church in Evergreen Park. 

Krueger, who died last year at age 84, was close friends with Bill Moore, Kazin’s father-in-law and father of EPCHS’ Director of Activities and Fine Arts Amy Kazin. Moore was someone who often cared for Krueger as the pastor struggled during his final days. Krueger’s two siblings chose to honor both their brother’s memory and Moore’s dedication to his care with a donation. 

“The donation from Kerm’s estate provided the funding for this special commission, and the timing lined up so that its premiere could help us to celebrate Ken’s retirement,” Amy Kazin said, noting that the most recent time a piece was commissioned for an Evergreen Park music program was in 1987, Ken’s first year at EP.  

“So Ken will be able to bookend his career with a commissioned work,” she said. 

After it premiers at EPCHS, “Evergreen!” will be available for purchase as a published work for any ensemble that would like to perform it. The top of each published copy will say “Commissioned by the Evergreen Park Community High School Band” so all who perform it will know where it came from.