Seeley named HHS Alumnus of the Year

Ever since discovering jazz music as a preteen growing up in Holton, trumpeter Jim Seeley has gone to great lengths to share his love of the genre with people across the country and around the world, playing with a critically-acclaimed and Grammy Award-winning Latin jazz group in New York and teaching young people how to play and enjoy jazz.

It’s a love that he picked up from his father, the late Dr. James C. Seeley.

“He had quite a bit of influence on me, and he had a great record collection of jazz music,” the younger Seeley said. “When I first started listening to music, I was listening to AM-radio pop, and I remember he says, man, why don’t you listen to some hip music? He says, check these records.”

One of those records was by the legendary, Kansas City-based sax man, Charlie Parker. Upon hearing “the Bird” play, Seeley said, “the light kind of went on.”

That light has been on ever since, and for his efforts to spread that light while shining a light back on his hometown, Seeley — who graduated from Holton High School in 1978 — has been named the HHS Alumnus of the Year by the Holton High Alumni Association, an honor that he said “delighted” him.

“It kind of caught me off guard,” Seeley said. “I sure wasn’t thinking about it or expecting it or anything like that. But I’m honored, obviously.”

Unfortunately, Seeley won’t be in attendance at Saturday’s HHS Alumni Banquet at the Northeast Kansas Heritage Center due to a prior commitment, but he plans to be part of “a Zoom-type thing” that will bring him back to his hometown “in a way.”

For Seeley, playing music was “all-encompassing” during his high school years, and it wasn’t just confined to Holton — his parents would drive him to Clay Center every Saturday for trumpet lessons with teacher C.L. Snodgrass, and he also participated in the Topeka Jazz Workshop, which met on Mondays at Hume Music in Topeka.

“I think I was the youngest guy in the band,” Seeley said of the latter.

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