Please join us in celebrating Black Women in Jazz and the Arts Day, and Women’s History Month by recognizing the accomplishments of Arkansas’s very own Dr. I. J. Routen.
By Liz Colgrove
In honor of National Black Women in Jazz and the Arts Day (March 1st) and Women’s History month, we here at The Springs Magazine would like to invite you to sit back and revel in the “her-story” of Dr. I. J. Routen.
Accomplished professional Jazz musician turned award-winning educator, Dr. Routen is the Elementary Arts Coordinator for the Little Rock School District (LRSD). She instructs K-5th grade children in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary curriculum that allows students to take the lead in their artistic education.
Her role at LRSD also includes mentoring Humanities educators, cultivating an all-encompassing interdisciplinary arts education team, and coordinating LRSD’s Artistry in the Rock, a student exhibition of visual and performing art (currently virtual.)
Dr. Routen is founder and director of the Rockefeller Show Choir who performed at Carnegie Hall with the National Children’s Choir, currently directs Voices Without Borders, an elementary honor choir, and is an Adjunct Professor in Music Education at UALR.
She was inducted into the Arkansas Music Educators Association Hall of Fame as a teacher in 2014 and as an administrator in 2017, and was awarded Little Rock PTA Council’s 2001 Teacher of the Year.
Dr. Routen’s approach to arts education is intuitively flexible and simplistically brilliant. She believes “If you love them, give them parameters and borders with high expectations. If they have a better idea, go with it. If it works, why not?” Dr. Routen ensures her students have agency over their own creativity, inspires them with a warm and contagious enthusiasm, and commands respect by being respectful.
To tell her story, Dr. Routen had to first explain her personal trinity; “I am three people. Irma Jean, who never ages past 10-12 years, I. J., the performer, and Dr. Routen, the educator.” When sitting with students creating art, she has been asked, “Are you a kid or a grown-up?” To which she replies, “a kid,” because, in that moment, Irma Jean, the kid, is who she needs to be.
Irma Jean, the daughter of a doctor and an educator in upper-middle-class Little Rock, began piano lessons at age five and describes being raised to be what was considered “civilized” in 1950. Despite being musically advanced, the cruelty of segregation prevented Irma Jean from joining the Central High School Band. Undeterred, and with the philosophy of “accept no, and ignore it,” she applied to and was accepted at the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory School. Living with extended family in Chicago, Irma Jean began to develop her next self, I. J. the performer.
I. J. the performer found her footing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when country and blues singer, Tracy Nelson invited her to join the Imitations, a progressive Jazz group that has been described as the musical voice of 1960s radicalism on campus. Here I. J., Chuck Matthews, and Nelson provided vocals for Richard Drake (Fat Richard), Hart McNee, and Gary Karp. According to Susan Kepecs in Isthmus, Nelson is quoted as saying “Irma taught me the Temptation Walk we did when we were backing up Chuck. It was a blast.”
Imposing the same high expectations on herself that she now does with her students, I. J. the performer moved on to great success, in Jazz and Cabaret with some of the most elite musicians in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Ibiza, filling in for Anita O’Day in London– even performing in the company of Princess Anne.
I.J. opened for Tony Orlando and Dawn (England), performed at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club (London), was mentored by Bill Russo, Stan Kenton’s arranger, at Columbia College (Chicago), and was told by the legendary Duke Ellington that she had “good chops.” Wanting to take her abilities to a deeper level, and to continue to break barriers, she enrolled in the University of Southern California to study music composition. I. J. then struggled with some personal tragedies, and after seeking respite in St. Barts doing cruise ship stints, she had a conversation with God.
God told I. J. to go home and teach. After 30 years away, home is where I. J. became Dr. Routen working to transform LRSD arts for over 20 years. When asked about retirement, she said she is not ready because “The kids are still fun, and as God said to come here, He will tell me to sit down.”
Locally, I. J. occasionally performs at the Ohio Club in Hot Springs with Clyde Pound and occasionally sits in with Shirley Chauvin and the Stardust Big Band. Dr. Routen is curating the virtual LRSD Artistry in the Rock exhibition, and Irma Jean can be found in the classroom nurturing the next generation of artistic souls. All three unstoppable versions of herself ask the public to “Support arts in public education. Without them, we are not whole.” Voices Without Borders and the 2022 LRSD Artistry in the Rock will be found on the LRSD website at www.lrsd.org and on YouTube starting March 19, 2022.
