James Miltenberger was engaging in a little fib that day, but no one seemed to mind.
His audience, in fact, loved every minute of it.
The occasion was the 2017 Spring Commencement of WVU’s College of Creative Arts.
With all those musicians, painters, potters and designers going forth to foster the arts in a society that needs the arts, it was already a heady afternoon.
This one, however, may have even been more so.
That’s because Bill Withers, the “Ain’t No Sunshine” soul-pop Everyman from Slab Fork, Raleigh County, who spun AM Radio gold in the 1970s, was awarded an honorary doctorate in music that day.
And that’s also because James “Doc” Miltenberger was retiring after 55 years.
This particular ceremony, in fact, would mark the last for the professor and jazz pianist as an active faculty member.
In more than a half-century at the school in Morgantown, Miltenberger stretched out his tune to garner international acclaim as a music educator, writer, arranger and performer.
The professor also caught ears — and Mountaineers — in his own backyard.
That’s his arrangement of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” the Pride of West Virginia Marching Band plays at Milan Puskar Stadium during home game Saturdays each fall.
A tenure like that, school administrators decreed, warranted keynote remarks during the graduation exercise — to which Miltenberger obliged, in his own sonic way.
With all those years on his resume, he told the audience, he had sat through lots of commencement addresses, and all of them were boring and forgettable, he said.
He told his audience “to not expect any better” from him.
“You’re not gonna remember a thing,” he said, as the audience chuckled. “Trust me.”
Then he walked over to a baby grand piano — to let everyone know he wasn’t telling the truth.
He launched into a jazzy, reflective rendering of the John Denver tune, and 10 minutes later, after a trombonist and saxophonist emerged from the crowd for that bluesy segue to “Ain’t No Sunshine,” the audience was on its feet.
These days, at 85 years of age, Miltenberger is still enthralled by those 88 keys.
As a little boy taking piano lessons, he leaned into Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff and all the classical masters.
Still playing as a teenager, he found new muses in the Time Out, mathematical jazz of Dave Brubeck — which he promptly balanced with the gloriously goofy, keyboard anarchy of Thelonious Monk.
He still gigs regularly with his jazz band, and next month, he’s enlisting its latest incarnation to the Ukrainian cause.
Miltenberger and his musical mates are performing a benefit concert for the people of Ukraine at 1:30 p.m. April 29 at First Presbyterian Church on Spruce Street.
Admission is free, but there will be a request for donations that will be earmarked for the war-torn country.
The afternoon in the meantime will feature an eclectic playlist, he said, with jazz, classical pieces, a Beatles medley and even some back-porch music, a la Miltenberger, courtesy of his granddaughter, Lillian Green.
“Yep, Lilly plays a mean bluegrass viola,” her grandfather said.
College of Creative Arts Dean Keith Jackson is also in the band, along with Curtis Johnson, an educator and WVU music grad — and they’re the two who walked through the crowd, with their trombone and saxophone, respectively, for that Miltenberger take on the Withers tune six years ago.
Passports will also be stamped for the band this summer, for international shows in Belgium and Bavaria — where the Morgantown-based assemblage will play jazz in Miltenberg, the ancestral home of a certain local musician and professor.
That concept of home, as metaphor and geography, has long hit resonating, ringing chords for Miltenberger, who found one here.
As a newly minted PhD. from the Eastman School of Music, a young professor and his wife arrived in Morgantown in 1962, thinking they might stay for a couple of years before the next opportunity.
Instead, they found a love song with a permanent address in the chorus.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, with more and more people there being driven from the place they love, Miltenberger thought some altruism and outreach might be in order — again, in his own sonic way, via next month’s benefit concert.
“It just seemed like the right thing to do.”
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