From the Earshot Jazz Festival web site, "The region’s perennial powerhouse of high-school jazz, under the baton of its long-serving, multi award-winning director, Clarence Acox, shows that it carries the very spirit of Seattle’s remarkable jazz continuum. An instrumental figure in the Seattle music scene, Acox has nurtured young musicians for the past 35 years as director of the jazz program at Garfield High School. An accomplished musician, educator and drummer, in 1994, Acox was inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame, and in 1995 co-founded the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. He performs weekly with the Legacy Quartet (formerly, the Floyd Standifer Quartet) at the New Orleans Creole Restaurant, now for more than two decades, and teaches with Seattle JazzED. Acox was named Educator of the Year by DownBeat in 2001, received the Seattle Music Educator’s Association Outstanding Music Educator Award in 2004, a Mayor’s Arts Award in 2007, and most recently, the Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award from Seattle’s ArtsFund in 2011. Under Acox’s direction, Garfield has won Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Jazz Band Competition four times (2003, 2004, 2009, 2010), and garnered second (2002, 2008) and third place (2006) finishes. Notable Garfield graduates include Clark Gayton, Anne Drummond, Tatum Greenblatt, Nick Roseboro and the Marriott brothers. "