As a Wharton student, Dr. Richard Lundquist, W’58, used his management and marketing textbooks to create a business plan for his jazz band, the Pennsylvania Six-Pence. Sure that success was just a trumpet blast away, he traveled up and down the East Coast with the group, even performing at Carnegie Hall. The band also toured Europe and recorded an album. But in 1959, before a scheduled audition for the Ed Sullivan Show, Lundquist was drafted for a gig he hadn’tplanned for — playing the trumpet for the U.S. Army — and the Six-Pence split up. “Boy, was I frustrated,” recalls Lundquist, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and emeritus professor of international and private enterprise of the State University of New York-Fredonia. “I was so angry. We had worked so hard.”
Now that he has retired, however, Lundquist has reunited the band with four of its original members and two other experienced musicians under a different name — Independence Jazz Reunion. Their new CD, Rekindling the Dream, was recorded at the band’s 40th-year reunion concert near Buffalo. (Lundquist is the only Penn alumnus in the reincarnated group. Gary Goldschneider, C’59, G’65, Steve Goodman, W’62, L’65, and Harvey Leidy, W’59, played in the original band.)
Lundquist says he was inspired to reunite the Six-Pence permanently after playing a few reunion concerts with them at Penn and at his own retirement party, observing how much they had improved over the years. “The band was so good, and I said, ‘I can’t let this go.'”
Recognizing that nostalgia and musical talent alone won’t guarantee a band’s success, he has again contributed his business expertise to the enterprise, even market testing the group’s new name.
