James Dutton, a lifelong musician and music professor in the Chicago area, took a close look at the Chicago jazz scene and how young musicians were being prepared for it and decided their education was too theoretical. In 1975, as a result of that conviction, he founded the Birch Creek Music Center on a dairy farm in Door County, Wis., where scores of high school and college students got to rub shoulders with professional musicians. Mr. Dutton, 78, died Dec. 18 at the Illinois Veterans Home in Manteno after a long illness. “He felt like we needed better professional players, and to create those, there needed to be a place where they actually got into the music, learned how to get settled in a town, all the practical sides as well as the musical sides,” said Thomas Streeter, an Illinois Wesleyan University music professor and a longtime program director at Birch Creek. Mr. Dutton was well known to many aspiring Chicago-area high school jazz musicians for the intensive summer jazz camp he ran on the Wisconsin farm. Mr. Dutton chose to let others handle day-to-day affairs at Birch Creek, but colleagues said that when he stood in the back of the converted dairy barn to listen to concerts, or walked the academy’s grounds, he was always matching what he saw with his idea of what it should be. Mr. Dutton is survived by his wife, Frances; two sons, Mark and James E. ; two daughters, Rebecca Parker and Linda Matias; a sister, Margaret; and four grandsons. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Feb. 5 in the Church of the Three Crosses, 333 W. Wisconsin St., Chicago.
