A lone horn’s wail echoes in the hallway of the music building at the University of North Texas as a music student shuffles down the hall carrying her instrument.

DRC/Candace Carlisle

Steve Wiest, an associate professor of music at the University of North Texas and the interim director of the school’s One O’Clock Lab Band, on Friday sifts through some of the 400 pieces that compose the recently donated Maynard Ferguson Music Library.

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The student may not know it, but she’s one step closer to a jazz music legend.

A moving van delivered the 400-piece Maynard Ferguson library to the UNT campus last week.

The library, provided by a consortium of donors, spans Ferguson’s career from the mid-1950s to his death in 2006.

“This is important music that we wouldn’t be able to get otherwise; the actual music is not freely available,” said Dr. John Murphy, interim chairman of jazz studies at UNT. “Access is big. When you get an entire book of a major artist, it is an important resource.”

This important resource is the second for the university, which, decades ago, acquired the work of Ferguson’s mentor, Stan Kenton.

Kenton’s music still brings inquiries from around the world on a daily basis, said head music librarian Morris Martin.

Like Kenton’s music, Ferguson’s will be cataloged and digitized by librarians experienced in preserving documents.

Digitizing the music will give students more exposure to Ferguson’s popular music as well as compositions he never played — filed away in boxes and cabinets.

DRC/Candace Carlisle

Steve Wiest, an associate professor of music at the University of North Texas, points to a “screamer note,” a trademark of musician Maynard Ferguson that Wiest calls “inhuman” to play.

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Steve Wiest, an associate professor of music at the university and the interim director of the UNT One O’Clock Lab Band, sifted through Ferguson’s music Friday afternoon in search of four or five great pieces for the One O’Clock Lab Band to learn for a late-October premiere of the newly acquired music library.

Ferguson hired many musicians out of the One O’Clock Lab Band, Wiest said.

“Some of these are published, but now we have the original,” Wiest said as he pointed to the published CD of the works, which are now housed in their original form at the university.

Wiest, once a featured trombonist in Ferguson’s band in the early 1980s, pulls out a sheet of music. It’s Ferguson’s copy.

“See this note?” Wiest said, pointing to a “screamer” note skyrocketing upward, far above the treble staff. “It’s inhuman. Not many people can do this. But some members of the One O’Clock [Lab Band] can.”

CANDACE CARLISLE can be reached at ccarlisle@dentonrc.com.