As UCF’s Flying Horse Big Band filled the room with the energy of live jazz, Senior Instructor Emeritus Joseph “Joe” DiNapoli recognized more than talented student musicians taking the stage. He saw the same passion, creativity and love of music that defined his father’s remarkable life.
Mario “Mike” DiNapoli built an extraordinary career that spanned nearly eight decades. A professional musician by age 14, he performed with iconic swing-era ensembles including the Benny Goodman Orchestra and the Glenn Miller Orchestra and shared the stage with musical legends such as Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Yet beyond his accomplishments, Mike’s enduring legacy was his belief in the power of music to inspire, connect and enrich lives, a passion he continued to share well into his 90s.
Now, through the Mike DiNapoli Jazz Studies Endowed Scholarship supporting exceptional UCF jazz students, his name will remain connected to the music he loved.
“His recordings and his sheet music at some point will not be remembered,” Joe says. “I would like him to be remembered.”
The scholarship does more than preserve a name. It gives a new generation of musicians the freedom to develop their own sound and tell their own stories.
When Joe was a toddler, his father noticed him picking out melodies on the family piano.
That was enough to set the course: Joe began private lessons at age 4. As the only boy in a family with five sisters, he was expected to follow his father to the keyboard. His sisters took after their mother, an acrobatic dancer.
Joe eventually gave up classical piano lessons around age 12 or 13. But he never truly left the piano, or the love for the music that filled his childhood.
Today, Joe still plays for pleasure at his home in Asheville, North Carolina.
“I can’t play jazz like my father did,” Joe says. “But I just love the genre.”
A Life in Music
Although Mike was known for his ragtime style of playing, his repertoire extended well beyond that style, and he continued playing well into his 80s. Even in his 90s, his fingers remained nimble enough to play. He passed away in 2012.
Music also introduced him to his wife, Evelyn. She was performing as a dancer in traveling shows along the East Coast when they met in the 1930s.
The couple married in 1940 and raised their children in a home where the arts were part of everyday life.
Although Joe chose a career outside music, the piano and his father’s influence remained part of his life. He became a speech-language pathologist specializing in language disorders caused by strokes and acquired brain injuries. He later joined UCF, where he taught for 21 years and helped expand access to education through online learning.
After retiring, he established The Joe DiNapoli ‘Extended Journeys’ Endowed Scholarship Fund in 2021 for students returning to college later in life, often while working or raising families.
One recipient, Kendra, had once been homeless and lived in her car before returning to school. She now works as a speech-language pathology assistant in Orlando and is in an online graduate program.
“If it wasn’t for your scholarship, I don’t think I would have been successful,” she told Joe.
Inspired by UCF Jazz
The idea for Joe’s second scholarship arrived when he heard UCF’s Flying Horse Big Band perform.
He was struck by the students’ musicianship and by the leadership of Trustee Chair and Pegasus Professor Jeff Rupert, director of jazz studies at UCF. The performance brought together several things Joe valued: his father’s legacy, his own love of jazz and his conviction that the arts are essential to a university education.
“I said, ‘That’s it,’” Joe says. “I decided that I would do this jazz scholarship. It was only after that that I said, ‘It’s got to be named after Dad.”
Joe later met with Rupert over Zoom to shape the scholarship criteria.
The scholarship will recognize a student who demonstrates distinction in instrumental performance, composition, arranging or orchestration. The recipient may be selected through an audition or through the jazz studies director’s familiarity with their work. Joe hopes the fund also will help UCF recruit exceptional young musicians who can further enhance the university’s jazz program.
“The Mike DiNapoli Jazz Studies Endowed Scholarship is an impactful milestone for students choosing to join our professional jazz studies degree at UCF,” Rupert says. “While students are eager to join our jazz program, costs can thwart attendance. We expect that the DiNapoli Endowed Scholarship will be a tipping point for generations to come.”
For Joe, jazz is more than entertainment. Its rhythm, melody and harmony form a language through which musicians tell stories and invite listeners into another person’s perspective.
“Any musical piece, especially jazz music, tells a story,” he says.
Through the scholarship, new generations of UCF students will have the opportunity to tell their own stories while carrying forward the name of the musician who first taught Joe to hear them.
“I dream that the DiNapoli scholarship will inspire others to provide scholarship opportunities for our jazz studies majors, here at UCF,” Rupert says. “We aim to offer the most impactful degree offerings and to create pathways for post-baccalaureate work, without the constraints of crushing college debt.”
That hope strikes a chord with Joe, who created the scholarship to honor his father while helping the next generation of jazz musicians build their own futures.
“It is one of the most meaningful things I’ve done in my career and now in my retirement,” Joe says. “It makes me extraordinarily happy to think about students benefiting from something that I did.”
Joe DiNapoli’s commitment to creating opportunity reflects the mission of Go For Launch, which seeks to give more students the resources, experiences and support they need to define their own trajectories. Join UCF’s next mission and help build a future the world has only begun to imagine.
