The only freckled redhead in ours was a girl, and she didn't really care about it, she was just good at playing the parts.
We did have some black kids, though. And, only somewhat coincidentally, we were all just as interested in Basie and Cannonball as we were Kenton/etc. And James Brown, can't underestimate how a new James Brown record coming out every day and a half, most of which featured somebody playing some kind of jazz-like sound, filtered into that mix.
As for Maynard, this one here created a lot of common ground, as had the original.
Oh, you'll dig this - the Kenton record we dug before any others was Hair.
Maybe worth considering - it was called "stage band" then, and we played a lot of Don Sebesky "jazz-rock" charts that he had published by some outfit called Alfred Music.