William G. Morton, Jr., and Governor Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts Bob Kramer Studio

When he got up from the drums, Bill Morton was not happy with his performance.

Every musician knows the feeling. But this was different. William G. Morton, Jr., is chairman and chief executive officer of the Boston Stock Exchange, and he'd gotten dragooned into sitting in with a Berklee faculty band celebrating the grand opening of the exchange's new home last winter.

"I hadn't played in a couple of years," says Morton. "I was in shape then for my daughter's wedding, because a friend of mine was coming up from New York to play for it and I knew I'd be asked to play. But in March I was pretty rusty."

Rusty or not, that the 62-year-old securities professional could be coaxed into performing at all explains a lot about Morton's recent, and increasing, involvement with Berklee College of Music—involvement capped early this year by his appointment to the Board of Trustees.

"It is a pleasure to welcome Bill Morton to the Berklee board," says Board Chair Will Davis. "A finance professional of his stature, with his history of community service, who also harbors a deep love for music, is a real find for Berklee."

Growing up in Syracuse, New York, Morton learned two things at home: finance and music. Morton's father was a banker—as was his father before him—but also a piano player. "My old man was forced to play piano as a young man by his mother," says Morton. "So he said, 'When my son's born he's going to do something else.' So he started me early on drums."

Before long, though, Morton developed one other passion: sports. "Like a lot of young people, I had two major interest areas," says Morton. "One was sports, and the other one was music." Then he laughs. "Maybe because I split my interest between sports and music I wasn't good enough in either vocation."

He still did pretty well in both. At Dartmouth College, Morton was running back for the Ivy League champion football team and made All-American in lacrosse. Morton downplays the honor. "In those days, there were only 60 colleges in the United States playing the game," says Morton. "It's not like making All-American in basketball or something." Morton also played drums for a variety of jazz bands in college, playing swing and Dixieland, though he says he got some exposure to modern jazz as well.

After college, Morton went to business school at New York University and then to Wall Street, where he was drawn to the trading floor. "I guess it comes from music and from sports both. It's being where the action is," says Morton. He managed stock exchange floor operations for investment firms, including Dean Witter Reynolds in New York for nearly 20 years.

In 1985 came the opportunity to head up the Boston Stock Exchange, one of several regional stock exchanges originally created to facilitate local investment but starting to play a bigger role in trading stocks nationally.

But a 30-year career in the securities business has done nothing to diminish Morton's attachment to music. Though he played rarely ("with friends from college"), Morton prowled the jazz clubs, both in New York and after he moved to Boston's Back Bay.

It was trustee Phoebe Zaslove-Milligan, managing director of State Street Global Advisors, who linked Morton to Berklee. Though she'd known him for years, "one thing I didn't know was his strong interest in music, and that he was a jazz drummer," says Zaslove-Milligan. "Once I found that out, I started to talk to him about Berklee."

And talk to Berklee about Morton. "She called me up and said, 'You've got to come to lunch with Bill Morton,'" recalls Executive Vice President Gary Burton. Over that meal, says Burton, "little by little things start coming out," including Morton's visits to Wally's, a cramped South End club cherished by Boston's hard-core jazz fans and by Berklee students who further their educations by jamming there. "Imagine that," Burton remembers thinking. "The president of the Boston Stock Exchange is a regular at Wally's."

When "we finally dragged it out of him," that Morton played as well as listened, "I knew he was someone perfect to bring into the Berklee community," says Burton.

Shortly after joining the Board of Trustees, last fall, Morton was faced with the task of opening the stock exchange's brand-new headquarters downtown, with attendant celebratory functions. "I was talking to [President] Lee [Eliot Berk] about it, and he said, 'We can help you with that,'" says Morton.

And help, Berklee did. Assistant Professor Dennis Montgomery's nine-person gospel group Overjoyed sang specially arranged versions of "God Bless America" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the official opening of the 100 Franklin Street facility. A few weeks later, the student Urban Outreach Orchestra, led by Associate Professor Lin Biviano, performed at a Seaport Hotel celebration. So, too, did a quartet led by Associate Professor Maggi Scott and featuring vocalist Associate Professor Donna McElroy—and, for part of the second set, special guest Bill Morton on drums.

The Berklee performers "did a fabulous job," says Morton. "Donna McElroy rocked the place." In appreciation, the stock exchange board of directors established an endowed scholarship at Berklee. "We haven't defined it yet," in terms of what students could be eligible, says Morton. "It all happened so fast."

And there will be more to come, as Morton gets more involved with Berklee. "I'm not sure how I can contribute," he says. But one campus cause has caught this onetime musician-athlete's attention: the lack of recreational facilities for Berklee's budding music professionals.

"When I think of the importance of keeping your body in some kind of shape, particularly if you're in that racket, that's something I'm interested in," says Morton. "If you're going to work [playing] at night, it wouldn't hurt to run two or three miles every day to get ready for it."