As the band plays on....

There is a smell that is  burned into my olfactory memory...a blend of aging brass, musk, valve oil and the crushed velvet that lined the inside of the old Conn alto saxophone case-the saxophone that my Dad rented from the Alonzo Leach music store in downtown Des Moines. By today's standards, the saxophone would be considered a clunker, but I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever laid my hands on. Little did I know that first time I opened up the instrument case and breathed in it's distinct odor, that I would still be repeating that ritual some 50 years later.

 I began playing the alto saxophone in 1963, taking lessons at the Catholic school I attended. The diocese had recently initiated a band program so there wasn't a full band yet. I vaguely remember a few attempts at a band rehearsal with a handful of students, but nothing else stands out in my memory.

At the end of my 6th grade year, my parents informed us that we were all going to be attending the neighborhood public schools the next school year. And this I remember distinctly...they had a school band and it was a class. Like English or Math, you could take Band class. 3rd hour on my schedule if my memory serves me well.

The junior high band was led by Mr. Bagley, an old-school band leader by any era, who also led the band at the high school I would attend 3 years later. When I walked into the band room, the other students were taking out their instruments and putting them together so I followed their cue. On our music stands was a folder of music. After taking roll, reviewing class rules and a few other first week of school-type announcements, Mr. Bagley asked us to pull the "Uncle Sam A-Strut" march folio out of folders and turn to the first march, "The Lexington March",  and prepare to play.

They say that our brains experience 20,000 moments in a day. Moments are a series of 3-4 second bursts that are strung together to create memory. We forget most of what happens to us because it isn't very memorable. But we experience, capture and retain the best and worst moments of our lives.

My memory captured those first moments of band practice that day as we attempted to sight read the "Lexington March" and locked them away forever. To this day, those first sounds of a full band....reeds and brass, treble and bass, percussion, melody, harmony, timber and texture, melodies and counter-melodies, resonate in my brain. The sound of band music picked me up and took me to a place I had never been before, to place I where I belonged. 

That first day in band rehearsal was followed by thousands of rehearsals and performances in school and college bands, combos, jazz bands, marching bands, summer bands, and band camps as I pursued my education, majoring in music education in college. From there, I led the rehearsals for 10 years as I played the role that Mr. Bagley played for me, that of band director in small town Iowa schools.

There haven't been many times since then that I haven't had a band to rehearse or perform in. Playing in a band is in my blood, my DNA, my soul and my heart. 

Band rehearsal is a ritual that is woven though the story of my life. For nearly all of the past 50 years, fall brings the start of the school year, the changing of the season and the first band practice. And for most of those 50 years, I've loaded my saxophone in a car, or walked it to school for the first rehearsal of the year.

Tomorrow evening at 7:15, band rehearsal will begin again. After taking July and August off, the Nebraska Wind Symphony, an adult community concert band, will convene in a rehearsal hall on a college campus in midtown Omaha. And once again, like I've done so many times before, I will walk into a rehearsal room, joining up with an odd and eccentric (me included) group of adult musicians to play band music.

The moment will come when the band begins to play, usually a B-flat concert scale in unison whole notes, just to shake off the rust and warm our ears and instruments. And at that moment, I am always transported back to that first rehearsal of junior high band, in the fall of 1965, where  I experienced the sound of all those instruments resonating through me, for the first time in my life. It is a moment I never forgot.  And while I am much older than when I walked into that band room back in 7th grade, when the first downbeat is cued and the music begins to sound, I will be ageless. Time will stand still. Nothing else will be in my awareness.

There will only be the sound of music as the band plays on.