Happy Birthday Ben!!!
This morning, I was scrolling through some more of the pictures Lisa took when she was in Idaho, and I saw this picture of the band I was in when I was in ninth grade. This picture was taken the year I was in the band because I clearly remember playing in the half-time show during an Edmonton Eskimos football game. It was freezing. I thought my mouth was going to freeze to my mouthpiece. What the article doesn’t say is that we were also invited to play in the Rose Bowl parade, but we couldn’t afford to go.
We had the best drumline. All the other bands had a simple cadence, but our drumline played a beautiful and complicated rhythm, and they played it so loud that when we were practicing before a tournament, we would mess up other bands who were practicing in the same parking lot.
Our conductor was Boyd Hunter, and he was a very strict and traditional conductor. He would have been horrified by the modern marching bands with all the fluff and flags and gimmicks. We didn’t do anything simple. Our patterns and even simple turns were done with a flourishing and looked amazing. I really wish I could see one of our field shows.
I would have loved to play in the band during high school, but I had to choose between band or auto mechanics and drafting. It wasn’t much of a choice. Those 4:30 mornings were rough, but I did love marching.
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The earliest marching bands that historians have documented were from the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century.
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1 comment:
Dad this is so cool!!
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