In the main website there is much information about the Italian banda tradition and about our North American recreation of such a band. In this post I’d like to share a little about the home-grown American version of a similar tradition.
The North American small town band tradition. An example from the early 1950’s in rural Minnesota: The Dassel, Minnesota town band played Saturday evening band concerts in the gazebo in the little park in the center of town during the summer when I was a young boy. In this town of Scandinavian, Czech, German, and Finnish-Americans, the wind band tradition had deep European-American roots. Local radio played polkas and fiddle music as often as the more modern popular music of the day. Electric guitars from new urban blues and jazz were only heard on the big city stations from Minneapolis. Rock and roll was brewing in Memphis and Chicago but it would still be a few years before everything would change here in small midwestern towns.
Summer in Dassel, Minnesota. The evening air was thick with heat, humidity and lightning bugs (and mosquitoes, of course). The down town commercial district was (and still is) two or three blocks long with stores on only the north side of the main street. A very modest grassy park with a small white gazebo sat opposite across the street. At both ends of the narrow park were grain elevators and other pragmatic buildings of rural midwestern commerce. Lining the south side of the park were the railroad tracks, quiet, as only stone or hardened steel can be, except when a train barreled through, larger than the town itself, screaming its mournful, exciting, gigantic whistle. We stayed at my grandmother’s two-story white wood-framed house two blocks from the downtown, for two full weeks each summer. We could hear the whistle from her house.
Running in the grass around the band shell while the band played out into the open night was a wonderful kind of freedom. The grown-ups mostly just stood around, talking quietly, or listening to the band; completely willing to let us kids be wild and free. The band’s ragged renditions of Old World elegance, alternating with the optimistic marches of the energetic New World, were a beautiful soundtrack to our nighttime adventures, which were as natural and free as the lightning bugs’ air dancing. That freedom was protected by the agreed-upon standards of appropriate behavior and community mores, the ever-present certainty of which was as comforting and snug-fitting to us children as the humidity of the hot summer nights, and though unaware of it consciously, we relished the paradox of such delicious protection and freedom.
All over the world: I am sure that many Italian children have had such experiences during the past century and a half at the performances of their bandi municipale, as have Mexican and Balinese children, and children all over the world, whenever community celebrations welcome people of all ages to celebrate in their own ways. The hope that we might bring such an experience to some child (or adult) in this busy, frenzied, and anxious modern world, is one of the main reasons I play music and started this band.
“Bright Moments!” to you, from Banda Italiana di Marin, to borrow a phrase from the late jazz saxophonist, Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Thank you,
Marshall Johnson
Founder and Coordinator, Banda Italiana di Marin.
Flugelhorn and cornet.