"Music is an oral language,” says renowned trumpet player and teacher Vince DiMartino, musical director of the Lexington Brass Band, which is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. “You can write music on paper and the only thing you can do with it is put it in your fireplace during the winter to keep you warm. Because it doesn’t make any noise.”
DiMartino shrugs disarmingly and smiles when he says this, a smile that asks you to smile with him but doesn’t demand it—which also does a pretty good job of describing the directing style he brings to the band: invite, but don’t force. Invite musicians to express themselves and show off their talents; invite the audience to experience whatever feelings the music inspires in them.
A veteran LBB member who has helmed the band for the past three years, the optimistic, always-encouraging DiMartino may well be the perfect person to lead a real, live, flesh-and-blood community arts organization in the age of the internet and social media, where the possibilities for distraction are seemingly endless.
For DiMartino, the key to staying vital with the audience is, at least partly, to give them the same sensation they experience when a friend comes up behind them and touches them on the shoulder.
“Oh!” DiMartino gesticulates, jumping in his chair a little and grinning. “That! That’s what music does. The audience comes to feel. They don’t just want to hear that you’re in tune.”
Not that being in tune isn’t important too, DiMartino says. It is. After all, half of this challenging juggling act is honoring the part of the band’s mission statement that specifies “performance at the highest artistic level.” And if anyone understands the value of technical proficiency in musical performance, it is DiMartino, a distinguished music professor at Centre College who is in high demand as a trumpet player, having performed with the likes of Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan and Pearl Bailey. (And that is a woefully incomplete list of his accomplishments.)
DiMartino knows that continuing mastery of precise musical technique is what helps elevate music from noise to art, and sacrificing excellence in pursuit of “a broad and diverse audience”—also specified in the mission statement—would leave the organization with neither excellence nor a broader audience, and would violate another of its guiding principles: educate the public.
It is a balancing act he is enthusiastic about helping accomplish, and he has ideas for how to go about it. “Think about it,” he says. “You take the more classic things that we think of that stand the test of time, and we usually find out that they are a combination of both beauty and function.”
The Lexington Brass Band has certainly stood the test of time, thanks in large part to that crucial combination of beauty and functionality. Diverse musical excellence and tradition provide the beauty, allowing for the practical functionality of bringing in and enlightening/entertaining musicians and audiences. Clearly, it is a formula that works.
Vince DiMartino
When Ron Holtz, Mike Swafford, Skip Grey and some other musicians founded the Lexington Brass Band in 1992, British-style brass bands were a rarity in the United States. In fact, the Columbus Brass Band, founded just six years before the LBB, was one of the only such bands in the entire country at the time. Holtz and the others had no idea they were at the forefront of a burgeoning movement, but they certainly were: The North American Brass Band Association website currently lists more than 40 brass bands in the U.S. and Canada alone. “The brass band has become a worldwide thing,” says DiMartino. “There are now brass bands in Japan! It wasn’t that way when we started. It spread.”
These kinds of bands are called “British” not because they play exclusively British music (they don’t), but because they originated in Britain in the 1800s and remain a strong, important tradition there. Other than some percussion, British brass bands consist only of E flat soprano cornets, B flat cornets, B flat flügelhorns, E flat tenor horns (sometimes referred to as E flat alto horns), B flat baritones, B flat euphoniums, B flat tenor and bass trombones, and tubas. Some of these instruments are so rare today in the U.S. that one seldom gets to hear them played except in a brass band.
Besides a love of music, another aspect of brass band culture that attracted the LBB’s founders is a focus on community. Brass bands are all-volunteer organizations, celebrating the common people and bringing them the opportunity to perform and/or partake of quality, entertaining music performed by skilled musicians from all walks of life. Legend has it that community life and band participation in the earliest British brass bands were so closely linked that skilled laborers often were hired not necessarily for their job skills, but for their ability to play the flügelhorn, say, or the E flat soprano cornet.
Another vital aspect of such a community-centric brass band culture is a love of getting together with other community brass bands as often as possible to share, show off and contend with each other. Brass bands travel to perform and compete as often as their fundraising and schedules will allow, even occasionally venturing overseas. The LBB has traveled to a host of places in the U.S. as well as England (2000) and Canada (2011).
Kentucky even boasts its own gathering, which draws brass bands—including regular attendees like the LBB—from all over the U.S. and Canada: the famous Great American Brass Band Festival, four free days of jam-packed, frenetic, family-friendly focus on all things brass band, held in Danville every June.
Attend any of these kinds of events, and it immediately becomes clear that for many, brass bands are not just a pastime but a way of life, which explains why a core group of the LBB’s members have been with the band the entire 25 years.
“It’s infectious!” says DiMartino. “When you get in, you stay in.”
As the Lexington Brass Band embarks on the next leg of its journey, it is determined to build on the traditions and standards the group has worked hard to develop and sustain for more than two decades. At the same time, it strives to revitalize and fine tune the organization so as to appeal to modern audiences and performers whose attentions are pulled in many directions, thanks in large part to technology that did not exist when the band was founded. Beauty plus functionality equals longevity.
“Our biggest challenge is building an audience,” says band president John Higgins, a member since 1998 and a professional graphic designer who does all the design and graphics work for the group on a volunteer basis. “We have a very loyal following—a small but mighty group of sponsors and patrons and season ticket holders, which is great. Our goal is to build on that.”
To that end, the band’s repertoire is evolving and broadening under DiMartino’s direction and his infectious love of music of all kinds and the effect it can have on people. A recent concert by the band ran the gamut from a formal 1914 British march to the theme song from the Harry Potter movies. “I love the traditional brass band literature,” DiMartino says, “but you want to have something for everyone. Why did people go see Frank Sinatra? Because he appealed to everybody. Tony Bennett, too—he performs with Lady Gaga. It’s fantastic!”
Higgins also sees the value in this type of branching out. “What often surprises people is how much range we have, how many genres the band can play in,” he says. “Sometimes, when people think of brass bands, they think of loud playing and marches. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is something for everyone, and people are continually surprised by that.”
Not only is the band thinking creatively about ways to attract and educate new audiences but also ways to attract and educate new musicians. “We are trying to broaden out not only for the audience, but also for the performers,” DiMartino says. “You want to give them something new, something challenging, something unexpected. Musicians want to be challenged. I want to be challenged.”
To attract younger performers, the band recently started the First Up program, inviting small high school brass ensembles to play 10- to 15-minute “mini concerts” before the Lexington Brass Band takes the stage. “We really want to get high school kids involved,” says Higgins. “That is a big part of our outreach.”
DiMartino is so excited about all of these developments and the future of the Lexington Brass Band that he practically wriggles in his seat when talking about them.
“The Amish people build barns,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “They all get together, and before you know it, they’ve raised a barn in a few hours. Isn’t that fantastic? You couldn’t do it alone. And you can’t have a band alone.”