Music
Andy Sparling: A lifetime in dancehalls By Peter Paylor
During their first
summer in Belleville, after moving from London, Ont., in 1987, Andy Sparling and his wife, Theresa, found themselves at the Waterfront Festival one evening. “And there’s this big, beautiful band playing under the moonlight on the end of the pier,” says Sparling, “with about 300 or 400 people around having a great time. It fired me up.” That band was the Commodores Orchestra.
It was an evening, says Sparling, that took him all the way back to his childhood. When Sparling was nine, his father, Phil, played saxophone, clarinet, and oboe in a local big band after a stint overseas with the legendary RCAF Streamliners who put their lives on the line playing swing, jump, and jive for the troops. Sparling soon found himself tagging along with his father each summer, going on gigs, and setting up music stands at theatres and dancehalls.
“One summer I saw the trombone player playing Tommy Dorsey’s famous solo "Marie" and I decided right then and there that I was going to learn to play it,” he says. With the help of a local music teacher – and despite his arms being too short to reach seventh position – Sparling started on the path that would eventually lead to his own 30-year run playing trombone with the Commodores Orchestra. Playing for the first time on May 28, 1928, and still playing today, the Commodores are believed to be the longest-running band anywhere in the world. Over the past few years, Sparling has taken up the task of keeping the story of the band and its one-time home, The Club Commodore, still going. “The Club Commodore was an amazing place,” says Sparling. “I’m looking two blocks to the west of me, because that’s where it was, at the Belleville Fairgrounds, and I think back to the late 40’s. That place was
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