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 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7 • K E N T U C K Y M O N T H LY
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