Kearny Mesa Concert Band: A Modern Presentation of a Once-Common Form of Entertainment

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday evening (Tuesday, August 15) I went to a “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring the Kearny Mesa Concert Band, an estimable ensemble that is organized under the auspices of Mesa Community College – though you don’t get college credit for being in it. They were founded in 1972 and originally were a fully accredited music class at Mesa College, though in the mid-1980’s they transitioned from a Mesa College music class to a “continuing education class.” Their current music director is Richard Almanza, who led the group since 2016, and along with him there was a pudgy young man (a boy, really) who helped with the sound check. The concert opened with “An American Fanfare” by Rick Kirby, and then Almanza announced the next piece – “Chorale and Shaker Hymn” by John Zdechlik – and challenged us to name and recognize the familiar tune on which the piece was based. Well, the moment he said the word “Shaker” I knew what it was going to be even before he and the band started playing, and I was right. It was “The Gift to Be Simple,” which Aaron Copland not only set for voice and piano as one of his “Old American Songs, Volume 1” but used as the main theme for his 1943 ballet Appalachian Spring. After the piece was over Almanza asked if anyone in the audience had known what the piece was called, and the only hand that went up was mine. The piece itself is cleverly written and the variations on “The Gift to Be Simple” manage to preserve the song’s titular simplicity and not go too far afield (Zdechlik’s inspiration was clearly Copland, not Ives!).

The next piece was an arrangement of movie themes called “Lights, Camera, Action!,” though it’s not the piece of that title that came up when I did a Google search; the piece that Google listed was drawn from recent films exclusively while the one the Kearny Mesa Concert Band played also touched on the classics, including the big theme from Gone With the Wind and “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca. Almanza and company followed that with what they introduced as the big orchestral prologue to the 1961 film West Side Story (“the good one,” he added rather snippily, dismissing Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake – I’d long thought the way to update West Side Story for the 21st century would have been to keep the Sharks Puerto Rican but make the Jets Black so it would become a story of Black vs. Latino gang wars, but Spielberg and his writer, Tony Kushner, alas didn’t go there). I haven’t seen the 1961 West Side Story in well over a decade (and I’ve never seen Spielberg’s at all!) and so I can’t say for sure whether the piece of music the Kearny Mesa Concert Band played last night was the opening overture or just yet another medley of Leonard Bernstein’s songs for the show, but it was quite appealing. The next piece on the program was “Fantasia,” a set of variations on the old song “Lady of Spain” by a composer named Tolcart Evans; once again, I suspect I was the only person in the audience who recognized the tune the “fantasia” was based on, but the piece itself sounded fun even though there weren’t any of the trumpet pyrotechnics usually associated with this song (perhaps because this is an amateur band and there probably isn’t anyone in it who can play that sort of thing).

Then the band played its best piece all night, the overture to Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld. Like Rossini’s William Tell overture, it’s one of those pieces that has a hugely popular Big Tune (in Rossini’s case the exciting ride sequence used as the Lone Ranger theme; in Offenbach’s the equally famous can-can), but audiences today are often annoyed because the Big Tune comes only at the very end of the piece. Though some of the blends within the sections were a bit “iffy,” reflecting the band’s status as an amateur organization, the individual soloists were surprisingly good – especially the woman first clarinetist and the man sitting just behind her playing oboe, thoroughly belying Danny Kaye’s and Sylvia Fine’s joke that the oboe is “an ill wind that no one blows good.” I suspect that my old friend and former Zenger’s cover boy Patrick McMahon was in the band as second clarinetist. After the Offenbach Almanza’s next piece, the last on his program (though unlike the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra, the Kearny Mesa Concert Band did not publish a printed program; instead they gave out a flyer advertising their next concert, scheduled for Saturday, September 23, 1 to 3 p.m., also at the Organ Pavilion, with the U.S. and Japanese naval bands, a neat bit of bridge-building between the enemies from World War II!) was a medley of themes from John Williams’ score for Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Anybody who thinks of John Williams as just a guy who cranks out cheaply “inspirational” anthems for big-ticket blockbusters like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, E.T. and the Olympics has another think coming: a surprising amount of Williams’ music is plaintive, subtle and quite emotionally dense.

I remember being shocked when I first heard the E.T. soundtrack album in the late 1980’s after seeing the film for the first time and hearing the moving opening of Williams’ score, an intense depiction of E.T.’s status as literally a stranger in a strange planet. The medley the band played from Williams’ score for Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens last night wasn’t on the level of the magnificent opening of E.T. but much of it had the same plaintive quality, and given how the film fit in to the overall arc of the Star Wars saga (the immediate sequel to Return of the Jedi, in which thse bad guys have regrouped and once again threaten the peace, structure and order of the universe) it’s not surprising that Williams scored it with more emotional complexity than usual for him. The final piece, heard as an ostensible encore, was the “Colonel Bogey March” by F. J. Ricketts, used as the theme from the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, and members of the audience clapped along even though Almanza solemnly instructed them not to whistle. Concert bands were a much more popular form of music a century ago than they are today; in the late 19th and early 20th century only America’s very largest cities had symphony orchestras, so many of the great classical masterpieces were heard only in piano reductions for in-home play (assuming someone in your family knew how to play piano) or in concerts by bands of this type. In the 1936 short film Every Sunday, directed by Felix Feist and co-starring Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin, they play the daughters of a bandmaster whose concerts are no longer drawing audiences, so they hit on the idea of staging a battle between Durbin’s classically trained operatic soprano and Garland’s jazz voice (though Garland actually never was a jazz singer), and together they save dad’s concerts from being canceled due to lack of attendance. Aside from the pleasure of their own playing, the Kearny Mesa Concert Band gave us a nostalgic glimpse into a once highly important form of public entertainment.