Coronado Concert Band at "Twilight in the Park" August 26: The Band Was Better Than Their Material

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday evening (Tuesday, August 26) I went to the Organ Pavilion again for the third-from-last 2025 “Twilight in the Park” concert, featuring the Coronado Concert Band. I mentioned this to my husband Charles when he returned from work and said, “The musicians were better than the material,” which pretty well sums it up. This was one group that presented a pre-printed program on green paper (though I didn’t get a copy, I saw other people in the audience with them). The concert was titled “From Hollywood to Broadway” – reversing the usual order of those communities – and it consisted mostly of suites from film scores. Four of the selections – The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 film, mostly Harold Arlen’s songs rather than Herbert Stothart’s background score), Titanic (heard here as part of a James Horner medley called “Hollywood Blockbusters”), Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, and Mission: Impossible – were preceded by recorded excerpts from the actual soundtracks, featuring the actors from the movies (or, in the case of Mission: Impossible, the TV show as well, since all the Coronado Concert Band played was the iconic main theme). The concert began with the suite from The Wizard of Oz, which started with Judy Garland’s spoken introduction to “Over the Rainbow” (though not, alas, her singing of the song itself) and then went into “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead,” “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “If I Only Had a Brain/a Heart/the Nerve,” “In the Merry Old Land of Oz,” and an orchestral statement of the great “Over the Rainbow” theme to close. I give whoever wrote their arrangement (the MC, Jack Coburn, mentioned the names of some of the arrangers, but not that one) credit for including the rarely heard verse of “Over the Rainbow” (Judy Garland did not sing it in the film), though as with much of the material the band’s version really suffered from the absence of a singer.

Then the band played the James Horner “Hollywood Blockbusters” medley, which featured a lovely interpolation of the Academy Award-winning song from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On.” Once again, though, we really (I really, anyway) missed a singer in this beautiful song, even though like so many other great ballads (like Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” and Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”) it got so overplayed it became the butt of jokes nationwide. When a real-life excursion boat sank in Florida (luckily, it sank so slowly everyone on board escaped) just as Titanic was ending its theatrical run, a newscaster joked that the passengers knew they were in trouble because they heard the voice of Céline Dion come from out of nowhere. For the next selection the band returned to the Land of Oz with a medley from Stephen Schwartz’s score for the musical Wicked – and of course gave a plug for the upcoming theatrical release of part two of the film version, Wicked for Good. Unlike The Wizard of Oz, I don’t know the score of Wicked well enough to pick out the individual songs that went into their medley, but it was nicely done. Then the band played the main theme from Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Magnificent Seven (1960), itself a “Westernized” remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) – and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve never seen either one of those legendary films. They did a bang-up job on it and also included some of the “Mexican” permutations of it from the original score (since the film is set in Mexico), though I’ve long been haunted by the similarities between its openly heroic brass writing and Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.

Then came for me what was the most exciting and entertaining piece on the program, billed as a tribute to the 1929 film St. Louis Blues. This was a 20-minute short made in New York by RKO, directed by Dudley Murphy and starring the great Black blues singer Bessie Smith. She plays a woman whose no-good boyfriend leaves her for a much slimmer and lighter-skinned woman (Fredi Washington, who also appeared in a 1929 Dudley Murphy short called Black and Tan starring Duke Ellington and as Peola, the young Black woman who “passed” for white, in the 1934 film Imitation of Life), then momentarily returns but only to steal her bankroll before running off with Fredi. The film is the only visual record of Bessie Smith we have, and in John Hammond’s autobiography he recalled being on the board of the NAACP in the early 1950’s when the group located the one remaining copy of St. Louis Blues and planned to destroy it because they thought the film was demeaning to Blacks. Hammond successfully argued that destroying the one extant visual record of one of the greatest African-American stars of all time was hardly an advance for the cause of Black equality, though one frustrating aspect of the 1929 St. Louis Blues was that Smith was dressed in a really dowdy outfit when there are professional photos of her in the stunning fur-lined gowns in which she usually performed. (There’s another film called St. Louis Blues, a W. C. Handy biopic from 1958 with Nat “King” Cole playing the adult Handy, 11-year-old Billy Preston playing him as a child, and Eartha Kitt delivering a stunning performance as the fictional singer “Gogo Germaine” who popularizes his songs.) The Coronado Concert Band’s tribute to this movie was to do a swing arrangement of “St. Louis Blues” that did justice to the song.

Then, alas, the band returned to more standard fare for it and played a suite from Claude-Michel Schönberg’s (not to be confused with the late classical composer Arnold Schönberg, inventor of serial music and the 12-tone row system that, if followed faithfully, ensures that your music will be dissonant and largely unlistenable to non-cognoscenti) musical Les Misérables, arranged by Warren Becker. Les Misérables – or “Les Miz,” as it got nicknamed – opened on Broadway in 1987 after it first premiered in France in 1980 and in Britain in 1985. I was amazed that a musical celebrating the struggles of poor people became a worldwide hit at the height of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency and its open and proud advocacy of the privileges of the rich. Once again, Les Misérables is a score I don’t really know that well – the only songs I recognized were the revolutionary anthem “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and the landlord’s song, “Master of the House” – but, like a lot of the Coronado Concert Band’s music, it was pleasant even though a good deal too brass-heavy. The next selection on the program was a suite from John Williams’s score for one of the many Star Wars movies: Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017). When my husband Charles and I watched Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, as Carrie Fisher’s character declared, “Nothing is impossible!,” I joked, “Look at me! I’m the star of this movie and I’ve been dead for two years! I told you nothing is impossible!” In both The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker Fisher played surprisingly substantial parts even though she passed away early on in the filming of The Last Jedi. (A number of movie critics pointed out the irony that of the three key characters in the original Star Wars, now known as Episode IV: A New Hope, Fisher’s character, Princess Leia, was the only one alive at the end of the cycle – but in fact Fisher is dead and the two actors who played the other leads, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker and Harrison Ford as Han Solo, are still alive even though their characters are dead.) Once again it was pleasant but rather unassuming music, and it was nice to hear the iconic main theme from the 1977 original done in a surprisingly soft and lyrical version in the middle of the mix from this one.

Then came the Lalo Schifrin theme for Mission: Impossible, which was well done enough even though that’s about all we got and I’d have liked an acknowledgement of the recently deceased Schifrin’s career in the jazz world (he was Dizzy Gillespie’s piano player in the mid-1960’s). After that came a surprising selection: a march John Williams wrote for one of Steven Spielberg’s least-known films, 1941, an oddball comedy from 1979 about people in Los Angeles panicking after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and wondering whether their city would be next on the Japanese target list. The film co-starred Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi from the original Saturday Night Live cast and was a major commercial flop (Spielberg’s first), though as I hadn’t known before last night it was also the first collaboration between Spielberg and Williams since the 1975 mega-hit Jaws. For an encore, the band played the lovely song “God Only Knows” from The Beach Boys’ masterpiece Pet Sounds as a tribute to the recently deceased Brian Wilson. Once again I could have used a singer to give us Tony Asher’s heartfelt lyrics, but the band’s arrangement was good and a nice respite from all the shrieking brass playing in the previous film-derived pieces. I wish the Coronado Concert Band would be more adventurous in exploring the literature for concert band, including pieces by American classical composers like Howard Hanson and bandleaders like Frederick Fennell, but overall it was a nice concert and surprisingly well played, especially for an amateur band.