Cue the band

Participating in the band was one of my favorite activities growing up. I played the trumpet, taking after my mother and Chuck Mangione. At my school in Pocahontas, we started band in fifth grade, which was in the elementary school. The band room was in the high school, which was just one block north of the elementary school. It seems crazy in retrospect, but we rode a bus for one block from the elementary school to the band room, perhaps because the two schools were separated by a busy highway and the school district only had so much money to pay for crossing guards.

The first few weeks of band were not much fun because they consisted mostly of practicing scales. Band became more fun as the year went on and we began to play actual pieces. The marching pieces were my favorite because they were up-tempo and because I recognized them.

I don?t recall marching to the marches, though, until we reached middle school, which for us was seventh grade. Playing while you walk can be tricky, not only because you have to work harder to steady the horn on your mouth but also because you have to be cognizant of your speed relative to the other band members ? too fast and you?ll eat a tuba sandwich ? too slow and you?ll be knocked unconscious by a wayward trombonist.

The high school band performed at all the home football games except the last one, at which the middle-schoolers performed their numbers. That was one gig we could have done without. It struck me as especially cruel to make the youngsters perform at the coldest game of the year. It was so frigid that we could barely move, let alone play our instruments. We were lucky to make any noise at all.

Marching band in high school was more challenging because we had to move on the field while playing. I never understood why we made the shapes we did because oftentimes they didn?t look like anything. Our middle school marching band just stood on the field in the shape of the letters P-A-C (Pocahontas Area Community), and that was all right with me.

I was in the jazz band my last three years of high school. The funny thing was that I did not enjoy jazz music that much when I joined. Little by little, it grew on me. I recognized some of the numbers from infomercials such as ?The Girl from Ipanema,? ?Watermelon Man? and Bobby Darin?s ?Mack the Knife.? My favorite piece we performed has to be ?Make Me Smile? by the band Chicago, which had tremendous success in the 1960s, 1970s and even into the 1980s. Chicago was a big brass band that fused elements of jazz with pop and rhythm and blues.

Marching band and jazz band were great fun, but the real highlight of my musical career was performing at basketball games in the pep band. The songs we played in pep band were all very fast, which we liked, and they were all songs we had heard before. ?Wipe Out,? ?Proud Mary? and ?Hello, I Love You,? were some of our standards. And who could forget ?The Final Countdown,? a song that was seemingly written for pep bands?