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Concerts in the park a tradition
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FarkWhen the day’s work and chores are done, and the business people have left downtown, when the air has cooled and the supper dishes have been put away, it’s time for a little music.
Cars start pulling into Memorial Park about 7:30 p.m., and the drivers pop their trunks and reach inside.
Some pull out lawn chairs, bug spray and blankets.
Some pull out trumpets, spare reeds and sheet music.
They’re here for a Rapid City Municipal Band Wednesday night concert. They are here, in the band’s 88th year, to uphold tradition.
The band doesn’t have to keep playing. The city could find more practical budget items to spend a few thousands dollars of taxpayer money on, perhaps filling potholes. If it ended, the 150 or so people who come here on Wednesday nights in June and July could find something else to do.
Maybe there would be something on TV.
But a simple, ephemeral pleasure like a free concert in the park on a summer night is still worth something here at sunset, with the fading light shimmering through the cottonwood leaves.
“I can’t see that it will drop off,” said the deep, friendly voice of the band, Verne Sheppard, the former KOTA radio man who announces the shows, filling the breaks with music history and Ole and Lena jokes.
“There’s always an audience for music, and there’s so darn many kinds of music and that concert covers about everything. They play music that’s going to keep you happy and talking about it when you get home, and tapping their foot when they’re there.”
Even if there weren’t an audience, this band, it seems, would love to play.
They are joined by their passion for music, but also by the bonds of tradition extending back decades.
Beginning in 1971, the twin conductors were Jack Knowles, Central High School band director, and Milo Winter, Stevens High School band director. Now with Knowles retired from the municipal band, Winter shares the baton with a rotating cast of current school band directors including Central’s Mark Bray.
There are three generations of students and teachers here, sometimes playing as colleagues, sometimes as mentors and students.
Winter navigates the roles with ease. When it’s his turn to sit in the trumpet section, he blends in.
When it’s his week to conduct, he leads practice with authority, and the room full of accomplished musicians seem like teenagers again.
“What do you have marked there?” he asks the band.
“Piano,” they reply in unison, meaning the passage in question is supposed to be played softly.
“Piano? That’s right,” he says. “Why do you play F there forte? Jimminy Christmas.”
While he critiques, he also praises. “Nice job, trombones,” he says after one passage, then starts a round of applause. “That’s good sight reading.”
And there’s encouragement, to go farther, take the music beyond notes on a page and into something that will move the audience.
“That’s very Lutheran of you there, trombones,” he says one night while practicing a medley from the musical “Chicago.”
“You can play that a little raunchier. This is a bunch of babes in jail.”
The band listens, and the Central High School band room becomes a burlesque club.
A high school band is still learning technique, but this group’s music can take you places. If you close your eyes, sitting there in the park in a plastic lawn chair, you’re clogging at an Appalachian moonlight dance, galloping in an English foxhunt, or smoking a long cigarette in a Manhattan penthouse.
Time seems to stop here in the park by the bandshell, as soon as the musicians find their seats, shuffle their music and start noodling around the scales.
On the grass, families spread their old blankets, couples open pairs of creaky lawn chairs, and girls in pink flip-flops dash from the Boy Scouts’ concession stand with hands full of oven-hot chocolate chip cookies.
There are no clocks, no cell phones, no important meetings waiting.
The clarinet sounds the A and the players tune their instruments. By day they are a school teacher, an insurance salesman, a radiologist. Tonight they are an ensemble. The note vibrates out of the bandshell and through the crowd, out to the cottonwood trees that sway above the park, all of it under a billowy, gold cumulous cloud.
As every week, the band starts with the Star Spangled Banner, and the older people in the crowd are quickest to remove their hats and rise. An elderly woman with a poof of white hair, walking in a minute late, stops in her tracks, and sings along in a soft soprano.
Then they pick it up a pace, swinging with “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and then it’s on with the show.
For the next hour, time unfolds at the band’s pace, swinging with Duke Ellington, metered out in a three-movement symphony, holding its breath as a teenaged trombone soloist slides faster and faster.
The sky fades until it is nearly dark, and soon, in the butter glow of the popping machine, a Boy Scout in a green shirt and red tie scoops the last popcorn into a paper sack, a Norman Rockwell character in an Edward Hopper painting.
Chilled air floats up from a rushing Rapid Creek, perfumed by wet weeds and wildflowers.
Then, the finale, same this night as every night, every year: “America the Beautiful,” with cymbals and trumpets and timpani and applause.
“Drive carefully, and we’ll see you next week,” Sheppard says. “Goodnight, now.”
If you go:
What: Rapid City Municipal Band
When: Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. through July
Where: Memorial Park bandshell. Park in the lot by the Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn.
Cost: Free
What to bring: Lawn chairs or blanket, extra jacket for chilly nights, bug spray, and a picnic supper or a few dollars for the Boy Scouts concession stand, which sells popcorn, cookies,
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