When we first visited the college and were invited to make our home there, we could not believe our luck. It’s an amazing place –You walk up a tree lined avenue to the main entrance and can immediately see it’s a building full of light, and space. It looks beautifully designed and it has rightly won an award for best public building in the UK.
Inside is even more beautiful, with all the rooms built around two open spaces, the quadrangle and the gardens. It is state of the art, with wonderful facilities that the students perhaps don’t realise how fortunate they are to have the benefit of. These facilities include a fabulous, purpose built performance hall with raked seating that interconnects with and opens up onto a full size dance studio. And this is where we now enjoy rehearsing each week.
Even before we moved in, we knew we had to make the most of this fantastic opportunity that had been handed to us. It was our chance and our incentive to start making some changes and build a band that’s going places and doing things. We wanted to have a future to look forward to and create something that members and audiences enjoyed and wanted to be part of. We also wanted to be able to give something back to the college and what better way than to include them in we were doing?
It started with a redesign of our logo – a day’s “work experience” workshop that we ran with JCC’s tutors, their art and design students and professional Graphic Designer, Glenn O’Connor from Studioworx. The students were fantastic, so creative it made judging very hard and the result is the fabulous new logo we have today.
The new look then proceeded (slowly) to encompass a change in uniform, moving away from always wearing the traditional brass band heavily brocaded jacket, to wearing all black, with a rainbow of brightly coloured ties that are actually rather reminiscent of the traditional bright uniform colours of brass bands the world over (except perhaps the lime green!)
Musically, we realised we wanted to be a bit different too. We’re not of Black Dyke or Grimethorpe’s standards (yet?) - We’re an amateur band, made up of local people, a few of whom are professional musicians, but many of whom are students, teachers, nurses, engineers, accountants etc. - A myriad of hard working people who come together to learn, to make music, to get better and to have fun.
We’re a creative group too and we put on a jolly good show that our audiences enjoy, so we realised that this was where we could shine, this was where we could make our mark... especially with the help of the facilities at JCC and the talents of their staff and students too.
And so begins a serious of innovative, different concerts. They’ve been created by us, organised by us and hosted by us, in what we’ve quickly adopted as our “home.”
We celebrated our launch at Christmas with our first concert “Come Follow the Band,” where we premiered a brilliant new piece, “Waiting to be Reached,” written by our very own Musical Director, Warren Belshaw. One of JCC’s students, Idriss, created a film to go with the piece and 4 of the college’s dancers choreographed and performed a dance during the evening too. It was a great evening and left us on a high, wanting to do more.
Which brings me to tonight! Tonight is the premier of our second concert, “History as You’ve Never Heard it Before.” One might perhaps call it a show rather than a concert. Even more adventurous than our first concert, it features film clips, dancing, singing, African drumming and narration as well as some fantastic brass band music.
It’s not the most accurate or complete portrayal of history, but that would be impossible to achieve in two hours. Rather, it is our own unique take on our world, starting with the dawn of time and featuring music and events that made us laugh; that inspired us; that made us sad; that made us thankful and that made us joyful, glad to be alive and to be able to make music and share it with others.
If you are coming tonight to join us, we hope you enjoy the show as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it and we look forward to sharing more unique events with you in the future.
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