International bands to bring foreign flavor to festival

By HERB BROCK
Staff Writer

The U.S. government has been working for years to reach a balance of trade. If the feds want to see how to do that, maybe they should take a look at Danville, where trade is as balanced as it gets.

Right now, one of America's major trading partners, Germany, exports such things as beer, brats and VW bugs to the U.S. The U.S. sends computers, chemicals and cotton to Germany. But this summer, each country will be exporting tubas, trombones and trumpets to the other.

Well, it's not really a U.S.-Germany deal. The trading referred to here is limited to two small towns, one in each country.

This June, the Herforst Music Vererin town band from Herforst, Germany, will be performing at the Great American Brass Brand Festival in Danville as guests of the Advocate Brass Band. In July the Advocate Brass Band will return the favor by performing at a festival in Herforst as guests of the Music Verein band. It also will perform at sites in three other European countries.

This band swap is a big deal in and of itself, but it really is just one stanza of a bigger piece. Not only is Danville's brass band going international, but the brass band festival it hosts every June is going global as well.

The Herforst band will be one of six to eight bands from foreign countries that will perform at the festival, which will be held June 9-11. Discussions have been going on with bands from England, Sicily, Denmark, Sweden, Russia and Japan and some of them already have committed to the festival, said George Foreman, director of the Advocate band and founder and chief organizer of the festival.

"We've had some bands from Canada, and they have been wonderful, but it's been primarily a national event," said Foreman. "But we've been talking over the last couple of years about making the festival truly an international event, and we thought the year 2000 and the new millennium and all that would be a good time to do it."

While the foreign bands will help with their own expenses, and Rotary Clubs here and in Europe will also be providing financial assistance, Foreman said the international theme will require more contributions from local supporters.

"The addition of these bands from other countries will increase the cost of the festival by $20,000 or more," he said.

But Foreman thinks the increase in variety will more than match the increase in funding.

"If all we had from now on were the American and Canadian bands, that would be fine. They have provided some wonderful musical moments and overall entertainment to appreciative crowds for years, and will continue to do so," he said. "But I think festivalgoers will really enjoy hearing how brass band music is performed in other countries and seeing the people who perform it, in costume."

Foreman speaks with authority when he talks about how foreign bands play, especially ones from Germany. The Danville-Herforst connection -- and trade accord -- was reached while Foreman was in the midst of "putting out feelers" to Europe in search of bands for his 2000 festival.
One "feeler" led to Glen Wren, a high school friend of Foreman who is a music teacher at a U.S. Air Force base in Germany. During a three-week visit to Europe last summer, during which he checked out several bands in his search for groups to perform at the festival, Foreman and his wife, Dianna, visited Wren and his wife in Germany.

"Glen and his wife lived away from the base, in a little village called Herforst. It's very German, very picturesque and very small, only about 1,000 people," said Foreman.

Despite its size, Foreman discovered that Herforst had its own community band. He found that out because Wren had joined it. He found out also that it was a great band and a definite candidate for being a performer at the festival back home in Danville.

"When we were there, Herforst was having a festival to honor local athletes, one of the many festivals German towns seem to hold at the drop of a hat, and the town band performed at it," Foreman said. "They played in a huge tent that was filled with hundreds of people and lined with tables laden with mounds of brats and sausage and steins of beer. Outside there were carousels. Germans know how to put on festivals."
But to Foreman, the best part of the festival wasn't the food or the fun but the performance of the Music Verein band. The group performed in concert on a stage inside the tent for two hours and the crowd loved every minute of it, he said.

And even when the band was off stage, they occasionally would put on a spontaneous performance.

"At one point, all of sudden some band members gathered in the middle of the tent and started jamming and singing old German pieces. The crowd started singing along and dancing," Foreman said.

"I was wishing I could join them, they were having such a blast," he said. He got his wish the next day when the band members invited him to play trombone with them.

Dressed in a typical German band outfit, including a vest and tie, Foreman played with the band, directed it and marched with it in a parade.

"I hadn't marched in a band since I was in college in the late 1960's," he said. "It was great. As we marched down the street, scores of people from the crowd marched right behind us."

Foreman's German band experience ended on two high notes -- the Music Verein band gave him a souvenir plate as a gift and an acceptance of his invitation to play at his brass band festival in June. In response, Foreman gave the band festival T-shirts and a promise to return to Herforst with the Advocate Brass Band in July.

The Advocate band will fulfill its commitment to perform in Herforst on July 30, just a few weeks after Music Verein will have fulfilled its promise to play at the festival in Danville on June 10 and 11. But the Danville outfit won't be playing just in one place. In addition to Herforst, where members will stay in the homes of local townspeople, the band will be performing in Leimen, Germany, and in towns in Luxembourg, Belgium and The Netherlands in a five-stop concert tour that will last into early August.

Most of the Advocate band will be able to go on the tour, and they will be accompanied by four or five nationally-renowned brass band musicians.

"The band exchange will be really neat, and I think that it will show that the two bands probably have more in common than differences," Foreman said. "Although the Herforst band is older (it was formed in the 1930's while the Advocate Brass was founded in 1987), the two bands mirror each other in the fact they are both community bands, both play the same instruments, both represent the same age range of 14 to 15 on up to early 70s and both have a lot of camaraderie."

But both bands do come from two different countries, continents and cultures, and the differences will be obvious -- and "educational and entertaining," said Foreman.

"Going international was a great experience for me, is going to be a great experience for our band and the Herforst band and will be a great experience for the crowd at our festival," he said. "Just think, the Advocate band has made two trips since it was formed 13 years ago, to Louisville and to Washington, D.C. Now, it will be Germany, Europe and the world."