Despite deluge, GABBF declared ‘great festival’

By HERB BROCK
Staff Writer

The 14th edition of the Great American Brass Band Festival was a biblical as well as a musical event, or at least that’s the way it appeared to Chairman John Albright. At several points during the festival, Albright may have felt like double-checking his program to see if an additional band had showed up — something with Noah’s Ark in its title. After watching off-and-on showers Friday through Sunday, you couldn’t blame the GABBF chairman for wondering if he was seeing at least one band mount a stage in twos.
“You want an overall assessment of the festival? Let’s go over there to that mud hole and roll around in it for a while,” said Albright with a chuckle this morning as he oversaw crews removing the last pieces of equipment at Centre College.
The rain — a total of more than 3 inches, according to The Advocate-Messenger weather station — played havoc with the festival. It forced the cancellation of the hot air balloon race and cut down on attendance, at least to some degree.
At one point, it looked like the wet stuff might be the only souvenir that festivalgoers were going to be able to take away. The souvenir tent closed up shop briefly Saturday while several inches of standing water had to be pumped from the area, Albright said.
Despite the deluge — one not seen since the 1994 festival — good music and great fun shone through the rain clouds most of the weekend to produce another “great festival,” Albright said.
“All in all, I’d say things went very smoothly and, most importantly, I think the people enjoyed the event,” he said.
He gave high marks to festivalgoers for their resilience in braving the elements.
“A lot of people left during the downpours, but many stayed, and most of those who left came back as soon as the rain stopped,” Albright said. “It says something about these people and about the festival.”
Speaking of wetness of a different variety, the GABBF chairman said he heard of no incidents related to the drinking of alcoholic beverages. Danville police and state Alcohol Beverage Control agents reportedly were going to be closely monitoring the festival for drinking. This weekend’s event was the first festival held since Danville enacted an ordinance allowing the sale and public consumption of alcohol in large restaurants. Albright said he is “not a numbers person” and wouldn’t make an estimate of the attendance for the three-day event. But he said that, despite the bad weather and the cancellation of the hot air balloon event, the turnout was “on par with many of the festivals we’ve had in the past.” Estimates of overall attendance at several of the past festivals have been in the 30,000-35,000 range with highs in the low to mid 40,000 range.
“The way I measure attendance, at least here (at the main festival venue at Centre), is to see how many green patches there are. For the picnic Saturday night, there started out to be a few patches, but most of those were filled as the evening went on,” he said. The biggest single crowd at the three-day event is for the picnic, and estimates of several in the past have been in the 15,000-18,000 range.
The parade late Saturday morning went off in dry conditions and drew a large crowd, Ablright said. Not long after the parade, the first major rain of the festival hit.
Some “new twists” this year seemed to work, Albright said, including the new “band buddy” program in which staff members were assigned to each of the 16 or so visiting bands.
“We heard lots of positive comments from the bands,” said Albright of the program. The buddies were “custom-tailored” to each band, helping them with everything from arranging meals to transportation. “We hope to build on that next year,” he said.
While most of the anecdotal evidence Albright has collected has pointed to another successful festival, a more detailed account will be provided when the GABBF committee meets to review expenses and donations. The committee ended last year’s festival $60,000 to $65,000 in the red. The overall festival budget is $200,000-$250,000.“One of our goals is to wipe out the deficit and get to the point where we have a cushion,” said Albright.
One of the ways the committee was able to trim costs this year was to cut expenses associated with visiting bands in half, from $90,000 for the 2002 event to $45,000 this year. The committee was able to reduce some of the expenses by using several bands, such as those associated with the Salvation Army, that do not require compensation and whose only expenses involve transportation and related costs.
“While we are looking at ways to cut expenses, we are not going to shortchange the public on the quality or variety of bands. I think you saw this year that the quality and variety were as high as always,” Albright said.
Planning for GABBF 2004 will begin almost immediately as the committee soon will be working hard on raising donations and booking bands.
“We want our budget and bookings to be set as early as possible in the process of planning for next year’s festival,” he said. “We want the only thing we have to worry about when festival time arrives being the weather and, of course, you can’t control that, like we saw this year.”

This story ran in the Advocate on June 16, 2003.