Fountain City crowned NABBA champions

North American Brass Band Association Vice-president Betsy Jones, reports from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Fountain City swept the senior and youth titles

With a record 34 bands competing in five sections, the North American Brass Band Association (NABBA) Championships 2016 was the largest and fiercest banding contest ever held on US soil.

Brass bands have dotted the states and Canada for a century or so, but the popularity of the 1996 film, Brassed Off!, sparked a cult of sorts among university students and aficionados, most of whom had settled for drum corps competitions to get their fix of adrenalin-pumped brass music. Thanks to music sharing in the digital age, the movement has spread to the corners of the Continent.

NABBA began in 1983 with a six-band contest in the coastal state of North Carolina. Nowadays, NABBA is located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, just a couple of hours’ drive from Chicago. Brass bands are understandably popular in the Midwest, where early 20th Century American bands flourished, and where Conn, Bach and 60 other manufacturers located their instrument factories.

The NABBA Championships follow a test-piece, own-choice combination format, with the test-piece weighted at 60 per cent of the final score. Bands pour into the small city on Friday for a solo/ensemble competition. During my flight from Texas, I imagined how cool it would be if we could see a dynamic map, similar to the maps that show all the current air flights in the world as they travel various directions, only our map would show all the tubas in the country converging on Fort Wayne.

The Championship bands perform their test-piece on Friday evening. NABBA bands self-select their section since most are not ranked and, for many, NABBA is the only competition they enter in the year. Lower section bands perform test and own-choice works back-to-back on Saturday for a screened panel of three adjudicators. In the early days of NABBA contests, bands might perform
a march and a programmatic work for their own-choice music, but the heated competition has led to a spiralling level of difficulty among own-choice works. For example…

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Photo: The Fountain City Brass family - FCB Youth and Senior Bands