And the Long Beach Municipal Band Plays On

Imagine a time before iPods, CDs and radio shows, when the family cast about for entertainment on a hot summer night. Forget TV; there wasn’t even amplified sound back in 1909, when the Long Beach Municipal Band struck up a song for the thousands who flocked to their concerts.

“It’s a storied band and one of the few municipal bands in the country,” said an admiring Michael Montgomery, a euphonium player in one of the nation’s other city-funded groups, the Naperville Municipal Band in Illinois. “One of its conductors, Herbert L. Clarke, was among the best trumpet players of the last century. He played with John Philip Sousa’s band, and Sousa was like the Elvis Presley of his time.”

Nearly 100 years later, the 40-piece Long Beach Municipal Band remains on the city’s payroll, still drawing up to 10,000 residents a week to its summer night concerts -- a mix of jazz, Americana and show tunes belted out at parks across the 50-square-mile city.

It’s “Music Man” meets Hollywood Bowl, but free.

“I’ve been coming here for 30 years,” said Barbara Strong, tapping her sandal to the band’s beat on a recent evening at Marine Vista Park, three generations of family dining around a picnic spread. Strong had walked to the park and gathered with her daughters and infant granddaughter, neighbors and friends, some of whom drive each week from Fullerton.

“It’s a throwback to a simpler time, a feeling of a small-town community that you don’t find very often,” observed Mike King, an aerospace engineer who for 10 years has walked or pedaled to the Thursday night shows at the edge of Marine Stadium. “I love it. We usually ride bikes because its impossible to park.”

This summer’s band season winds down this week with Broadway show-themed concerts tonight at Los Cerritos Park, 3750 Del Mar Ave.; Thursday at the patch of park fronting Marine Stadium, at 5255 Paoli Way; and Friday at El Dorado Park, 2700 Studebaker Road, at the corner of Willow Street. Tuesday night shows have been divided between Bixby and Whaley parks.

Because El Dorado Regional Park has plenty of parking and is situated near the San Diego and 605 freeways -- and because the shows are Friday nights -- it draws the biggest crowds by far, conductor Larry Curtis said. Sometimes more than 6,000 people will unfurl their blankets and anchor their spots with lanterns and ice chests hours in advance.

“Every concert at every park attracts a wonderful cross-section of Long Beach,” he said. “And that is really part of the history and tradition of this band.”

Since its start, the Long Beach Municipal Band has remained a constant in the state’s fifth-largest city, holding together for hundreds of shows annually through World War I, the Great Depression, the 1933 Long Beach earthquake that leveled much of the downtown and World War II.

Montgomery, the Illinois brass player, said municipal bands are a throwback to another time, when communities cherished their bands. States such as Illinois and Iowa still have band laws on the books that allowed levying of property or sales taxes to finance such bands, he said.

And from the beginning, Long Beach has continued to publicly fund its band, although periodically when budgets get tight some in the community call for its privatization.

By the late 1970s, after passage of Proposition 13 drastically cut property tax revenue to governments, the Long Beach Municipal Band’s full-time schedule of more than 500 concerts a year was reduced to a summer season, said Curtis, the band’s historian.

In response to a city budget shortfall that was then more than $100 million, Long Beach in 2004 and 2005 cut the number of concerts from 32 to 24. But a better financial picture allowed the band to return to its 32-show schedule.

With a budget this year of $400,000, the band has put on four concerts weekly -- Tuesdays through Fridays -- over eight weeks. Private companies and other public entities such as the Port of Long Beach and the city’s gas utility, also have contributed money, records show.

The 40 band members are part-time city employees who have benefits and for whom the city pays payroll taxes, said Curtis, who was the Cal State Long Beach Band program director for 25 years before he came to the municipal band in 1993.

Curtis, a percussionist, has performed at Lincoln Center and appeared in movies including Disney’s “Hidalgo.” The municipal band members also work as recording studio musicians, in jazz orchestras and in groups such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Such well-known singers as Natalie Cole have performed with the band over the years.

At Marine Stadium last week, audience members perched on jet skis or crammed onto the waterfront green lawn planted in the middle of a grove of palm trees. Many had brought their own meals for the two-hour show, but food stands sold hot dogs and snacks.

The show opened at 6:30 sharp with Curtis welcoming the crowd, including 50 or 60 boaters moored just off the rocky shore, where a speaker pointed out toward the bay.

“L.A. may be the entertainment capital of the world, but Long Beach is the band capital,” he said to whistles and whoops.

The national anthem was especially moving on the same night of the announcement out of London that a terrorist plot to blow up U.S.-bound planes had been aborted.

“It’s beautiful,” Charles Scull, 82, said quietly, sitting back down in his webbed lawn chair behind a giant speaker near the bandstand. Arm still placed over his heart, the retired Safeway grocery truck driver said he has been enjoying the concerts for the 30 years that he’s lived in Long Beach. “Wouldn’t miss it.”