The British Bandsman talks to Jim Lynch about all things 'Bad Ass', starting with the story behind Bad Ass Brass and see where we go from there.
For several years I’d chatted about the possibility of organising a scratch band for Whit Friday with Mark Frost, Danny Marsden and Andy Greenwood whilst playing in the pit at Wicked in London’s West End. In 2014, we decided we were finally going to do it. By coincidence, I bumped in to trombonist Jon Stokes (whom I know from John Wilson Orchestra) across the road at London Victoria station, and he told me he was also planning a Whit Friday band with some friends out of the eight-piece Bad Ass Brass and the London contesting band Zone One. So, we already had a reasonably large network of people we could start with to form a band.
The eight-piece Bad Ass Brass also had a gig at Dobcross Band Club the day after Whit Friday in our first year, so it was a case of bolting everyone else on around them. For example, Gemma, one of their two saxophone players, was a percussionist with us that year on the street march. We didn’t manage a full band, but we did recruit some very good players that first time out and had some top-ten finishes, which we were delighted with.
Once we were up and running, it wasn’t too difficult to organise logistically in the years following as we had a system in place, but it’s never easy assembling personnel. That said, we have managed it every year since, with many returning year on year saying it’s their favourite night of the year!
We obviously only get to rehearse for a very short time, usually for about an hour in the hotel car park of where we’re staying, and we do both pieces. Amazingly no one nearby has ever complained. One year, we shared our hotel with another band and both bands were rehearsing at the same time with a coach acting as a makeshift sound barrier. It actually worked ok.
This year’s rehearsal was in glorious sunshine and some elderly residents from the sheltered housing accommodation next door came to listen, along with some hotel staff, with all of them applauding as we finished.
There’s usually a small handful of professional musicians in our ranks, although these are commercial and jazz players, rather than experts in how to play a quickstep contest march. That said, they’ve usually played in bands when they were younger and some may have even done Whit Friday as kids. Occasionally, some have never played in a brass band before so it’s really nice to introduce them to the banding world. One colleague came two years running and brought his retired parents with him the second year because he loved it so much. I should point out that the rest of the band have a pretty good banding pedigree, to say the least.
Our aim is to have fun whilst treating the event with the respect this tradition deserves. Sure, we like to make an entrance alright for our jazzy stuff but for the next five or six serious minutes we’re the same as any other band.
Once we’ve covered our travel costs (which have rocketed post-pandemic, have they not?) we can usually donate any prize money we may win to youth music projects, including youth brass bands. In 2022, we got to hear one those youth bands, the Mossley Hollins High School Band, march off before us at Lydgate. The school’s Head of Music and band’s musical director, Steve Beardmore, was able to thank us in person and we had a nice chat about their band which has been going for over fifty years. I’m guessing that most – if not all – in our band would be of the age where instruments and tuition in school were freely available. It’s certainly not the case in most places these days so it’s nice to be able to help in our small way.
It’s great that more and more venues are now including scratch band prizes. It gives us something – and somewhere – to aim for, otherwise it’s just the open section, although we actually topped one of those this year at Uppermill, which was truly amazing. I always thought that, in the right circumstances, this was certainly possible, but the odds really are stacked against you as a scratch band. In the end, our win was by quite a large points margin.
I’d love to do a concert with this band, probably tied in to Whit Friday, by playing somewhere the day before or after. There’s potentially some really interesting material we could do. I think the banding world would certainly find it entertaining.
