A frisky spirit makes my trombone sing.”T he thirty-seventh annual concert by the Minneapolis Trombone Choir (MTC) was an exotic and thrilling experience. The performance this past Sunday evening at Judson Church in Minneapolis featured approximately 40 trombone players, some of them alternately switching to euphonium or tuba for several of the works that comprised the evening’s program. The pieces were conducted by Jim ten Bensel, Mike Bratlie, John de Haan, Tom Huelsmann, and Stan Bann.
— Chris Barber, trombonist.
S everal pieces of new music were performed, including Eric Ewazen’s ‘Concertino for Bass Trombone’, conducted by John de Haan, with soloist Derek Crosier and a trombone octet consisting of Neil Baumgartner, Doug Coleman, Zach Friesen, Lauren Husting, Scott Kruse, John Metcalfe, Greg Michnay, and Brian Wistrom. The 11-minute piece begins with an atmospheric chorale section, giving way to more aggressive, virtuosic, up-tempo writing. Crosier’s cadenzas (at 7 minutes and 9 minutes) were heart-felt, luminous things. Beautiful!
J im ten Bensel, who has directed MTC for many years, is a Yamaha trombone artist with Bachelor and Master degrees in music education from the University of Minnesota. He is currently on the faculty of MacPhail Center in Minneapolis, specializing in low brass and jazz combos. As a performer, Jim has toured with Stan Kenton, Henry Mancini, Ralph Marteri, and other bands. Jim currently plays with the Barbary Coast Dixieland Band, the Bella Gala Big Band, and the George Maurer group, among others. As a classical trombonist, Jim was in 1988 awarded ‘Best Classical Brass’ by the Minnesota Music Academy Awards.
S ome 40 years ago I’d received some lessons from Jim (who was then at U of M), and, through all these years, I’ve vividly remembered his engaging teaching methods. I’ve lived away from Minnesota most of the intervening years and have been logistically unable to attend his performances, so I looked forward to Sunday’s MTC concert with much anticipation.
M y anticipation was well-rewarded.
H earing a concert by Jim ten Bensel and his colleagues is a lot like having a heart-to-heart with a good friend. You alternately laugh and get misty-eyed, and, when it’s over, you feel a sort of renewed sense of what matters. Jim’s energy for putting sounds in the air is so genuine—so real—that you find yourself hoping it might linger in the air longer than is physically possible. Hoping.
I attended this event with family members, including my parents who are in their eighties. My dad has always held low brass instruments dear, having played euphonium in high-school band when he was a kid. When I was a child, my dad used to hum/improvise a hidden baritone part whenever a piece of classical music was playing on the stereo. Often, his humming would enable me to hear a part that was actually there in the score but was too colored-over by other, brighter instruments for my inexperienced ears to notice. At other times, his humming would be revealed to be completely spurious—an extemporized harmonizing with whatever else the composer had written. The mystery of how my dad was able to fluently/synchronously impute and hum a part into a piece of music that was unfamiliar to me (and to him?) fascinated me. Was part of what convinced me that music deeply made ‘sense’, despite the fact that it was pure magic.
A t any rate, with all the years of these built-up neuroendocrine ‘triggers’, and with all of us emotionally ‘locked-and-loaded’ just so, the MTC’s inspired performance of ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ from Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’ (well, not just that one, but other works on the program as well) proved more than sufficient to raise tears in the eyes of many in the audience, particularly us once-and-future brass-players. The MTC’s powerful transgenerational evocation of what music has meant to us—to each of us, throughout our lives, separately and together—was most welcome, handkerchiefs and all.
M inisters and priests, take note: the acoustic persuasiveness of 40 low-brass players pouring their hearts out in a modest-sized church sanctuary is a spiritual force to be reckoned with, one not unlike that of the world’s great cathedral pipe organs.
T he MTC encore (Meredith Willson’s ‘76 Trombones’) was icing on the proverbial cake for the enthusiastic 150+ lovers of brass ensembles and low-brass in attendance. Bravo!
- Jim ten Bensel website
- ten Bensel faculty page at MacPhail Center for Music
- Eric Ewazen website
- Eric Ewazen faculty page at Juilliard
- Judson Church, Minneapolis
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