Last week there was one competitive marching band festival in the entire state of Illinois; this weekend, there are more competitions than you can shake a stick at. For a complete list, please see our temporary marching band cover page, here.
A logo created by 2 students was posted on the school’s website earlier this month.
One that caught our eye, though, in terms of its newsworthy quality, is the Jamboree at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Palos Hills. Sure, the festival’s about twice as big as it was last year, and it features last year’s champion from Illinois State University’s huge competition and the only marching band named Grand National Champion by the Bands of America organization seven times. No other band is even close to hitting that mark.
That would be Marian Catholic High School from Chicago Heights, a perennial high performer at Stagg’s Jamboree. To give you an idea how far back Stagg and Marian Catholic go, when I was in high school, back in the early 80s, Marian Catholic marched at Stagg. They scared us to death, achieving things with consistent precision that we really had never even heard could be done on a marching field. And don’t even get me started about the music.
I think the main idea was that as hard as we worked on our show, as good as we thought we were, we never achieved a score even close to Marian Catholic. Scores aren’t really all that important after more than 30 years, but the lessons you take away are. Just to know and see with our own eyes that something greater was possible was humbling and inspiring, especially since Marian’s kids had no more raw intelligence or ability than we had. For that lesson, I’m indebted to a former band at Marian Catholic High School.
But in addition to the national powerhouses, Stagg’s competition has also kept a soft place in its heart for programs that might be considered “up and coming”: schools like mine that don’t necessarily attend other festivals but get this one chance every year to march with Marian Catholic and at least one of the Lincoln-Way schools. Only one Lincoln-Way school existed back then, by the way, so for me, the memories of Lincoln-Way aren’t quite as numerous as they will be for kids marching at Stagg this weekend.
But there’s more. Stagg’s band last weekend had a rather special homecoming event to mark the school’s 50th anniversary. Band director Bob Mecozzi brought back alumni to march with the band during the homecoming football game, and the whole blast was just one big party, as the Southtown Star reports. And it continues throughout the season for the marching band and the entire music program, starting with the enormous fundraiser known as the Jamboree.
As Dan Balash of Illinois Marching Online put it, Stagg should be “a great day of shows.” Assuming the weather cooperates, the festival kicks off at 3:00 sharp. With more than 20 bands scheduled to perform, it won’t end until about 9:30, but it’ll be worth it, just for those memories we all know will be forming away in the heads of high school musicians. I wonder if they’ll write about them 30 years hence.
Marian Catholic High School, founded in 1957, brings a marching band, the country’s only seven-time Grand National Champion, to a high school marching band competition in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, to a school named 50 years ago this year after the only football star to be inducted into the Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach, to the Jamboree at the Jubilee, if you will, to the very same field on which a band from the school marched in 1981 alongside a fledgling marching band from Victor J Andrew High School, and to the collective and individual memories of thousands of students and other learners. The Marian Catholic Marching Band was and is directed by Greg Bimm, with assistance from Bobby Lambert and Tyler Sammons.
