The Aiken Concert Band has provided six decades of music for the community

In the winter of 1960 eight amateur musicians gathered in a hangar at the old Aiken Airport for their first rehearsal, burning paper in a potbellied stove to keep warm and creating a concert band that has made music for the people of Aiken across more than six decades. Now the Aiken Concert Band comprises more than 80 players, including octogenarians and college students, retirees and working moms, music teachers and their protégés, engineers and physicians, amateur musicians and professionals. As it has since its inception, the band provides a way for many to keep playing their instruments after high school or college.

“When you leave school the opportunity to continue the recreation of performing in a musical organization is no longer available. There is a great deal of talent and experience in the musical arts that is lost after leaving school. The band affords an opportunity to continue,” an unnamed member was quoted as saying in a February 1962 article in The Aiken Standard & Review.



“Just because band ends in high school, it doesn’t mean you have to stop playing. This is the perfect outlet for that,” said Blake Allen, leader of the French horn section, after a recent rehearsal. “I teach my kids that you don’t have to put your instrument away when you’re done with school,” said Heather Rhodes, band director at Horse Creek Academy and president of the Aiken Concert Band’s board.

She’s played in the trombone section since 1999. Todd Jenkins, the group’s music director and conductor, estimates there are 10 current or retired band directors playing in the group. “There’s a bunch of other folks who either have music degrees or studied music through college and then went on to do other things,” said Jenkins, who is director of instrumental studies at USC Aiken.

As a result, the band is able to play challenging music. Kent Hannibal first played with the band in 2014, just days after moving to Aiken from Los Angeles. A retired high school band director with a master’s degree in percussion performance, he played in the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra for 43 years.

“I really had no idea who was in the band, what kind of people were making up the band, but I could tell immediately that this was a pretty high level of playing for what you would think of as a community band,” he said. “You could tell immediately there were a lot of really good players in the group.” “Once I got here and I kind of understood a little better the lay of the land, I thought, yeah, this makes a lot of sense, because Aiken is full of lots and lots of engineers and professional people like doctors and attorneys and people like that,” Hannibal said.

“These are really bright people that still want to play, which I think is just amazing. I think it’s wonderful,” he said. The band’s founding members all worked at the Savannah River Plant, including Kris Gimmy, a 30-year-old DuPont Co.

research engineer who played trumpet. He and other musicians from a February 1960 Aiken Playhouse production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera “The Mikado” began rehearsing concert band music together soon after in the frigid airplane hangar. In August 1960 a notice in the newspaper sought other interested players for twice-monthly rehearsals.

Two months later they played “stirring patriotic music” at a Boy Scout Round-Up in the Aiken High School football stadium. At the end of the year the group presented a concert of Christmas music, accompanied by vocalists, at Aiken Junior High School. Gimmy conducted.

The group then provided music at picnics, the Veterans Administration hospital in Augusta, the Miss Aiken Pageant and other civic functions, presenting its first formal concert as the Aiken Concert Band on March 19, 1962. By the next summer there were 30 players in the band, but by 1967 they were again advertising in the paper seeking members. “In the late ’60s, it kind of fizzled out,” said Jennie Thomas, who plays clarinet in the group and serves as the band’s historian.

In 1972 Roger and Barb Rollins moved to Aiken. Roger worked for the Department of Energy at the Savannah River Plant, and Barb had just completed a master’s degree in instrumental music education. “Coming here and seeing that all these people who were educated and worked out at the plant, and a lot of them I knew played musical instruments and there was nothing for them here, so I just put out an article in the paper, and I think the radio interviewed me, and people just started signing up for it and we went for it,” Barb said.

In 1974 they began rehearsing once a week in the original Aiken Community Theater building on the corner of Price Avenue and Two Notch Road. “There was no air conditioning,” she said. “Everybody had to bring their own music stands.

We had nothing.” They did, however, have a steamer trunk full of sheet music. “Kris Gimmy, he had a trunk full of music, and it was concert band music and so they gave that to us and that’s what we played for the first couple of years because we had no income.

We used that trunk load of music.” “They were old pieces,” said Rollins, who conducted the band through the 1970s. One of those pieces was a medley of songs from the Broadway musical "South Pacific.

" The band still plays it today, from the same pieces of paper. In 1976 they registered with the state of South Carolina as the Aiken Community Band, a nonprofit corporation “to engage, organize, and perform concerts for the community.” “Roger did all the legal stuff.

If all the legal stuff hadn’t been in place it wouldn’t still be going. He did all that,” Barb said. “I’m just glad that I was a part of initiating it, but it wasn’t just me.

It was a joint effort between the two of us.” By the early 1980s Rollins was focusing on private instruction and working with school bands. Other conductors then led the Aiken Community Band, including Penny Bagwell Johnson, Don Milford, Joe Lorenza and Alex Henderson.

“We have had great conductors,” said Dr. Jim Boehner, who has played trumpet in the band since 1986. “We’ve been very lucky with our conductors.

We’ve had the top conductors of the top military bands.” The first of them was Col. William E.

Clark, who had been commander and conductor of the U.S. Army Field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus from 1979 until his retirement in June 1991.

After 8,510 performances in 50 states and 12 foreign countries, he became director of bands at USC Aiken and conductor of the Aiken Community Band. “He knew how to get things done and he was a good guy,” Boehner said. “He truly had a love of music.

He was good at organizing and he was a great leader.” “Bill Clark, he not only conducted the band, he directed the band. He built it,” Thomas said.

In 2005 Clark began reducing his conducting duties. Cheryl Fryer, Catherine Rand and Lauren Meccia conducted in the ensuing years. They were followed by Col.

Gary Lamb, who had conducted the U.S. Army Band, know as “Pershing’s Own,” from 2000 to 2005.

It was during his tenure that the band’s board changed the group’s name from the Aiken Community Band back to its original name, the Aiken Concert Band. Lamb left in 2009. Ryan Westberry conducted the group through the Christmas concert in 2014.

Jenkins’ audition included guest conducting a piece at that concert, and he became conductor in 2015. Clark, however, stayed involved with the group, playing in the trumpet section. “Colonel Clark, for one season or maybe two, played third trumpet in the group.

He hung out and he would play. Man, it was fantastic to have that kind or resource to talk to about music,” Jenkins said. He said the colonels also left their mark on the band’s library of music, which is housed in a storage unit near Midland Valley High School.

“It’s not humongous, but it’s completely walled by shelving and filing cabinets to keep all of our stuff. It’s great,” Jenkins said. “It’s an amazing collection.

The music stretches way back. Col. Clark and Col.

Lamb had been doing this for a long time. They were buying new music, but also making sure the players were exposed to important classics. The library is pretty extensive and pretty varied.

And then of course we have the university library here as well, so we pull music from there,” he said. “We’ve got this really nice partnership with USC Aiken,” Jenkins said. “We’re allowed to use their facilities, and their students are allowed to play in the band, so our music majors get to play in a large ensemble.

That would be difficult for us without the Aiken Concert Band.” “It’s really a mutually beneficial relationship for the two organizations,” he said. A verbal agreement from the late 1980s allowing the band to rehearse at USC Aiken and allowing USCA students to use the band’s percussion equipment was formalized in a written memorandum of understanding in 2007.

The band, which plays a free concert at Hopelands Gardens each summer and performs three ticketed concerts per year at the USCA Etherredge Center, agreed to contribute half of its net proceeds to the university. “The Aiken Concert Band provides quite a bit of scholarship money for the university, and helps me acquire equipment and music. It’s a financial blessing for USCA for sure,” Jenkins said.

The band’s relationship with USC Aiken has long been cooperative and symbiotic, said Katherine Bryant, a retired band director who taught in many Aiken County schools and was adjunct professor of music at USCA. She has played in the band on and off since the mid-1970s. “It was a two-fold situation, because it gave adults in the community the opportunity to have a place to play, and then gave students the opportunity to have a larger ensemble to play in, where they could play full arrangements of the music instead of simplified stuff.

” Pianist and percussionist Isaac Parks first played in the band in 2014 at age 16. He’d played in Barb Rollins’ AAA Homeschool Band and the Aiken Youth Orchestra, but never in a large ensemble. “I remember it being awesome.

The size of the ensemble was much larger, and the sound of everybody playing together was really, really cool,” Parks said. At age 18 he attended Berkeley College of Music in Boston and graduated in 2020, moving back to Aiken to work, compose his own music and play in the Aiken Concert Band. “It’s enjoyable.

It keeps me engaged. I’m always happy to be a part of it,” Parks said. He said that despite his training at one of the preeminent music schools in the country, “some of the pieces are still pretty challenging.

” Boehner agreed, remembering a spring 2023 concert in which he played piccolo trumpet in a duet with Jenkins on Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto for Two Trumpets.” “It was a stretch. I had to build up my hands.

I had to build up physically to play it,” Boehner said. “My goal is to continue to program music that is more and more challenging for the band while still being stuff that the audience wants to hear,” Jenkins said. Jenkins said the performed music is ephemeral, a fleeting experience shared in time by the musicians and the audience.

“I think the definition of music is that it’s an art form of sound in time. The piece is in time while you’re doing it. There’s a pulse and a beat.

But then when its time is over, it’s gone. It's not like a painting or a sculpture that continues to exist. Every performance of a piece of music stands on its own,” he said.

He said the reward for the musicians is in the playing. “Even amongst the arts, performing music stimulates the brain in a unique way, because it requires all your motor skills, it requires your concentration and your memory, and all these things are working together and it really just lights up the brain like nothing else,” Jenkins said. “Music is both extrinsically and intrinsically beautiful.

It’s a worthy pursuit. It is something that people can do their entire lives.” The Aiken Concert Band’s next performance is a concert of Christmas music scheduled for Dec.

3 at 7:30 p.m. in the USCA Etherredge Center.

Tickets are $20. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit aikenconcertband.org.

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