A March Craze

The Advocate Brass Band, George Foreman, director,

Gazebo Records .

When John Philip Sousa wrote the “Washington Post March” in 1889 for a ceremony announcing the winners of a student essay contest, he started a craze. It was the age when the center of every town green was its bandstand, and when tobacco companies gave away newspaper-editors cards like baseball cards. Arthur Pryor, the “Paganini of the trombone,” soon penned “The St. Louis Post-Dispatch March”; the noted trombonist Frederick Innes created marches for papers in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New York, and Washington—one-third of his entire musical output; Alessandro Liberati wrote the “Kansas City Star March,” which served as the daily sign-on music for the paper’s radio station until 1958. The fad was not brief: The Louisville Courier-journal got its march in 1961. Altogether, more than a hundred newspaper marches were written. Eighteen of them, all top-notch rousers, are expertly performed on this CD by a band formed in 1987 by the Danville, Kentucky, Advocate-Messenger to reincarnate a turn-of-the-century town band.