Dr. Josef Wendel does Baltimore
How I spent my Saturday:
Left to right: the festival's sound woman (whose name I forget; it's a luxury not to do our own sound, and it gets done right), Don Miller (tenor/clarinet...Don's been playing with Joe almost as long as Joe has had a band, which is now over 50 years), Halley Schoenberg (alto/clarinet, our regular sub from D.C., her 3rd time on this gig). Dave (trumpet from U. of Akron...his comment on Joe's arrangements was "Most music includes these things called rests.")
I'm a little conflicted about playing these gigs. The money really isn't worth the hassle, which in this case meant getting up at 4 AM so that I could meet the van leaving at 5:30 for a 12:30-5 gig in Baltimore, getting back home around 1:30 AM. "Too old for this shit" suggests itself, except that most of the band is older than I am. We've been capitalizing the farm like crazy, and Rusty isn't working, and money is money. Mostly I guess it's because I think this music needs to survive, and euphonium players don't grow on trees. One of these days Joe will die, or I'll die, and that'll be that.
(7/18/07: edited at the request of Dr. Josef Wendel.)
Comments
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: July 30, 2006 09:41 PM
It must mean something when the name of the organizing organization (did I really type that?) is longer than the name of the event it is organizing.
And it was a crashing comedown to have the event name in English. Couldn't they call it DeutschesFest? Or SommerFest?
"The German Festival" sounds like something we would have done in sixth grade for a school fair.
Posted by: Arnold J. Inzko
Posted on: April 28, 2007 09:41 AM
Hi Joe,
Did I find the right Joe Wendell from East Cleveland? Do you remember when we took a math course together at John Hay Evening School? If you are the same person e-mail me. If you are not the same one, tell me that you are not.
Arnold J. Inzko
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: April 30, 2007 04:00 PM
I wouldn't know, because I'm not Joe Wendel. But this Joe Wendel would have gone to HS in the early 50s, I think; he started his band in 1956 if memory serves. He was in Cleveland (from Austria) but whereabouts exactly, I couldn't say.