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Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland
Gotham
August 2007
On Sale: August 2, 2007
ISBN: 1592403190
EAN: 9781592403196
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Every fall, marching bands take to the field in a uniquely
American ritual. From the stands, it looks easy. You don’t
see them sweat. For millions of kids, band is more than a
show. It’s a rite of passage—a first foray into leadership
and adult responsibility, and a chance to learn what it
means to be part of a community. Nowhere is band more
serious than at Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana,
where the entire town is involved with the success of its
defending state champion band, the Marching Minutemen. In the place where this tradition may have originated, in
the city that became the band instrument capital of the
world, band is a religion. But it’s not the only religion,
as director Max Jones discovers. After four decades, Jones’s
single-minded devotion to musical excellence has fallen out
of step with a younger generation increasingly focused on
personal salvation. In what his students do not know is his
final season of directing, he has assembled his most
ambitious show ever, for the strongest senior class he has
ever directed. Amid conflicting notions of greatness, the
band marches through a season that starts in hope and
promise, progresses through uncertainty and disappointment,
and ends, ultimately, in redemption. AMERICAN BAND is an unusually intimate chronicle of life, in
all its triumph, disappointment, and drama, in the kind of
community in which most of America lives. It is an
especially timely portrait, capturing as it does the spirit
of the heartland at a time of profound change. If you have
ever been—or yearned to be—part of something bigger than
yourself, you will be rooting for the kids whose voices fill
this book.
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