(bright uptempo music playing) - We credit Alex Sutherland as being the founder of our band.

And he was one of six buglers at the Charge of the Light Brigade.

And he survived that, obviously.

And then he came to Denver to live and he became really a very central figure in the musical life of this community back in the 1860s and 1870s.

- Denver started out with a bang with a gold rush, but for a long time, it was a little city in the middle of nowhere.

Then the railroads arrived in the 1870s.

And that time, the city decides it needs to celebrate its achievements with a band.

So the Denver City Band is created around 1870 and for every grand occasion, the mayoral inauguration, the dedication of a new park, anything big-time going on in Denver, the Denver City Band is there.

In 1891, it evolves into the Denver Municipal Band, which it is to this day.

And that Band came in very handy during Mayor Speer's term, when he transforms Denver into a City Beautiful.

Transforms the park space, builds that wonderful bandstand at City Park and creates venues in Washington Park, City Park, all around the city.

At that point, we began to have these wonderful concerts, free for the public.

- What the City Beautiful described was really a sense of quality of life.

and was never intended to just be restricted to the physical or built environment.

It was meant to include having beautiful paintings and a rich tapestry, landscapes around you, but also, you know, thoughtful intellectual Chautauquas and places for discourse and wonderful music.

- The Band has had people who had a longevity with the Band.

Henry Everett Sachs conducted for over 40 years.

He was a successful businessman here in Denver, but his first love and his first engagement was music.

He conducted on Broadway before he came back to Denver after years, but he would add strings for special events.

We have a picture of, it's 1912 playing for a New Year's Eve celebration with 12,000 people.

- The band shell that was there when I got there in 1942 was the third band shell that had been in place.

One of them faced south on the land.

The other one was facing, I believe west, but it was out in the lake.

And then this one, present one, hangs out into the lake a little bit.

- The Band went to the San Francisco and St. Louis expositions and played in the early years of the century.

It broadcast via KOA Radio and also the Armed Forces Network to folks overseas.

So a lot of history that way, which is fun in and of itself, just to look back.

- [Narrator] A carnival atmosphere is typical of a summer concert in the park, and the Denver Municipal Band calls upon its trumpet soloist, Mr. Edward Lenicheck to exemplify that atmosphere with the perennially favorite Carnival of Venice.

(trumpet solo) - When I came back from San Francisco, it was the second year.

I came back in '65, the latter part of '65, I think it was the second year, And when I came in, I think that Henry Sachs was doing one of his last concerts or something.

'Cause I don't remember what happened then, But I think Alex Torres, who was the personnel manager had wanted to hire me, if I remember correctly, and Sachs was saying, "Well, not quite yet."

And then the next year, if I remember now, that Ed Lenicheck had the Band.

And that's when I started playing with the Band regularly.

I think it must've been for a couple of years at least.

- The Denver Municipal Band is formed in 1891.

And that's the time of the Great Depression, the 1890 Silver Bust, when the city definitely needs cheering up.

When we're losing population and banks are collapsing, and silver mines are closing, and smelters are closing.

And I think this was a way to cheer up people, get them to look at the brighter side, and at least enjoy music even if you were unemployed, you could go to City Park.

- I think the history needs to assist us by giving the groundwork for us, not just to look back, but to go forward because there's something vibrant about each concert, each setting each night, which still has vitality.

It's had to adapt.

Even the music we play, obviously, as we go through generations, but it's still a vital part of our ongoing civic life.

(band playing) (audience clapping) - A park is everything to a neighborhood.

It is a place where people can actually come out and get away from the stresses of everyday life.

And they can come and just sit in the park and decompress.

They can just get out and enjoy the green space.

Green space helps people heal.

(brass instruments playing) - I can recall more than once, but one night in particular, when I was still playing in the Band, before conducting, I was at Washington Park and the Gates Rubber Company was still in full flow at that time.

And in south Denver, there's numbers of families that the fathers or mothers worked for Gates.

And we would see people coming in after a long day down at the plant, literally, and there'd be the dad and they'd be the mom and there'd be the kids squalling.

They had their box of chicken and they had their, you know, Cokes, whatever, coming in to sit down.

At the end of a hard day, they were like three or four people.

They come to the park, not a concert hall, but the park.

So the kids, bam, they're off to the jungle gym there which is nearby.

Mom and dad sit downs, beautiful Colorado sunset, cools off a little bit.

They have their chicken.

They have their Coke, whatever.

At the end of the night, when they're leaving, you could see the body language, because it's a family, has four people going out, four people coming in like four different individuals, each bringing the day's hassles with them.

But with that total experience, the park, the beautiful sunset, the cooling breeze, and the wonderful healing music.

I mean, Shakespeare "music cures the beast, the weary beast".

It does.

There's this wonderful salve for us.

- To me personally, a highlight of the summer is sitting outside, the fresh air, watching the stars, having a picnic supper, and then listening to the Band, hearing some wonderful classical music live and explained to you, geared to the general population, kind of educating while you see, or refreshing your memories of great classical music pieces.

- You know, I used to hear them in the parks for years at Denver City Park.

I would go by and just think, God, this is a great group of young musicians.

But veterans, and they never charge, I don't understand that.

I think it's the greatest thing in the world.

- You could live in a neighborhood, but you're not talking to your neighbors.

You're not a community.

So that's what park spaces do, is they bring neighborhoods together to make a community.

(audience clapping) - So this is a chance to maybe get away from you and the TV screen, where you actually see your neighbors, get outside and enjoy the bigger picture of what neighborhood life is like in Denver.

And a big part of that is these musical performances.

- When we show up in the park, and the guys are opening the cases and they're taking out the clarinets, the trombones and the trumpets, they're breathing through those horns.

Unlike a physical structure, the Band's life comes alive each night and then goes away each night.

We start playing at 7:30, by 9:15 those guys pack up, the wagon has pulled away.

The park goes to dark, and it's like we weren't ever there.

And so it's a fragile history.

(funky upbeat music playing) - It's hard to imagine this City Park and this pavilion or any of our venues in our parks without the Municipal Band.

I think it was their example that opened the doors for things like our City Park Jazz Series and the connection that people have made with music and the Municipal Band and parks.

(joyful music) (busy one-way street) - There was a saying the Cobb Management Company had one time that says, "teach a kid to blow a horn, and he won't blow a safe."

That sounds pretty corny.

But in real life, once you start communicating with other people without words, and you do that in the arts, when you're playing the trumpet and the clarinet, the flute, it's an individual experience for you all, but you have to coordinate just as much mathematically or scientifically as any other discipline.

And when that happens, there is a pleasure there, which can't be described, but you wanna do more of it, and you wanna get better at it.

♪ Come put your red dress on ♪ Time we were up and gone ♪ I want to take you to the uptown cabaret ♪ ♪ They got a band... - We are at a time in our country in the world where we are having social unrest and we're dealing with issues that have been around for over 400 years.

People are just now understanding that there are communities of color that have been deeply impacted for centuries by inequities, by racial injustices, and music can actually help bridge some of those very, very big gaps.

(opera music playing) - That's something we're talking about so much right now, especially in the context of what's going on in terms of equity and inclusivity and social and racial justice issues.

And I'm really thankful that the group of us that are involved in the Band now are all on the same page with those issues.

And we all care about them deeply and in the right way.

So I have really hopeful and optimistic projections about the future of the band as we grow to meet this moment.

- If it hadn't been for music, I couldn't have survived.

Music was the soul of my existence because the fact that it afforded me a release from my emotions, one thing, because when you take music, I've found very few musicians who take music, have to go to psychiatry.

Music was my psychiatry and music I think will always be.

And I might suggest to youngsters is this, that don't let people hoodwink you into thinking that you can't play, because you can play, if you only play one note.

- The Denver Municipal Band has traditionally sent small groups of our musicians, three to five musicians at a time to visit schools, primarily work with the kids already in their music program to do a masterclass and in-class performance, to run some sectionals or group lessons.

These are really special visits, but when I was a kid and someone would come to our school, it was really a lasting memory.

So, that's a great program that we have.

And now we're branching out our outreach.

In an educational sense, we're looking to do more lasting programs, find schools that are underserved, and see if we can build programs that run for a full semester and year and beyond.

And hopefully permanently, if we can raise the right kind of funding.

- My feeling about the Band has always been this, that it brought together a culture of races, which we couldn't have had, didn't have before.

I know because I was on the other side of the, as I say, the black side of the fence, and it brought those people out and it made the people on the other side of the, which was then Colorado BLVD, made them come in.

So in other words, there was like an amalgamation of two races, and they got together and they started talking, because before, it's very seldom you had blacks and whites talking.

- They're all there bonding together because of that love of music.

And there it is, that glue, literally, in a society which is so fractured.

Every day, it's violence here, or that.

Whether it's racial, or cultural or whatever, it's nothing but this.

And you think, how can these people come together and do this?

And if they do it, shouldn't that tell us this is something of value?

And therefore this is something we should prepare our citizens to do?

- It's going into the schools and playing with the kids.

It's going to the senior centers and making sure that they maintain that connection to a rich cultural life.

It's going out into the rec centers and the parks to make sure that there are free concerts.

It doesn't matter how much money you make, that you get that access to a City Beautiful experience.

You know, you can really live in a really culturally rich, affluent lifestyle.

- In 1985, when the city ended up reducing our funding very substantially, I realized that one of the things that would help the Band was a wider awareness of our history and who we were, as well as what we were doing at that time.

I went back down to the library and it turns out in 1870, the Municipal Band was thrown in jail overnight.

And then the Rocky Mountain News simply said that the Band got miffed about this, and they weren't going to complete the concerts for that season.

(laughing) So hopefully we'll find out how the band got chucked in jail - Denver's history is like a roller coaster ride, the ups and the downs of steep mountains and the low valleys of Denver's economic life.

And the wonder is that the Band hasn't been cut out sometime, but I think the city always thought that music was important.

That even in, particularly in the depressed times, hard times, it was important to have some band music to cheer you up.

Done properly, a municipal band is more than a musical resource.

It's a civic resource.

- The Band has had financial hassles over the years.

The city changed, it grew.

Different forms of entertainment came along.

And at different times, 1985, for example, the Band allocation was cut altogether.

And it was not that the city was against us.

Mayor Pena was the mayor at that time.

It was just that the city was in a situation where, as it has been just a few years back, where there was an extreme financial crunch, and we kind of dropped below the radar.

All of a sudden a city has grown around you.

We have skyscrapers.

The populace is moving west, east and here we are, still playing at City Park in Denver, which a hundred years ago was the hub of town, no longer the hub of the entire metropolitan community.

Well, it turned out that we had a lot of friends who still heard the Band, were aware of the Band, and the uproar was pretty substantial.

Gene Amole was a columnist at that time in the Rocky Mountain News.

It came out, just wanted to know, How could this be done?

How could this go on?

So it was kind of a close call.

- The history of the Band is quite unique.

It's the oldest, continuously existing concert band in the country since its formation in the early 1860s, it's never missed a season.

One thing that sets us apart from some of the other bands in the areas is that we are really strictly a professional ensemble.

We try and have the best players in the ensemble.

It's not a community band in that sense, it's a band for the community.

But we want the community to have the best possible musicians up in front of them, playing.

- The level of musicianship has to be at the highest for the simple reason, because finance, for one thing, rears its ugly head.

You have to pay the musicians to rehearse as well to pay them to play.

If you have to spend a lot of time on rehearsing, the funder is not interested in the hours you spent rehearsing.

He wants to see you out front delivering the product.

We use our rehearsal time very carefully to rehearse new music, or to make a soloist feel comfortable with the ensemble and the accompaniment that way.

- Our group coming to the community in their parks, on their terms, to everyone and engaging them.

That is the core of our traditions.

It's not necessarily just the music, although that's a part of it, but more importantly, the whole experience.

That experience has a truth and importance to the people of Denver and their quality of life for them and their families, that is still truthful.

Parks are truth.

there's an old proverb which says, "never throw anything of value away, until you have something of value to replace it."

So I look at that and I think what's made this Band, or what's made music in our Western world, so vibrant, so successful for so many hundreds of years, really, that we want to make sure that before we let that go in favor of something else, that whatever's going to replace that is something really of value.

(jubilant music playing) - The cost of things now is prohibitive, but the Band, we need the Band.

God, that's the last thing we have in terms of cultural relationship, bringing cultures together.

Get this Band in there.

(soft woodwind music playing) - We are at a real challenge with the Band, because on the one side, there's so much of our traditions passed down from the early 1860s that are the core of who we are.

- The Denver Municipal Band is made up of mostly a whole bunch of white guys.

And that's the reality, but, what's amazing about that is they seem to have woken.

- We understand that our core role is to serve the community and the community is fluid.

It has different needs every generation.

Right now it's a time of crisis and incredible possibility.

Where people, all people, are coming to the understanding that racial equity is absolutely at the core of our survival as a community.

(soft woodwind music playing) ♪ From this moment on ♪ You for me, dear ♪ Only two for tea, dear ♪ From this moment on - Certainly Denver is a city that I think will be defined more by its future than by its past.

So that as rich and as illustrious our past is, I think our true greatness is still ahead of us.

But to do that, to have that potential and that future, you've got to have a strong and firm foundation to build on.

How many cities have a municipal band that's already going into their second century?

- Traditionally, we're a concert band playing a lot of American songbook and orchestral music and brass and woodwinds compositions.

And now we're looking for ways that we can sort of share the stage with other styles of music, which would naturally pull out people from different parts of our community that might not be as interested in joining our concert band, but when it's a chance to share a concert with someone of a different background, different style of music, I think that will be a good chance for us to build bridges, connect with our broader community in a way that we maybe haven't before, and hopefully just pull more and more people into music and arts and culture for free, for whoever can just come and join us and sit down.

- I think relevance is that very precarious, at times, but wonderful balance between knowing who we are, knowing how we serve the community with our traditions, and building relationships with our community to really better understand how we can move forward and evolve in every step of the way, with every concert that we perform.

- They can bridge some of those, those really challenging discussions that we had to have as a city.

Those discussions aren't comfortable about white privilege, about racism, about inequities in our systems.

Those are really, really challenging discussions to have.

They are not comfortable, but they understand that those discussions need to be had, but they can also have those discussions through music.

♪ It's wonderful ♪ It's marvelous ♪ You should care for me ♪ It's awful nice!

♪ It's paradise ♪ It's where I long to be ♪ You make my life so glamorous ♪ ♪ You can't blame me for feeling amorous ♪ ♪ It's wonderful ♪ Marvelous ♪ That you should care for me