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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT NOVEMBER 30, 2023
YOUROBSERVER.COM
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The award-winning Canadian Brass quintet returns to Sarasota with a holiday concert Dec. 4 at Sarasota Opera House.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BRASS
The award-winning Canadian Brass quintet has strong Sarasota ties.
MONICA ROMAN GAGNIER ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
W
hat? You’ve never heard of Canadian
Brass?
That’s OK with Chuck Daellenbach, the sole remaining founding member of the award-winning ensemble formed in Toronto in 1970. You’re still invited to the band’s holiday concert Dec. 4 at Sarasota Opera House.
In fact, you’re exactly the kind of person Daellenbach, who comes from a long line of German and Swiss musicians, wants at his concert. One of the reasons Canadian Brass has attracted a cult following during its half-century in existence is that it happily talks with the audience and makes jokes during its concerts. With a Ph.D. from Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, Daellenbach could have easily ended up in a conservatory teaching music. Instead, he and his fellow band members travel the world educating and entertaining audiences about brass. Daellenbach recalls how at one of the band’s early concerts, one member of Canadian Brass came out on stage carrying a piccolo trumpet, which is roughly half the size of the standard instrument. “You could hear everyone in the audience thinking, ‘What is that?’ They didn’t have to wonder for very long because we explained it to them,” he says. When Canadian Brass was first starting out, it was criticized in some
IF YOU GO Canadian Brass Holiday Concert When: 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 4 Where: Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave. Tickets: $35-$85 Info: Visit SCASarasota.org.
quarters for engaging in banter about brass with the audience. Fifty years on, the band’s official bio notes that it takes “pride in seeing the entire concert world embracing engagement as a fundamental element of performance.” The Sarasota concert of Canadian Brass will be a homecoming of sorts. The band’s roots here go back at least four decades, and former member Ronald Romm lives here, Daellenbach says. Another former band member’s parents used to live here, he recalls. Daellenbach was on the road during
his telephone interview and the connection wasn’t always good, so it was hard to pin down all the ties the band has to the area. Suffice it to say that even if all roads don’t lead to Sarasota, a few of them do for Canadian Brass. The first time the band came to Florida’s “Cultural Coast” was around the time it first played Carnegie Hall, which was back in 1980. “Our horn player’s parents had a place in Sarasota, and we thought it would be good to go down there,” Daellenbach says. But spending time in Sarasota wasn’t the only thing that happened to the band after it played Carnegie Hall. “We basically got the music world’s seal of approval by playing there,” Daellenbach says. In a 45-minute phone call that was interrupted and then resumed a couple of hours later, the word “luck” was mentioned by the Canadian Brass stalwart at least five times. SEE BRASS, PAGE 2