When I was a kid I joined a music group called the Denver Junior Police Marching Band. We wore little police uniforms and practiced every Monday night in an old warehouse building packed with cops and coffee machines. We would play at all sorts of interesting places, football games, parades, ground breaking ceremonies, ribbon cuttings, inaugurations, and even the rodeo. It was an eye opening experience for a little eight year old. Imagine suddenly being surrounded by sixty other kids from every imaginable background, with a tough old cop named, Mr. Cohen, waving a baton and screaming red-faced, “Sit up straight! I told you to practice! Play it right, god***** before I woop your skinny little asses.” This was usually incentive enough for us to get it right the next week.
After about a year of this, we realized that we could actually play, and were soon graduated up to the next level. There was a ceremony, a police officer added a stripe to our uniform, and the music got more challenging. Mr. Cohen still screamed and turned red in the face, but there was less edge to his voice now, because even he knew it sounded better. I played in those bands until I was sixteen, and Monday nights became a part of life.
Fast forward twenty-five years. “Sit up straight. Play it right! Why didn’t you practice?” I yelled at the band. I banged my baton against the music stand. Everyone sat deathly still. “I’m gonna kick your butts if you don’t start playing it right!”
Welcome to the Taipei Junior Police Marching Band. We practice every Wednesday night, and will soon play at all sorts of interesting places. I’ve gotten to know each of the kids pretty well. We started in October from thirty-five kids who couldn’t read music at all, to a proud marching band with their very own little police uniforms. It’s pretty much the same as I remember, except I try not to swear as much as Mr. Cohen, and everything is now in Chinese. The parents still ask the same questions, “Does the trumpet have to be so loud?” and the kids still do the same things: knock over music stands, forget their music, and kung-fu fight during breaks.
My celebrity friends think I’m turning a bit weird. I guess for them music is about late night partying, TV game shows, and wearing Armani sunglasses at night. I suppose in some ways they’re right. For an “artist” in Taipei, this is the way to mingle with the herd. Unfortunately for them, they never had the chance to play the Cody, Wyoming summer rodeo festival, and watch the wild bull riders fly out of the shoot. They probably never had the experience of playing in front of seventy thousand screaming Denver Broncos football fans, or puking up Slim Jims and Doritos in the back of the bus on the way home. This is a different kind of culture, and a lot of what music is about for me. It’s about the experience of hanging out with a bunch of kids your own age and working towards the same goals, and in the end feeling proud as hell about it.
If I can turn these thirty-five kids into proud little musicians, then maybe someday one of them will grow up to be a famous musician, and say, “Hey, I really loved being in that Taipei Junior Police Band. We would go to all these cool places and play, and Mr. Wall was such a riot. He would yell and scream at us to sit up straight and….”
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