Carlton Brass

This year at the Bolsover Festival of Brass (Sunday 1st Oct), the band will be going on a journey to explore Our Towns, Our Bands, Our Heritage, Our History and Our Future.

The programme opens with Jerusalem the hymn of the time when our towns of Carlton, Colwick, Gedling and Netherfield were just tiny rural hamlets six miles to the east of Nottingham.

The dark satanic mills portrayed in the hymn tune and the push for industrial progress mainly that for steam and coal put our towns on the map.

Our soloist is the band’s Principal Cornet Andrew Allison and he plays ‘First Light’ showing the last remnants of pastoral life and the move towards bigger settlements and a changing way of life.

With the arrival of the railways came people and with people came new ideas and one idea of the railways was to have a railway band. So was formed Netherfield Railwaymen’s Band in 1902 or perhaps earlier. To celebrate this we play a specially commissioned piece, The March – Netherfield Flyer.

Composed especially for the band by Geoff Hawley, the march is dedicated to our youthful 94 year old baritone player Ken Dunkin and the Carlton Band Organisation. The organisation consists of Carlton Brass and Burton Joyce Community Brass and at one time had the NCT Band in the same stable.

Our man Ken was a member of the Netherfield Railwaymen’s Band and was with the band when it became Carlton Silver in 1952. Like most in the area Ken was employed by the railways and worked at Colwick Loco sheds, Then the biggest locomotive centre in Europe.

The iconic Royal Border Bridge and the evocative sounds of the train journey hark back to Colwick Loco sheds where these beasts of steam such the Flying Scotsman and other trains running on that line  were maintained and repaired by men such as Ken.

The swinging sixties and all the modernisation and phasing out of steam power taking place saw the gradual  demise of the loco sheds in Colwick. So in Ticket to Ride you hear plenty of hissing and puffing and then finally the steam train grinds to a halt marking both the end of an era and new beginnings.

To round off the programme, the band plays ‘New Jerusalem’ a place where we hope to move on, keep Carlton Brass alive and going forward. The piece features an off stage cornet part once again played by Andrew Allison, who played this in the Royal Albert Hall when the NCT Band were in the National Finals.

Hopefully you enjoy this journey through ‘Our towns, our bands and our history,  our heritage and our future’.

Playlist

Jerusalem –   Hubert Parry arranged  S Herbert

First Light – Ben Holling ( Cornet Solo featuring Andrew Allison)

Netherfield Flyer –  Geoff Hawley

Royal Border Bridge ( from Three Impressions for Brass) –  Arthur Butterworth

Ticket to Ride –  Lennon/McCartney arr Fernie

New Jerusalem – Phillip Wilby