The Kauai All Island Ku Kilakila Band capped a four-day band camp Wednesday evening at Vidinha Stadium in Lihue. All 300 members marched together for the first time, with Kauai High School band director Larry McIntosh looking on.
Tough love greets
Kauai bandThe group prepares for its
participation in the Rose Parade
LIHUE >> Kauai High School band director Larry McIntosh alternately looked stern, disgusted and perplexed as he wended his way through the stands in Vidinha Stadium Wednesday afternoon.
The Kauai All Island Ku Kilakila Band is very much McIntosh's creation. Patched together this spring with student musicians from all three of Kauai's public high schools, the band was created for the sole purpose of marching in the 2005 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., on New Year's Day.
Wednesday, McIntosh was being, as his students describe him, "a bit scary."
The brass instruments were in one section of the stands, the wind instruments in another and the drummers were outside the stadium. That morning, the drummers had spent three solid hours working on nothing but stick technique.
"No, no, no, that's too fast," he growled at an assistant. "You can't march to that tempo."
"We're not even close to where we need to be," McIntosh said as he shook his head. "Right now, I'd be happy if we can get just one group in a block and keep the lines straight."
Wednesday was the fourth and final day of the first band camp.
It also was the first time all 300 members of the band tried to march together at the same time. No drill sergeant could have looked more fierce than McIntosh as he paced up and down the ranks.
But if he was scowling on the outside, McIntosh was grinning on the inside.
"These kids all know 'Mr. Mac' is not loose with compliments. If I actually told someone they were excellent, they would think I was lying," McIntosh laughed -- but not anywhere near the band.
For McIntosh, the appearance of the Kauai All Island Ku Kilakila Band in the annual Tournament of Roses Parade will be the grand finale to his career.
McIntosh plans to retire after the next school year, his 40th as band director at Kauai High School. For the past 18 years, he also has done double duty as band director at Kauai Community College.
Perhaps his most impressive feat has been selling the Tournament of Roses Committee on inviting an all-Kauai band that didn't even exist yet. He piggybacked on the performance of the all-Hawaii band in the 2003 parade in Pasadena.
"The mainland bands are great but they all do the same things, they all wear the same uniforms," McIntosh said Wednesday, obviously repeating his sales pitch. "Here comes this band led by hula dancers in grass skirts and musicians playing traditional Hawaiian music in march time."
The committee agreed to include the nonexistent Kauai band among the 24 bands it invited and on Jan. 1, an estimated 80 million television viewers in the United States and 350 million worldwide will be watching them.
The task is enormous.
For starters, Kauai does not have a tradition of marching bands. Two of the high schools -- Kauai High and Kapaa High -- have small marching bands, but the emphasis always has been on concert bands.
"I have a whole room full of trophies for concert bands, some of them are huge, but not a single one for marching bands," McIntosh said. "Most of these kids -- in fact, most of these kids' parents -- never have seen a really big marching band, except on television."
McIntosh has enlisted many of the volunteers who helped shape last year's all-Hawaii band.
Chief among them was Charles Iwanaga -- a Californian who also teaches marching to the Kamehameha Schools band -- who led the Kauai band through its first complete march routine on Wednesday.
Iwanaga started them with a single step, then two, then four, then eight. Within an hour they were marching together the entire length of the football field. Not the seven miles they will march in Pasadena, but a good start.
Then, there is the cultural aspect.
Kauai's population has three distinct groups: Kapaa, Kauai and Waimea high schools alumni. And the designation stays with Kauai residents for their entire lives.
The Kauai All Island Ku Kilakila Band is the largest social experiment in the island's history in terms of putting students from all three schools on the same team.
Said McIntosh, "This probably will be the most challenging thing most of them do in high school ... maybe in their whole lives."
