Sunshine Brass Band of Tampa Bay

If you'd like get your very own vanity email address to show your band pride, they available immediately and without cost.

Just drop me a line, tell me what email address under @sunshinebrass.com you'd like. You'll also have two options in how it works:

• You can have a totally separate email box from your normal emails -- OR
  
• You can have yourname@sunshinebrass.com simply redirect to your existing email.
  

It's that time of year. President, Vice-President, Treasurer and several "at-large" positions are coming up for election.

New twist: We're going to do an ONLINE ELECTION, so like any other voters, you must register to vote! Create your new account to participate! It only takes a moment, and of course we don't traffic your personal details anywhere. Anyone who knows me knows how I hate it when other do that!

Elections will take place after the Summer Break is over.

You may nominate yourself or others by contacting Linda!

There is growing interest within the band in forming a competition-quality brass quintet.

We don't have to limit ourselves to five players, of course. We are all busy professionals, and will have schedule conflicts and occasional emergencies like anyone else, so it would great to have a pool of 10 or 12 people that we can rely on to serve as alternates for each other. In this way, we will be able to reliably represent that band at EVERY opportunity, rather than just the ones that match five individuals' schedules.

This also means we can mix it up and spread the fun around!

The band is on Summer Break from June 9 to sometime in August. The date of the next rehearsal is not yet firmly settled, but when it is, we'll announce it here.

Don't let your horn grow any cobwebs!

We've been having website troubles. Our first provider (vaserv.com) lost 100,000 webhost accounts on Sunday, due to 24 unpatched vulnerabilities in HyperVM, and they are still down with egg on their faces. I was able to restore all my sites (this one is 1 of about 12) to a similar host from a different company (neosurge.com) within 3 hours. It was operating fine all day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday up until about 9pm last night. Then neosurge.com went down, because they were ALSO running HyperVm.

Title says it all! Full details at NabbaMusic.org. Great job to everyone, especially the Triangle Youth Brass Band, who I believe got a bigger standing ovation than most of the adult bands (and well deserved too!)

Doug Yeo promised at the awards ceremony that he'd have the results on NabbaMusic.org by 1am.

Band members: We are taking two weeks off, so see you at Rehearsal on Monday April 20th!

Yesterday, the members of the Sunshine Brass Band started arriving
at the Hotel Louisville Downtown in preparation for the annual contest put on by the North American Brass Band Association (NABBA). See, they're welcoming us already!

The first day (Friday), as some of you may already know, is the Solo & Ensemble competition. At any given time there are two performances going on, so it simply isn't possible to hear more than half of what's going on! The first order of business is to get to the Registration Desk, get a program and start planning which performers to watch and which to skip.

Don't forget to check for clinics and other presentations. There was one clinician workshop last year that I wasn't aware of until it was too late! I'm not going to let it get away this time (if there is another one!).

Another area I'm looking forward to is the Vendor Exhibit area, which opens at noon and goes to 5pm, and again all day Saturday (9am-5pm). I nearly bought myself a piccolo trumpet last year, but again, wrestled with the notion until somebody else bought it. I can't wait to see if another one is for sale!

Take some cash with you too, to buy the T-shirt, bags, and Audio CD of the other bands!

Due to contest rules, I can't tell you when we are scheduled to play, but I can tell you we have put in some extra rehearsal time to prepare, culminating with one more session tonight in the hotel!

I look forward to meeting our friends and competitors today and tomorrow!

Yours in brass,

Tim Jones, 2nd Cornet

Sunshine Brass Band.

Tampa's own Sunshine Brass Band is tuning up for a championship run. To get the competitive juices flowing, they're putting it before the public in a pre-competition concert on Sunday, March 15, 4 p.m., at Trinity United Methodist Church in Wesley Chapel.

"These competitions help us sharpen our skills," said James Cheyne, the band's Music Director. "We do concerts in the Bay area year round, and we're always striving to do our best, but for an all volunteer group such as ours, the prospect of putting our performance up against other bands from around the country is a bit daunting. It helps us focus."

The North American Brass Band Association hosts annual competitions for bands from all over the continent. Last year, Sunshine Brass took 3rd place in their division, and are looking to improve this year. The competition takes place April 3-4 in Louisville, Kentucky.

We're on FaceBook now. If you have no idea what that means, don't worry: this site is NOT going away! You can always come here and get the latest!

If you are already an avid FB fan, you can join the group and our upcoming events will automatically get posted to your account, the same way as all the other things you have subscribed to in FB. FB has a rich array of notification options, and integration with all sorts of mobile devices, RSS feeds, and lots of ways to contribute comments, photos and even videos.

See you soon!

We have just concluded our Christmas concert season, and are on hiatus until January 5, 2009.

There are two local appearances scheduled for the new year already, plus the annual NABBA contest in April.

If you would like for the Sunshine Brass Band to appear in your venue, please email me (tim@timjones.com or tim@sunshinebrass.com). Our performances are typically 90 to 120 minutes long, family-friendly, and not soon forgotten!