Trills, Toots & Oompah-pahs

In recent years, summer music has moved steadily indoors for air-conditioned comfort. But this season more and more Americans are defying chiggers and heat for the trill, the toot and the oompah-pah of old-fashioned outdoor summer band concerts.

Not much has changed. True, the fashion is Bermuda shorts instead of bloomers and Tijuana Taxi instead of Yes, We Have No Bananas. But otherwise the concerts are like snapshots out of an old family album, with folding chairs and blankets on the grass; piccolos and glockenspiels, vanilla uniforms with sundae braid and dangling whistles; waltzes and marches and "special symphonic versions" of Lady of Spain and Ethelbert Nevin's Rosary.

Some summer bandsmen are professionals, but others are amateurs who trade briefcases and lunch buckets for trumpets and sousaphones. The trend is noticeable in several parts of the country, but is especially strong in New England, where Chatham, Mass., draws audiences from Boston and beyond. Winsted, Conn., Rotarians raised $6,000 to build a new bandstand; Lions in Winchester, Mass., pledged their 50-member band a new shell. Boston's new Prudential Center plaza has gingham-covered tables, straw boaters on the light globes and its own Gazebo Band.

Clinkers Can Be Fun. Today's band concert echoes with some new sounds.

A public-address system has replaced the megaphone, and jet planes overhead often add a discordant note. But the grace notes of yesterday still abound.

Conductors lead audiences as well as their bands, local trumpeters still get the spotlight for tremulous solos, people still sing along on Let Me Call You Sweetheart, and somebody is bound to give the bandleader a chance to say:

"I have little Sally Knight up here--Sally would like her parents to come up and get her."

By the time a typical concert ends with The Star Spangled Banner or Stars and Stripes Forever, the clues to its popularity are easy to see. For one, it is free. For another, even clinkers are fun to people who are there as participants, friends and relatives. Moreover, concerts give a town an item of civic pride. "It's a true gathering of the real family life of America," says one mother, who might be quoting The Music Man line: "Gotta figger out a way t'keep the young ones moral after school!" The old find charm in the band-concert tradition and the young often find delight. "It's old enough to be new," says a middle-aged man, and a teen-ager adds: "You can't say just because something was started a long time ago that 60 or 70 years later it's old-fashioned."

One concert backer cited the universal appeal of "pleasant music, outdoors in the "ummertime," but another summed it up more tartly. "We're sick of the 20th century," said he, "we hear it on the radio and TV all the time.

Here there are no commercials, and nobody's worried about acidosis."

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