St. Margaret of York '09 & More

This Friday night (Aug 7) marks our annual visit to one of our favorite summer festival stops, St. Margaret of York in Loveland. For those of you who have been around us for a while, you may know that this festival was an important part of our heritage. Our 5 piece horn section was originally conceived and created to play this festival by our friend and trumpet playing bandmate Tom Heitkemper to lay down some hot horn licks with The SMOYs, a band put together by St. Margaret of York's parishoners. Many of the arrangements we still play today were originally penned by Tom way back in the day for our "once a year" performance at this festival. Three of our original horn players (Tom, Don, & Paul) from that period are still active members of Second Wind, and the other two (Mark "Fern" Greiner & Mark "Buggs" Hagee) still make occasional guest appearances with our group.

In addition to the historical significance of this festival, it's one of the biggest and best in the city-they know how to do it up right! They have great food, great rides, cold beer, margaritas, and a friendly and familiar crowd. We've also heard (uncomfirmed) rumors that they deal a lively game of Blackjack out under the tents-not sure about that, but there always seems to be a crowd there. Come on out and celebrate the season with some horn-charged tunes with Second Wind. We start playing at about 7:30 and wrap up about 11:30.

Now.....what have we been doing for the last few weeks? First, we wrapped our Blast of Brass summer tour with Bluestone Ivory with a fabulous concert at Sharonville's Gower Park on Friday, July 24. The weather was great, the setting was perfect, the crowd was wonderful, and our friends from BSI were great fun to work with. We ended the evening with a powerful set featuring all 17 players from both bands, on stage at the same time. We thank Lee and the rest of the group for conceiving and producing these shows. It took a tremendous amount of time and effort on their part to do so, and we were honored to be a part of such a unique musical event. We all appreciated the opportunity to work with and get to know all of the players in their band better. both personally and musically. Thanks guys-it was great fun!

We've also kept ourselves occupied with wedding receptions for a couple of different friends of the band. We played at the Sheraton in Sharonville, and at the Marriott at Union Centre, and had a great time at both events. We love playing wedding receptions, and it's worth what we charge just to see us dressed up in our fancy duds! If you're interested in having us play at a wedding reception, drop us a line at secondwind-band@cinci.rr.com and we'll contact you for details. We typically do 4-6 weddings per year, and we'd love to do more of them.