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Mount Carmel saxophonist has performed with band for 80 years
By jeanne starmack
struthers
The band plays on, as it has since 1927, and John DePasquale is with it every step of the way.
They’ve grown into their golden years together — he’s 95, and the Mount Carmel Society Concert Band is 80.
When the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Festival opens in Lowellville on Wednesday, continuing through Saturday, DePasquale will be right there with the band again.
This year, though, DePasquale has some bragging rights that extend beyond being the last original member of the traditional southern Italian concert band.
At his Struthers Spring Street home last week, DePasquale was excited about an article featuring the band in the spring 2011 edition of The American Bandmasters Association Journal of Band Research.
“Ten pages!” he said. “From all over the U.S., they chose our band.”
The article, “A southern Italian band tradition lives in Northeast Ohio,” tells the story of how founder Michael Lucente brought his music over from Italy to the United States in 1905. With his original, handwritten compositions, he founded what was then called the Lowellville Band in 1927. He departed for Italy again in 1931, leaving behind him his music, which he sold to the band for $25.
The band’s leader at that time was Dan Faragilia, president of the Mount Carmel Society, a club for Italian Catholics. Through that connection, the band became affiliated with the society, DePasquale said.
DePasquale was 15 when he joined the band. He knew Lucente, who had taught most of the members how to play their instruments and how to read music.
But Lucente did not teach him, he was quick to clarify.
DePasquale knew already how to play the tenor saxophone when he joined.
“Nobody taught me how to play the saxophone,” he said. “There was no money for lessons in Depression days.
“I had a couple of buddies who were playing, and they were making money,” he continued. So he was determined to do the same.
He started when he was 14 on an old tenor saxophone with cracked pads and bad springs. “It took me a long time [to teach himself to play],” he said.
He made money working nightclubs with a band called the Continentals.
Through the years, the Mount Carmel Band underwent some changes. It began playing a conglomeration of military fanfares in 1935 to accompany the Baby Doll Dance at the Mount Carmel Festival, the Bandmasters Journal says.
The dance, which today features a person wearing a hollow, 15-foot papier mach woman, is a tradition that carries over from old southern Italian festivals. There, the doll was witchlike and burned in effigy, a representation of the sins and troubles of the past year.
Today, they don’t burn her. They just shoot fireworks out of her arms, and her dance is accompanied by the same music every year. It was the only musice the band never wrote down. Members developed their own distinct order of military fanfares for it, and they learned it by ear, the Bandmasters Journal notes.
The band disbanded in 1941 during World War II but reformed in 1946. During the war, DePasquale was in the Navy and playing in its orchestra alongside men who played for swing-band leaders Tommy Dorsey and Harry James.
DePasquale has gone through three tenor saxes with the Mount Carmel Band, which plays concerts locally and in Cleveland, Canton, Akron, Greenville, Pa., and Aliquippa, Pa. Though his latest one is in better shape than the original, it’s pretty seasoned at 60 years old.
Today, the band still is vital. It began allowing women to join in 1989, the Bandmasters Journal said, and has around 30 members, DePasquale said, including young people.
It suffered a big loss when all its music, about 200 songs, was lost when the band manager’s house was destroyed in a fire in August 2009. The music, including Lucente’s original scores, was never published, DePasquale said. But the band hopes to re-create it through memory and recordings, the Bandmasters Journal notes.
As he got older, DePasquale considered quitting the band.
But because of a compromise, he doesn’t have to.
“The leader of the band, he tells me, ‘John, you don’t have to march,’” he said. “Blowing and marching at my age ...”
So while the band is proceeding to the stage, DePasquale rides on a golf cart and plays the cymbals.
He doesn’t plan to miss a beat.