First Contact
Keeping Time
by Charlie Griffin
It’s Tuesday night at Orlando’s Marks Street
Senior Recreation Center, and a small but
enthusiastic collection of seniors are here to
dance. At 7pm, nine couples are already on the
dance floor and ready to go. The hall is dimly
lit, with six of the nine ceiling fans illuminated
and spinning above. There sits a thin, wooden
platform overlaid on standard vinyl tile, which
is flanked on three sides by large, unadorned
banquet tables capable of accommodating five
or six couples each.
On the fourth side of the dance floor is Trumpet
Blues: an 11–piece band founded over 25 years
ago by trumpeter and now-retired mechanical
engineer, Tony Pizzurro. The musicians come
at this from many angles: for some of them
this is the only public music-making they do all
week because of non-musical day jobs, while
for others it’s one fun gig amongst many.
Faye Novick and Maurice Salamy, photo by Jason Fronczek
The other trumpeter is Eric Wright, an Adjunct
Professor of Humanities and History at Valencia College. John Babb,
the baritone saxophonist, works for Charles Schwab and is also a real
estate developer. I knew Melissa Davis as a yoga instructor at Warrior
One on Corrine Drive in Audubon Park before I learned she plays
second alto saxophone in the group. The singer, Barbara Jones, is an
executive assistant at The Wyndham. Kurt Sterling, on tenor saxophone, does instrument repair and makes mouthpieces. They blend
in seamlessly with the working musicians: the lead alto saxophonist
Gerald Retner, bassist Larry Jacoby, trombonist Will Rogers, drummer
Bill Cole, and Howard Herman—the pianist, composer, and frequent
arranger for the band.
Herman has created over a dozen arrangements for Trumpet Blues,
including some original compositions. His contributions complement
the more than two hundred songs the band has ready to go at any
given moment. Meringues, rumbas, sambas, cha-chas, tangos, and foxtrots make up the majority of tunes requested of the band. Pizzurro
consults with Jones and calls out tunes by their number so the musicians can locate them easily in their thick binders of sheet music, and
the dancers come so regularly that they have some of the tune numbers memorized themselves. Most of the songs are understandably on
the moderately paced side.
Tony Pizzurro on trumpet, photo by Jason Fronczek
I see grace, dignity, and playfulness as couples revolve past each other, occasionally offering greetings
to each other as they rotate past. I engage a few
couples in conversation as they take small breaks,
with a lot of repeating ourselves to be heard over
the band.
93 years old and still incredibly spry, John Ticen and
his wife Clarice have been coming to Marks Street
for 20 years. Joe grew up loving planes during the
Great Depression in Indiana and served as a pilot in
the Air Force, flying patrol and interception missions
in Panama during World War II. Using the GI Bill
after the war, Joe became an engineer and moved
to Florida in 1957 to work for Martin, which would
eventually become Lockheed Martin. He’d wanted to be a pilot his whole life, but the timing was
wrong for him to become a commercial pilot. By the
time that would have become a possibility, he was
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