By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Bowling Green City Council met Monday night, and Dick Edwards didn’t give it a thought.
A week since he retired as mayor, Edwards was in his happy place, the saxophone section of the Bowing Green Area Community Band.
“Tonight I didn’t even have to think about it,” he said of the city council meeting. “I didn’t have to worry about it or do anything about it. I came here and got here on time.”
Edwards was a founding member of the band back in the winter of 2007, and he’s hung in there despite the demands of his schedule. He said he was grateful “they haven’t booted me out because I missed so many rehearsals because of the city council meetings.”
Far from giving him the boot, the community band, under the direction of Thom Headley, is honoring him on the occasion of his retirement. On Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Bowling Green Performing Arts Center, the band will present its winter concert Celebrating Dick Edwards — a “Man For All Seasons.”
For Edwards, playing in the band is a welcomed, and long delayed return, to music. “I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d get to experience music the second time around.”
He started in music some 70 years ago in his hometown of Bellevue. He had a neighbor who played saxophone in dance bands all the way through the University of Michigan. Edwards’ parents bought the enthralled youngster the neighbor’s horn, a 1924 “Naked Lady” Conn alto saxophone. The instrument earned its moniker because of the engraved figure on the bell. It was popular with his peers, he said.
He benefited from two good music teachers in school, and in high school he was part of a dance band.
Then local professional groups started hiring him when they needed an extra saxophone. “I was the youngster in the band,” Edwards remembers. They took care of him, and even waived the union fees.
He played in the resorts around the Sandusky area. Interestingly the guy who kept him in reeds as the manager the Sandusky Music Store, was Wendell Jones, who would later teach at Bowling Green State University, where he was instrumental in founding the jazz studies program.
But Edwards’ college studies and career obligations kept him away from his horn.”That’s my excuse, a horrible excuse. I was away for a long period of time.”
Edwards always intended to return to playing, but it wasn’t until his peripatetic career brought him back to Bowling Green where he had years earlier been a top university administrator, that he finally picked his saxophone up again. The formation of the BG community band was the catalyst.
“I’m enormously grateful to Nick Ezzone and Thom Headley and so many others for really encouraging me to get back in here,” Edwards said. That included his section mate Elmer Girten.
He also got encouragement on the home front, from his wife, Nadine, and from his three daughters who bought him a new Yamaha alto shortly after he joined the community band.
Now he’s getting his second wind.
On the musical side, Edwards said, he benefited from the guidance of John Sampen, distinguished professor of saxophone and world renowned performer.
Sampen gave him crucial help in gliding back into playing after so many years, including introducing him to synthetic reeds.
“One of the many big challenges in returning to the music scene after many years was the huge challenge of redeveloping my embouchure — another sharp reminder that certain things ‘go’ with age,” Edwards said.
Sampen also connected Edwards with a series of doctoral students from whom Edwards took lessons.
Those lessons were put on hold in recent years, but now “I am eager to return to the practice rooms at the CMA,” Edwards said.
Fittingly Sampen will be on hand Sunday to perform as the soloist on “Georgia on My Mind.”
Headley, who put together the program, felt that was fitting given his connection to the honoree.
“John absolutely wanted to do it,” Headley said. He wanted to pay tribute to Edwards as a life long learner and as someone who would support his fellow saxophonists by attending student recitals.
In shaping the program, Headley wanted it to reflect the Dick Edwards he knows. “Dick is such a gracious gentleman. To my knowledge nothing shook him off from his center, his steadiness. ‘This is who I am, and I’m not going to lower myself into the gutter.’ … Those are the kind of people we should be honoring.”
Fittingly the concert will open with Henry Fillmore’s “The Man of the Honor March.”
In another nod to Edwards’ ties to BGSU, the band will perform “Go! BG Warriors” composed by BGSU graduate and Marine Band Assistant Director Ryan Nowlin. That piece will be conducted by Bruce Moss, BGSU director of band activities.
Moss, Headley noted, helped the BG community band get off the ground.
The final section will feature an arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne,” a nod to Edwards’ Scottish heritage, “Season of Love” from the musical “Rent,” and end with John Philip Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis March,” that is always faithful.
Edwards will also sit in with the BG Big Band during its set.
Asked about future plans, Edwards said simply “I’m just decompressing.” But music will certainly be part of it.
It offers so much, he said, “the physical things, working the lungs, working the mind, working the eyes, just the joy of getting back into music.”
