STRIKE UP THE BAND!

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Americans, who still hear marches from local ensembles on the occasional small-town summertime evening, tend to think of marches as quintessentially American. Europeans may be likelier to identify with their own national march traditions. Both views, though, are distorted: the march is best classified as European-American. The great American march composers, Sousa included, were nearly all immigrants from Europe, and many marches that became American standards, like the Entry of the Gladiators of Julius Fucik heard on this disc, known to Americans as the Circus March and penned originally as the "Grande Marche Chromatique," were imports from the start. It was America, on the other hand, toward which the trajectory of the march aimed; Americans made the march into a grand spectacle of mass entertainment, with enormous ensembles holding forth in extravaganzas presented to tens of thousands of people -- a tradition that lives on today at halftime of any football game. The buyer of a CD of marches has numerous choices, but few of them introduce the march as well, keeping these ideas in mind, as does this collection by the Band of the Royal Swedish Air Force under the delightfully named Jerker Johansson.
Swedish though it may be, this is a very American-sounding recording of marches. From the very first piece on the disc, Fucik's Florentiner Marsch (which is as exciting as Entry of the Gladiators), the trombones don't hold anything back. The ensemble is loud, large, and enthusiastic, and Johansson lets the style of the whole point toward the big American bands that fit the standards of the march repertory. And standards there are, aplenty. There's the inimitable Colonel Bogey of Bridge over the River Kwai fame; there's Charles A. Zimmerman's Anchors Aweigh; and for country music fans there's the original version of the dancehall standard Under the Double Eagle (it's the second strain that sends us whirling around the floor at two in the morning). It's by one Josef Franz Wagner, no relation to Richard. Sousa is represented by The Liberty Bell, and several other pieces will sound familiar thanks to their inclusion on soundtracks down through the years. The presumably Swedish booklet writer Lars Johansson displays an impressive knowledge of American and British television (quick, sample track 14, Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, and identify the shows in which it was used, without referring to the booklet). Each march is introduced, and plenty of worthwhile information about the lesser-known marches on the program is brought to light. (Translator Andrew Barnett, however, introduces a howler when he identifies the Army-Navy football game as a game between the Army and the Marines.) Several of the more obscure marches are fascinating on their own terms, and all fill out aspects of the march tradition as a whole. Semyon Tchernevsky, represented by the Salyut Moskvy (Salute to Moscow), is apparently familiar to Russians in the way Sousa is to Americans but little known elsewhere, and the marches included run all the way from Schubert to George Gershwin (the title piece from Strike Up the Band). In all, it would be hard to think of a single-disc march collection that is both more informative and more fun.

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