St. Simon’s Island offers wonderful free concerts during the winter season.  In January Tom and I went to hear a local group, the Coastal Brass Choir, play a concert at St. Simons United Methodist Church.

The Coastal Brass Choir is a volunteer group with a wonderful “temporary” conductor.  The conductor, Paul Reed, is the music director at Frederica Baptist Church.  He explained that the previous two conductors had moved almost as soon as they became conductors of the group.  So he was the temporary conductor because he had no intention of moving.  He has been the temporary conductor for two years now.  The group practices once a week and has concerts as often as anyone is willing to listen to them.

The Coastal Brass Choir has five trumpets, three french horns, three trombones, one euphonium, and one tuba.  They played a varied program of music.  All the members are part of The Mozart Society which promotes classical music.  The Mozart Society also gives scholarships for music lessons and instrument purchase.

The concert selections tended toward classical but the Coastal Brass Choir played interesting arrangements of pieces and kept the selections on the shorter side.  Bizet, Purcell, Verdi, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky all got a hearing.  But most of the audience enjoyed the “Mission Impossible” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” selections the best.  Each piece was humorously introduced by Conductor Reed.  The group even played a piece composed by Reed, “A Little Bit of Texas.”

About 100 people attended this concert.  It is too bad more people didn’t come because the group is great fun to listen to and their concert was only an hour in length.  We even got home in time for the kickoff of the National Championship game between Clemson and LSU.  We are planning to go to their next concert in March and looking forward to it.