(Mark Levy•Herald/Review)
BY MATT HICKMAN, Herald/Review
For
all of his adult life, Luther Smalls has been a serial band-starter.
Just
Us in his hometown of Augusta, Ga. was the first, and after he studied music at
Alabama A&M (and started up a band called Renaissance), he
began teaching.
Music
was my life. I didn’t want to teach; I wanted to perform,” Smalls said. “It’s
like a calling.”
That
call inspired Smalls to join the U.S. Army for
the chief purpose of being able to play in the army band.
That
decision landed him at a military base in Germany where he formed Luther Smalls
and the Groove. But that group, just like all the others that had come before
it, would pale in comparison to the enthusiasm, commitment, talent and numbers
he found when he was sent to Fort Huachuca and the 62nd Army Band.
“These are
the best cats, the most dedicated guys — great talents with multiple
instruments,” Smalls, a tenor sax player, said. “In Germany it was harder.
Everyone wanted to do their own thing. Here, these guys all wanted to play and
that made it very easy.”
On
May 1, the group began rehearsing on post and it didn’t take long for Smalls to
have the biggest band he’d ever had.
“Other
bands I’ve played in, I’ve been a solo horn player,” Smalls said. “The biggest
bands I’d been in were four to five pieces, and this one is six to eight… It
just turned out that way. We didn’t want to leave anybody out.”
As
fate would have it, the alto sax player showing up to the rehearsals was
Kollister Williams, who replaced Smalls in Germany after he was transferred,
and like Smalls, was a native Georgian.
The
two, along with trumpeter David Cotti, set out to find a name for the
burgeoning band.
“In
Germany, there was this guy with a tuba, one of the baddest players I ever
heard on the tuba, going around the base playing Hikky Burr,”
Williams said.
Read more: http://www.svherald.com/content/lifestyle/2011/07/24/214575
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