BANDSMEN'S FAULTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 3, 4 January 1934, Page 16

BANDSMEN'S FAULTS.

NEW CONDUCTOR EMPHATIC.

TROMBONES AND KISSING. "You have been smoking," said Captain E. Adkins (conductor of the new military band formed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission) to a bandsman during a rehearsal in Sydney. "No, eir," replied the perspiring trombonist. "Well, you've been kissing too many girls," replied the captain, and added with confident assurance, "Kissing and smoking are the only two things fatal to good trombone playing. One makes the lips' too soft and the other makes them too hard." "I don't smoke, anyhow," protested the trombone player. The conductor tugged his close-cropped ginger military moustache meditatively, and rejoined somewhat cynically, "Perhaps it would be better if you did." Then the rehearsal was resumed. Captain Adkins plucked booming bass notes from the air to the left of him, snatched terrified little high treble notes from the flutey regions on his right, shrieked grim warnings to tenor home, gesticulated, pleaded, urged, sang counter above the music, and finally placed two fingers in his mouth and emitted a shrill, eartickling whistle for silence. "You call that a tenor horn, eh?" he said, addressing an instrumentalist. "Yes, it's a German instrument," replied the player. "I've a better name for it," said Captain Adkins. "But you needn't feel downhearted. That tenor Lorn is of great value. Anything that came out of the Ark is of value as an antique." • And each of the 48 members of the military band was moved at last to heartiest laughter. Asked later why he.displayed so much apparent vehemence during rehearsal, Captain Adkins, who only recently came out from England to assume his present position, emote his interviewer heartily on the back. "Boy," he said, "I suppose it is because lam half Irish. But I believe in giving a man a black eye now and again and supplying the healing ointment."