So, I happened to come across the epic 2 hr. long battle between Hampton and A&T from the 1996. This was the first time that these two bands had ever met (at least since Hampton left the CIAA).
The battle made me so proud of our art form. The music repertoire of both bands was incredibly diverse from soul, to rock, to rap, to r&b to marches to America the Beautiful to The Olympic Fanfare.
Most of the arrangements were very well written, and the bands played them very well despite playing having all day long.
It was a truly incredible event!
A couple of things I noted when watching the tape.
Hampton played throughout the entire game (this is not shown on tape) while A&T mostly sat and did cheers during the game, so Hampton did start to run a little low on songs towards the end of the 5th.
At one point a comment is made by "The Voice" from the 5thquarter and another A&T grad that Hampton had run out of marches. The tape shows however that for some reason Hampton played a march during the game. This actually happened the same time as A&T was playing a song, so A&T didn’t hear it. We should have saved that one for later.
At 2 points on the tape, The Voice and the other guy mention that Hampton repeated a song. One song, we did repeat. "Count On Me" by CeCe Winans and Whitney Houston. Not our fault. It was our band director’s call. But we will take the "L" on that. What’s funny though is that "The Voice" said "they arerepeating a song, they are out of ish to play" on tape. That’s funny because the battle lasted at least another 45 minutes after that.
On the second point, we started a song towards the end of the game, "A Maze Spectacular – "Runnin’ Away/Back In Stride". We only played about 10 seconds of the song before we had to cut it off due to something happening with the game. During the 5thQuarter since A&T played "Before I Let Go", it only seemed apt to play a mix of Franklin Beverly songs back. Once again the people with the camera accused us of being out of songs. But yet in still, the battle lasted yet another 25 minutes.
On another occasion, after A&T had just finished playing "Rolling Thunder", one of the camera people said that we were trying to figure what to play, as soon as that came out of his mouth we played "Rolling Thunder" right back many times faster.
Good stuff
It was truly a great battle that affected Hampton significantly. Even though we had played against Howard, Grambling, Southern, Bethune-Cookman and many other bands, no one had ever brought us so close to the brink of running out of songs.
The very next year we added about 10 songs to our yearly repertoire changing our yearly average from 60 to about 70 songs a year.
It’s sad that we never really got the chance to go head to head with anyone like that again while I was in school.
"Thank You" by Boyz II Men for Marching Band arranged by Block Band
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D. Rashad Watters
Founder, CEO
Block Band Music & Publishing, LLC
(919)-698-2560
BlockBandMusic@gmail.com
Block Band Music & Publishing…Your Assistant Band Director!
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