This is my dad’s trombone.  Before I came along to whisk it away to another coast in another country, it sat in his mother’s basement for about 40 years.  So how did it get here?

Until my third year of university, I thought myself “instrumentally challenged.”  People had been trying for years to teach me piano, and I practiced as well as I knew how.  Like Spanish, despite determined teachers and my own desire to learn, it just never sank in.  Until Canada.

As part of my training to be a music teacher, I learned to make noise on many Western instruments: all the percussion you can think of, bassoon, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, flute, trumpet, French horn, baritone, and… trombone.  Turns out, I wasn’t as bad as I thought!  Bassoon and I didn’t get along as beautifully as some of the others (13 keys for 10 fingers…), though we had fewer arguments than the piano (88 keys for 10 fingers!); flute, sax, and clairent and I were all on the same page unless we had reed issues; percussion was a song; and brass hit home.  But the trombone.  It felt right at home in my hands.  It was a feeling like the stars aligning.

After those six brief weeks with a trombone, I started saving up to get a fun, colorful P-Bone, or plastic trombone.  As a student, it would take a while, squirreling away a few dollars every week or month, but I was determined.

Little did I know when I told my parents how excited I was to find an instrument I could play, my dad phoned his mother and brother.  The next time I visited, Uncle Bill pulled out two trombones for my perusal, his and my dad’s.  I was ecstatic!  I couldn’t wait to play them!  I kept quietly hoping I would like my dad’s(3) better.  When I found Bill’s initials on the trombone that wouldn’t stay together, I was thrilled — I had my dad’s(4) trombone!

Now I play the trombone and am rapidly picking up pitched percussion (and I speak more Spanish than I ever did in Southern California).  A change of scenery, a change of tactics, and my dad’s(5) trombone.  I’ll probably never be a professional-level player, but that’s not the point.

Music is for family, for community.  It’s something to build and strengthen connections.  Making music with other people is the crux of my passion.  I want to make music with people and for people, all enjoying the experience.  I may have private solo training, but my heart remains embedded in choir.

I come from a strong music family, though I’m the first to pursue it as a career.  We joke sometimes about forming a sweet adelaide’s quartet, like the von Trapp family of “The Sound of Music” fame.  In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the intergenerational angle while playing my dad’s(6) trombone.

I have my dad’s(7 – how many more?) trombone.  I joined the Carnival Band, based at Britannia Community Centre in East Van.  It’s an immersion experience for (re)learning the trombone.

I am making music with an awesome community band, and making it an intergenerational experience by using my dad’s(8) trombone.

You never finish growing in music,  learning more about your instrument, or a new instrument.  That I get to carry on the low brass family tradition on an inherited instrument makes my experience all the richer.