So formidable is the national reputation of the Ohio State University Morching Bond that it could make its next appearance somewhere on the outskirts of Searchlight, Nev., and very likely draw on appreciative crowd.
But every great performing unit, it seems, has one favo rite site-one location with which it is firmly identified, and where it traditionally rises to its greotest heights. The Mormon Choir has its Tabernacle, for instonce, and the dancing Rockettes their Radio City Music Hall.
For the Buckeye Bond, that magic showcase is 90,OOO-seat Ohio Stadium in Columbus, which, on any given Saturday afternoon in autumn, becomes the football capitol of America.
It is in this gigantiC bowl, for the first time, that sophisticated new equipment has captured the Buckeye beat on Side One of this, one of the most exciting brass bond albums ever assembled. It is the same precise and powerful Ohio State music that we have come through the years to expect from the ebullient Buckeye brass, but this time it's awash with the full-throated symphony of spectator voices that electrify the autumn air on every football Saturday in Columbus
The roar that greets the very first drum cadence quickly indicates that the band is on the threshold of something very special in a musical performance. And then the breakthrough-Burkeye Battle Cry smashing into a roaring stadium with the kinetic force of a rampaging fullbock.
This is the some resounding, driving Ohio State Band that has enroptured audiences through scores of thrill-a-minute afternoons. But in this alburn, the response of the massive crowd seems to spur these gifted musicians to even greater levels of excitement.
Certainly, the OSU Bond belongs outdoors-in the Buckeye lair at Columbus, or in an old·foshioned parade down Main Street that's another port of this trailblazing album. You'll hear that, too, as the band thunders into Disneyland for a scintillating outdoor concert during one of Ohio State's frequent ventures to the Rose Bowl.
And finally, on Side One, you're at curbside for Pasadena's world·famed Tournament of Roses Parade, when those diamond·like tones first reach your ears from somewhere down Colorado Boulevard. And here they come, the crisp precision of Beautiful Ohio transfixing the audience in a matchless spectacle of sound and movement. There is never a lapse, never a flowed note. Here is parade music the way it is meant to be played.
But this Ohio State unit is far more than just a marching band. On Side Two, for instance, you'll encounter the Buckeyes' amazing versatility in selections such as the First Movement of Beethoven 's Fifth Symphony And the special Ohio State treatment is stomped on a series of marches that everyone will recognize.
Here, then, is collegiate America's biggest and boldest bross-bursting out of an album that etches a bright new dimension in the wide spectrum of marching band recording.
-Jim Gallagher
Download liner notes here.