Sheet music theft devastating for Lethbridge Big Band

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on July 14, 2022.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Whoever broke into the garden shed in Paul and Nancy Walker’s westside yard may not have been expecting to see what was inside the rolling locked container they stole.
Inside that black plastic wheeled bin with red lid and stencilled with the letters LBB was sheet music belonging to the Lethbridge Big Band.
The container and others were in a shed that contained a public address system, music stands and stand lights, none of which were stolen.
Walker says a lock on the bin was cut and feels the person or persons responsible may have left suddenly.
Inside were binders of sheet music used by the Big Band which was formed here in 1964. Walker, the de facto musical director, has been with the band since he filled in as a high school student while attending Lethbridge Collegiate Institute. Others of the 17 band members who remain with the LBB all got their starts that way, as well.
Band members have been scouring dumpsters and alleys looking for the storage bin and the music. So far, a presumed sighting about the bin’s whereabouts hasn’t turned it up.
In the containers were numerous tunes the Big Band plays during its seven to 10 annual engagements, the majority of them dances.
Walker said Wednesday he has been in the process of digitizing the band’s musical repertoire, which is a lengthy and time-consuming task, due to many musicians using an iPad for their parts instead of sheet music.
The former musical director of New West Theatre said it will take him four months of continuous labour to finish the job.
Twenty years ago, the band made a photocopy backup of the musical book but it wasn’t a good one so Walker has to rescan all the material and print all of the music again.
“It’s a really tedious long job,” he said.
The band has always carried around with it about 175 tunes in cardboard folders.
“It’s been that way for almost the whole 60 years the band’s been together. And all these traditional big bands carried it around in that way so when we get to the gig, you don’t know what you’re going to be playing. They’re all in order. You play a couple of slow ones, a fast one, then a polka and a waltz. You can start anywhere in the book and you move forward,” he said.
But even with the backups, the LBB is missing about 15 scores of the 175 to 180 it carries to engagements.
“In all these years, we always thought the worry would be fire or something in somebody’s house so we tried to keep backups” somewhere else because some of the scores are 58 years old, Walker said.
And some of the missing music is irreplaceable, said Walker.
“They’re not available to buy again. And if you did, even the modern ones, they don’t sell individual parts so when you lose one book, you have to buy the whole arrangement again.”
Unfortunately, Walker said, the band keeps music in cases that are often used for carrying tools.
“They probably thought there were tools they could easily pawn to get money,” added Walker.
“Of course, they’d be ticked off too when they opened it up and find its just a bunch of big band music so I’m sure whoever stole it just dropped them in a dumpster somewhere,” he added.
“It’s one of those unfortunate things; it’s no use to them at all.”
Walker said in retrospect the music should have been kept elsewhere but “you don’t think of somebody stealing music like that because it’s not much use to them.”
He feels the intruders may have been interrupted before being able to take off without anything more than the single case.

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