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Mass Nass band keeps on playing

YOU’VE SEEN them in the Riverboat Days parade but you may not know that the Gitwinksihlkw Brass Band is enjoying its second reincarnation
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Harry Moore conducts the Mass Nass band along Eby St. during the Riverboat Days parade last year. The band won first place in the band category.

YOU’VE SEEN them in the Riverboat Days parade, at weddings or funerals or playing in other communities but you may not know that the Gitwinksihlkw Brass Band is enjoying its second reincarnation.

The band has been together for about seven or eight years but had been around long before in the 1970s and 1980s, said principle trumpet player Anthony Moore.

“Those same members are the ones who wanted to restart the band,” he said about the musicians who first formed and played in the band way back then.

The band took a long hiatus when work and other parts of life kept members from playing, he added.

“Now they’re mostly retired, so they had time so they decided to restart it,” said Moore.

Currently the band stands at about 38 members but when it joins with other Nass Valley bands for the Mass Nass band, the numbers can be as high as 85 or 90, he added.

As well at Gitwinksihlkw musicians, the mass band is made up of musicians from Kincolith, Greenville and Aiyansh.

In past, Gitwinksihlkw played primarily by itself but now the focus is on the bands playing together.

“Most picked their own instruments and have stuck with it over the years,” he said about how the bands came to be the instruments that they have.

Gitwinksihlkw is primarily brass instruments, Aiyansh is mostly brass and woodwinds with a lot of clarinets and saxophones and Kincolith and Greenville are almost all brass, although a couple of clarinets are in there too, he said.

Moore got his first instrument at age seven, a coronet, which is a smaller version of the trumpet.

Even though they play together as a mass band, spectators can tell which band is which, not just by the banners carried in the parade, but by their uniform colours.

Gitwinksihlkw uniforms are black, Kincolith are blue and gold, Greenville doesn’t have uniforms now but used to have green ones and Aiyansh has always been red, said Moore.

Last year, the mass band came first in the band category in the Riverboat Days parade and at Seafest in Prince Rupert.

The mass band will play one or two of its usual musical pieces and will add a couple more pieces for this year’s parade here.

The band will keep going as long as it can, he said.

“We try to expand as much as we can,” he said, adding most of the members are in their late 40s or 50s, some in their 60s and about a dozen in their 30s.

“And then the new crop coming in just out of high school,” said Moore.