A bandmate’s saxophone frames Pat Woollard, an alto saxophone player who is one of the more recent additions to the Cascade Horizon Band. The band’s winter concert at Sisters High School on Sunday afternoon was Woollard’s first in about 40 years, after she once again took up the instrument she stopped playing after high school.

SISTERS —

As the lights dimmed for the Cascade Horizon Band’s winter concert Sunday, the 70 or so musicians on the stage at Sisters High School were deadly serious.

No one smirked or horsed around, as some members might have done 40 years ago during the first chapters of their musical careers, in high school and college.

“This is my first concert, and I’m scared,” alto saxophonist Pat Woollard, 60, of Sisters, said earlier, in the hallway of Sisters High School before the concert. The retired public health nurse is one of the band’s more recent additions. She joined in October, after moving from Virginia.

“Forty-two years ago was the last time I played,” Woollard said. She bought her saxophone from a graduating high school senior who stopped playing, just as Woollard did after high school.

The band started off with a piece called “The Olympics,” as a tribute to this year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. The rousing jazz numbers, marches and other band standards they played drew strong applause from the large audience, which filled most of the high school auditorium. The concert was free, with donations suggested.

The Cascade Horizon Band formed in 2003, and is now one of 165 New Horizons Bands around the world, according to the concert program. Musicians must be at least 50 years old to join, and an audition is not required. Players under 50 can join if they are needed to play a specialty instrument, and members pay $45 a quarter to participate.

Band Director Sue Steiger, 53, is also a band teacher at High Desert Middle School. She said the band probably cannot grow much larger right now, because it needs to split into two groups, a process the band has not yet figured out.

The band played at the Oregon Music Educators Conference in Eugene on Jan. 16, which was an achievement considering how the group started out in 2003, said the band’s board president, Jay Dee Conrad, 71, of Bend.

“During the first rehearsal, the band played such stalwart numbers as ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,’” Conrad told the audience.

Band member Don Oliver, 80, of Sisters, plays the baritone horn, which he made a strategic decision to take up after starting out in the band as a trumpet player.

“I played trumpet here for one or two years, and decided I couldn’t compete with these red-hot trumpet players,” Oliver said.

Clarinetist Carmen Hull, 68, of Sisters, said Oliver has “been a great recruiter” for the band, encouraging others to join.

“We were fairly newly retired here, so it was a great way to meet people,” Hull said. “I came to a concert in Sisters here a few years ago, and I said, ‘I have to do it.’”

Trumpet player Bruce Shaull, 64, of Camp Sherman, said he finally joined the band in December 2008, after his wife and children encouraged him to do so. He played in a community band in Olympia, Wash., before he moved back to Oregon, but his love of band and music began more than 50 years ago.

“In fifth grade, they brought this dixieland band to school,” Shaull said. “I thought man, that’s what I want to do.”

Learn more

For more information about Cascade Horizon Band, visit www.cascadehorizonband.org or call 541-389-5121.