Edsel Bonnell taught young people in the Gower bands how to make music — and how to show up
Weekend AM’s Heather Barrett learned music and life lessons in the Gower Youth and Community bands
I wore my brown, 1980s Gower Youth Band uniform vest to work this weekend.
I am one of the hundreds of brass, woodwind and percussion players who are remembering Edsel Bonnell as a hugely influential figure in our young lives, musical and otherwise, growing up in the St. John's area over the past half-century.
Bonnell, the founder and conductor of the Gower Youth Band and Gower Community Band, died earlier this week at the age of 88.
Many players in the Gower bands went on to become professional musicians. Others are music teachers, paying forward what they learned from Bonnell.
The rest of us are scattered through many walks of life, bound together by our vests and an enduring love of music.
A trio of trumpeters
Bonnell was raised in the Salvation Army faith, where he learned music by playing in the Salvation Army church brass bands. In 1973, a work colleague who was a member of Gower Street United Church in St. John's, asked him to conduct that church's dwindling band.
"Dad went down and had his first practice, and three trumpeters showed up," recalled his son John Bonnell.
Bonnell told Gower officials that he would volunteer to lead the band, on the condition that young people of any faith or background could play in it.
John and his brothers Mark, Bruce, and Brett were early members of the band.
Professional classical and jazz trumpeter Mike Herriott was another. He recalled Bonnell driving several sets of siblings to band practice in his large 1970s station wagon.
"It was the young ones, myself and Bruce and Brett, we'd be flopping around in the back of the car with all the piles of musical instruments, and the older kids would be in the front," said Herriott.
80 members, twice-weekly practices
By the early 1980s, the Gower Youth Band averaged about 80 members, ages eight to early 20s. Bonnell and musicians filled the second-floor band room at Gower Street United Church for two practices per week and played about 35 concerts per year.
My sister Lori and I were among them. Lori started playing the bassoon with the band, now plays professionally, and works in music education.
Romano Di Nillo, percussionist for the Broadway musical Come From Away, joined the band as a very excitable 11-year-old around the same time as we did.
"I was back there [in the percussion section] wiggling away and dancing away, and I'm just getting into it, and I hear this big booming voice, 'Romano! Stop your dancing!'" said Di Nillo.
Lots of yelling
Yelling was a classic Bonnell instruction tactic, one that band members took in stride.
"He was old school. He was tough love," said John Bonnell.
Erin Dawe joined as fourth chair in the second clarinet section in 1986. Decades later, she still plays clarinet in the Gower Community Band.
"He expected the best from us and expected us to keep up and we rose to that challenge," said Dawe.
Sitting in a section close to the conductor, Dawe ducked her share of wayward batons.
"In many practices he'd be so caught up in the music, and passionate about it, swinging his arms so that the baton would hit his own [music] stand and go flying off in the air at people," said John Bonnell.
Eventually, he said, band members gave him a bronze baton, mounted securely on a plaque.
'Sense of commitment'
However unorthodox his conducting could be, Bonnell's beat was always steady, and band musicians always knew what he asked of them.
"What everyone got out of the band was a sense of commitment," said John Bonnell.
If you said you were going to do something, you did it.- John Bonnell
"If you said you were going to do something, you did it. If you were going to be in the band, you couldn't come and then not come, because you had a sporting activity or something.
"The band was really a family. It was a family for us, but it was also a family for the hundreds of young musicians who went through the band program."
Careers, weddings, children
Long after players moved on from the band, the connections remained. When Herriott and his wife, the acclaimed Canadian-Israeli cellist Ofra Harnoy, moved back to St. John's a few years ago, one of the couple's first stops was a Gower Community Band practice so Herriott could introduce Harnoy to Bonnell.
Di Nillo, during his Broadway run in Come From Away, showed up to play bass drum at Bonnell's final conducting gig with the Gower Community Band in 2018 — a short Christmas concert at the Pleasant View Towers Long Term Care Facility.
In turn, Bonnell showed up for the band.
Bonnell wrote countless letters of references for band members' first jobs and post-secondary school applications. He and his wife, Anthea, were honoured guests at band members' graduations and weddings.
"We got to the point where we had children of band members joining the [Gower] Community Band," said John Bonnell.
A few years ago, when my father passed away, Bonnell came to the wake.
Separate, public career
In addition to his volunteer work with the Gower bands, Bonnell had a high profile, time consuming professional career.
He was a journalist and communications specialist — again, resolutely old-school — and served as Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Clyde Wells's chief of staff after the Liberals took power in 1989.
But he kept that part of his life separate from his band life, and fortunately, his later career and my early journalism career didn't intersect.
John Bonnell said that his father's work with the bands remained close to his heart.
In his last few years, Bonnell spent most of his time at home in his apartment, surrounded by band memorabilia, working on a book about the history of the Gower bands. His sons are in the process of preparing it for publication later this year.
Dawe will be playing her clarinet with the Gower Community Band at Bonnell's funeral on Wednesday.
She said Bonnell would expect the band members to show up and do their best.
"He loved every moment of it," said Dawe.
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With files from On the Go
