Submitted Photo The Brass Band of Minot will play at Minot State University’s Ann Nicole Nelson Hall this weekend. The band started in 1994 in Minot.

The Brass Band of Minot will present a concert titled “Something for Everyone” at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 20, at Minot State University’s Ann Nicole Nelson Hall.

Concert officials said the concert will include a variety of musical styles, starting with British march, Kenneth J. Alford’s “Colonel Bogey.” The name comes from a golf term, but audiences may recognize it as the song whistled by prisoners in the World War II epic, “Bridge over the River Kwai” or from other films and commercials.

The concert will continue with a special feature: an arrangement of Arthur Pryor’s “Blue Bells of Scotland: Air and Variations,” featuring trombone soloist Michael HarriSon. Next, the band will turn to movie music with “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” pieces from the musical “West Side Story,” and a rendition of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the musical “Carousel.” The band will then swing into jazz and Dixieland with John Palmer’s arrangement of the gospel hymn, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” With one last style change, the concert will include an arrangement of the early rock and roll classic, “Rock Around the Clock.”

As North Dakota’s only British-style brass band, the Brass Band of Minot has been bringing music to North Dakota since 1994 when it was created by a group of Minot area brass musicians. Some of the founders still play with the band today, joined by musicians of a variety of ages and backgrounds from Minot and the surrounding communities and led by Gordon Troxel, a farmer, businessman, and retired music educator from Berthold.

A British-style brass band includes trombones, euphoniums, baritones, B-flat tubas, percussion, cornets, flugelhorns, altoniums, and E-flat tubas. Except for the trombones, all the band’s brass instruments have a conical bore, which means that the brass tubes they are made of gradually get larger from the mouthpiece to the bell, resulting in a sound that is darker, richer, and more mellow than the bright sound associated with trumpets.

There are also some technical differences in how British-style brass band music is written and played that provide extra challenges to the players, but the flexibility of sound allows the British-style brass band to play a variety of music and musical styles. The band consists of two types of instruments: brass and percussion.

“Something for Everyone” will be the third of this season’s concerts for the Brass Band of Minot. Its season will round off with another concert on April 10. Both performances will be at 4 p.m. at Ann Nicole Nelson Hall. Brass Band of Minot concerts are free and open to the public.

This project is supported in part by a grant from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, which receives funding from the state Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.