All Good Things...
Our June 5, 2026, concert was NCB member Joe Schorer’s (trombone) final performance with the Northshore Concert Band. Joe is grateful that NCB extended his Lifetime of Music for 14 memorable years and shared with us his journey.
Autumn 1974 marked the beginning of my senior year at Northwestern University. Law school lay ahead and, after that, a serious professional career. These plans left no room in my life for the trombone. As a result, at the end of the fall 1974 football season, I marched into Mr. Paynter’s office, thanked him for letting me play in his Symphonic Band the preceding three years and told him that I was not going to try out one last time for the Symphonic Band. He was gracious (“you son-of-a-gun,” he chuckled), maybe because he saw what his son Bruce was going through in Bruce’s first year at Northwestern’s School of Law.
Although I figured that I was done with the trombone, it turned out that the trombone was not done with me. As the years, and then the decades, unfolded, through countless recitals, symphony performances, band concerts, operas, musical plays and movie soundtracks, my ear kept searching for the trombone part, and my brain kept trying to figure out the slide positions and the keys in which the instrument was being played. By the beginning of the 2000s, Scott Golinkin, whom I had known since my freshman year at Northwestern when we were in the marching band together, had put the Northshore Concert Band on my radar, and I started regularly attending its concerts.
NCB Trombone Section, Midwest Clinic 2025
An inflection point came in December 2011, when Scott got me a ticket to hear NCB’s Saturday morning performance at the Midwest Clinic. Sitting at the very center of the first row in the audience, I wasn’t just enchanted by the pieces the Band played, some new to me (e.g., Rest) and some (e.g., Bandology) familiar to me from my high school days. Over me swept a wave of nostalgia for and long-buried memory of the camaraderie derived from playing music in a constructive and collaborative setting. For years, my wife Millie had been encouraging me to get back into the trombone thing. This Midwest concert put the taste for a band experience in my mouth. Consequently, after 38 years, I pulled the trombone out of the attic, started practicing, got a teacher and successfully auditioned for NCB, starting with its fall 2012 season.
Performing with the Northshore Concert Band at the Midwest Clinic in 2025 brought my NCB career full circle. Playing at Midwest checked off the last item on my NCB bucket list. I don’t see how it can get better than that.
Some of Joe’s happiest memories include:
Alfred Reed’s Russian Christmas Music, which the Band played at its April 2019 concert. This piece brought back vibrant, emotional memories of my first time in the Minnesota All-State Band (summer of 1969), when under the direction of Dr. Bencriscutto (director of bands at the University of Minnesota) we played Mr. Reed’s own arrangement of Russian Christmas Music.
With the rest of the NCB trombone section, rehearsing and recording Make Our Garden Grow under Mallory’s guidance in the parking lot of Glenbrook North High School in the summer of 2020 as COVID swept through the country. In another piece of good coming out of something bad (i.e. COVID), watching Mallory and Jay find each other and beat COVID.
Starting in 2017, annual master classes for the NCB trombone section led by elite symphonic trombonists.
Master class clinicians included Will Baker, bass trombone for the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra, Reed Capshaw, professor of trombone at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Megumi Kanda, principal trombone for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, R. Douglas Wright, Minnesota Orchestra’s principal trombone, Doug Yeo, retired bass trombone for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mark Fisher, Assistant Principal Trombonist with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Principal Trombone for the Santa Fe Opera, Tim Higgins, Principal Trombone with the San Francisco Symphony, Randy Hawes, bass trombone for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Michael Mulcahy, the second chair with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Performing the national anthem with the rest of the section at a White Sox home game in August 2022.
The electric experience of playing at the Midwest Clinic on December 19, 2025. It was the apotheosis of Mallory’s masterful and majestic skill as our director.
