For the first 21 years she directed The Moonlighters, Janet Hewes couldn’t quite summon the courage to invite David Westphalen to play bass on Take the A Train, Mr. Sandman and other standards on the big band’s summertime swings through the Upper Valley.
“She wouldn’t call me for a long time,” Westphalen, of Woodstock, recalled yesterday. “She was too shy to engage her former band teacher.”
Even after Westphalen started playing both bass and trombone with the band in 2014, Hewes, a 1969 graduate of Windsor High School, struggled with authority issues.
“To have your music teacher come and play with you, it used to be very intimidating,” Hewes, a Hartland resident who plays keyboards and occasionally wind instruments, said this week. “For a while I kept calling him ‘Mr. Westphalen’ and he kept saying, ‘Don’t call me that: Call me David.’ ”
Now she calls and/or emails Westphalen, saxophonist Fred Haas and musicians from a wide and deep network around the Upper Valley and the Twin States early and often, to determine who’s available to fill out a lineup of 15 on a given night.
Now that the band is celebrating its 25th birthday, it stands to reason that it spans generations. They’ll mark the milestone with fundraising concerts at the Hartland Recreation Center this coming Sunday and on Sept. 10.
“We used to rehearse at Hartland Elementary School, where some of the seventh graders would tune up with us,” Hewes recalled. “We still have some of those musicians now. … We have wonderful musicians who come from Rutland, the Lakes Region, New York state. They come from everywhere.”
The band grew out of Hartland Old Home Day in 1973, when Hewes, then a newlywed, noticed that no music was on the program. She asked to have a piano brought onto the grounds, and played it in company with her brother, who played saxophone and clarinet, and other local musicians her brother recruited. Over the next 20 years, a former member of the U.S. Navy band suggested forming a big band, which debuted at a New Year’s Eve party in the early 1990s.
“We were called The Cogitators then,” Hewes said. “Trouble was, people thought that we were a bunch of old codgers, rather than a group of people who ponder a deep question. That’s when we switched to The Moonlighters. Most of us have other professions, and we all moonlight playing music.”
Their first public event under the new name was the Hartland Community Arts variety show, in 1993. They started performing on bandstands around the Upper Valley, and word of mouth led to more gigs playing for town recreation department-sponsored shows.
In April 2017, they were invited to perform at the Vermont Statehouse as part of the Farmers Night concert series, which Hewes described as “the greatest honor we’ve had as a band.”
The proceeds from The Moonlighters’ Hartland shows on Sunday and Sept. 10 will go in part toward buying lights for the musicians’ individual sheet-music stands.
“It’s run on a shoestring,” Hewes said. “Whatever we make, the guys get it. If there’s a little bit left over, it goes toward things like advertising.”
For musicians like Westphalen, whose main group, Swing Machine, has been playing weddings and other, more lucrative gigs since the 1970s, playing with The Moonlighters is an opportunity to tackle music that other clients don’t always request.
“It’s fun reading the big-band charts,” Westphalen said. “And there’s a large amount of talent around Vermont and New Hampshire and the Upper Valley people like Fred Haas, and (trumpeter-vocalist) Gary Hubbard.”
Then there’s Hewes herself, who returned to the keyboards this summer following the retirement of longtime pianist Clydene Trachier.
“When I taught her that one year at Windsor, she was already well-versed in playing a variety of interests,” Westphalen said. “That was a very musical family, and she was pretty well advanced for her age.”
Almost half a century later, Hewes is a little more comfortable directing her teacher.
“When David plays bass with us, he’s right next to me onstage,” Hewes said. “He keeps me on task.”
The Moonlighters perform fundraising concerts on the grounds of the Hartland Recreation Center at 3 on Sunday afternoon and on the afternoon of Sept. 10. Admission is by donation.