Fred Driver with a special plaque awarded to him from Kāpiti Brass.
Fred Driver with a special plaque awarded to him from Kāpiti Brass.
Kāpiti Brass band veteran trombonist Fred Driver has called time on a lengthy brass band career that began with a chance encounter in a Taupō park.
“I was on the way to a new job at Wairākei in the early 1960s,” he recalls.
“I stopped in Taupō and I noticedthat the Taupō Citizens Band was playing in the park. The conductor must have seen me enjoying the music and asked if I wanted to join. A few days later I was at band practice learning trombone, beginning a new era of brass band playing.”
More than 60 years later, deteriorating eyesight, which has affected his ability to read music, has convinced him it’s time to snap shut the lid on his trombone case.
Kāpiti Brass president Mark Thirkell said the band respected Driver’s decision and would miss him as a dedicated musician.
“Fred has been a great servant to the band, not only as a trombonist, but also as one of the founders, a former president, band historian and in later years, welfare officer. He’s given a great deal to the band and the Kāpiti community. We’re very grateful to him and his wife Pat. While we’re missing his presence as a player, we’re fortunate to still have him keeping tabs on the welfare of band members.”
Business interests brought Driver south to Kāpiti in 1987. Three years later he saw an advertisement canvassing interest in forming a local brass band. That led to the formation of a committee of five led by Lou Moss and included Jan Krimp, who is still a playing member of the band.
“Lou Moss was the founder of the band. At the early rehearsals in Kaitawa Scout Hall, Lou would count us in [to the musical work to be played] and then play euphonium. After 10 years or so, we had 16 players — some of them excellent musicians — and while some parts were missing, we sounded like a proper brass band.”
Retiring Kāpiti Brass trombonist Fred Driver (right) with a plaque presented by president Mark Thirkell at a function to mark his service to the band.
The band’s first performance was in Coastlands shortly before Christmas 1991. Driver’s wife, Pat, who had a background in conducting choirs and bands, later became the band’s musical director.
Driver remembers the band’s big step forward was acquiring a complete set of near-new uniforms from the Port Chalmers Marine Band, which had amalgamated with Dunedin’s Roslyn Mills Kaikorai band.
Better instruments were also a pressing need. Fundraising enabled a complete set of new Yamaha instruments in 2011.
When Driver announced his playing retirement, he quipped that old trombone players never die, they just slide away.
But his colleagues in Kāpiti Brass were having none of that. Already awarded life membership in 2018, Kāpiti Brass presented him with an engraved plaque to mark his outstanding service.
“It came out of left field. I was lost for words, emotive, slightly in shock and grateful.”
He sums up his career as “a lifetime of music, fun, laughter and enduring friendships with some of the most decent people around”.
Driver grew up in a musical household on a farm at Heyward Point north of Dunedin. His father played button accordion for local dances and his mother played piano. He learned to play his father’s accordion by ear and then at secondary school, he joined the Port Chalmers Harmonica Band.
Though he’s proud of what he has achieved, he has one unfulfilled ambition — for Kāpiti Brass to have its own band rooms. It is a project he considers was feasible before Covid, but in his view is still possible.
