The Spring Hill Jazz Band is an extracurricular that many young band musicians join to push themselves further than the average band student. However, they’ve run into a problem this year; the band doesn’t have any trombone players. 

Dan Wooge, the Spring Hill band director, said, “It’s harder to select music without trombones… And then we have to transpose, [taking music from written for one instrument and translated for other instruments] music for other players as well.” 

“[Wooge] makes the trumpets double the trombone part, and as a Bari Sax I never match up with anyone.” Said Liv Burger, 10. “It makes it more difficult for me… so when I don’t have that [trombones] to bounce off of, it makes my job really hard.”

However, this problem is a very common occurrence in bands, and Wooge isn’t too concerned. 

“It’s not all that unusual. Lots of bands deal with having shortcomings and pitfalls in some sections. Even the big schools deal with not having all the instrumentation they need.” Wooge said.

There were also worries that the jazz band wouldn’t be able to compete this year. Wooge said “We’ll do the fall [competition], but not the big [competition] that happens in the spring. It was the case a couple of years ago as well.”

Despite the setback, Wooge assures that the lack of trombones is not that big of a deal, and that the jazz band will continue as usual.