DESCRIPTION:
Director: Robert M. Jordan
Assoc. Director: Sammy Halbrook
Assoc. Director: Eric A. Bailey
Field General: Tom Sleeth
Drum Dancer: Sam Duncan

1:00 Fanfare
1:50 Campbell's Farewell to Redcastle
3:27 Crusaders March
4:50 Bonnie Dundee
5:45 Highland Fling
7:00 Scotland the Brave
8:15 God Save the Queen

All tunes traditional, with horn arrangements by Sammy Halbrook.

From the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, the Highland Park High School Highlander Band stubbornly resisted the trend toward pairing pop music arrangements with highstepper and drum-and-bugle marching styles. Instead, it featured a very traditional precision marching style, paired with traditional Scottish pipe tunes. To help compensate for the band having just under 100 performers, the Halbrook horn arrangements supported traditional piper melodies with countermelodies from the low brass, reserving the trumpet section for bugle calls and other embellishments.

Ignoring the blue and gold school colors, the red and black uniforms were patterned after the Scots Guards, and pipers wore the Royal Stewart tartan. The Highlander Band of this era took pride in preserving tradition, and managed to stave off fads calling for flag corps, pep squads, color guards, drum lines, synthesizers, electric guitars, electric basses, and marching sideways into abstract outlines of various shapes. Among the performances of that era, this award-winning 1973 Parade of Champions performance is an almost-universal favorite, exemplifying the pride and tradition of that era, and winning high acclaim.

In sum, the Highlander Band of the Bob Jordan era remained fiercely traditional, bucking all popular fads of the time. But then, what would you expect from a band where even the lassies wear sporrans and keep daggers stashed in their argyle socks?