Home Local News Bandleader Jim Latimer will celebrate 90th birthday as Capitol City Band kicks off...

Bandleader Jim Latimer will celebrate 90th birthday as Capitol City Band kicks off 56th season on Thursday

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Jim Latimer conducts the Capitol City Band. (Photo supplied)

Jim Latimer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus music professor, has been leading the Capitol City Band and conducting hundreds and hundreds of concerts for 43 years now – since 1981.

This Thursday, June 27, 7 p.m., at Rennebohm Park, Latimer will conduct a very special concert on his 90th birthday that will be the opening concert for the 56th season of the Capitol City Band.

When the Capitol City Band first started back in June of 1969, Elmer Ziegler, a mentor to Latimer, led the concerts which back then took place in Vilas Park. Most of the time in the last half-century, the band has been led by Latimer, who was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Wisconsin Percussive Arts Society in 2018 for a lifetime of education, performance, and promotion of percussion as a solo and ensemble art form, leading the way.

The band’s weekly Thursday concerts will take place at 7 p.m. at Rennebohm Park on Madison’s near West Side and run for nine weeks from tonight until Aug. 22.

Concerts are free … rain or shine. Bring a chair to sit in. Rennebohm Park is located at 115 N. Eau Claire Ave. in the Hilldale neighborhood. 

For information about the event, call 608 835-9861. To donate to Jim Latimer’s 90th birthday fundraiser for the Capitol City Band, click here.