Gale Scott orchestrates a perfect retirement, clowning around included

Gale Scott COURTESY PHOTO At 61, Gale Scott can still get nervous, but not because she's something of an anomaly as conductor laureate of the 85-member Naples Concert Band. She took up the baton in Naples more than 25 years ago. In those days women conducted very little except themselves, and certainly not symphony orchestras or concert bands, except in rare circumstances.

But Mrs. Scott, who spent her youth and young adulthood playing the clarinet, studying music and conducting in the far West, was born to it.

"My father came from a family of 13 kids and they all played instruments. My grandfather was the conductor," she explains. "There were six in our family and we all played. But I was the only one who went on with it."

She went on with other things, too, becoming a successful financial consultant for such firms as E.F. Hutton and Dean Webber. That was before she and her husband, Don Scott, whom she met in Naples after moving here in 1980, opened McDonald Investment and worked together until she retired last year.

Which brings her to the current moment of anxiety.

Vast experience counts for little in the way of avoiding tension, it seems, when one of the world's greatest altosaxophone players is coming to town.

On Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Cambier Park band shell that Mrs. Scott helped to create and restore, she will lead the Naples Concert Band in a performance with classical sax soloist Dale Underwood.

Mr. Underwood, whose playing "goes into the stratosphere," according to Mrs. Scott, will take on a collection of Tosca arias, some Gershwin tunes and a piece called "Oblivion."

"They call him the Heifetz of the sax (after the late Jascha Heifitz, sometimes celebrated as the most flawless violinist of the 20th century)," Mrs. Scott says.

"My greatest responsibility as conductor is to make sure that all of us uphold him as a soloist. I'm really excited, I'm somewhat nervous, and I'm having a little difficulty pulling the band together.

"With a soloist, especially when you have cadenzas and a very rubato style of playing, we absolutely must follow him. He creates the tempos, not I. And 85 other people (the band) have to be right with me when he does."

All that with only a single rehearsal on Saturday, too.

Although music remains her "fulltime avocation," performance for an appreciative audience is her passion, she admits.

"I always think of the audience first, of how what we play will affect them," she says. "As a conductor, you know a little about every instrument, and the whole concept is to pull together all the different sounds, to balance them, to articulate them, and to create a beauti- ful expression for the audience."

Women, without question, can do that as well as men, she says.

"Some men, or example, are not expressive with their bodies — and some are," she points out. "I use my whole body in expression, including facial expression."

Which might be why Mrs. Scott has succeeded as a clown conductor, in the strict sense. She dresses as a classic white-faced clown (as opposed to an Auguste clown once favored by hobos) for some performances, including those in which the Naples Concert Band offers circus music.

She also stands a rotation on the conductors' circuit for Windjammers Unlimited in Sarasota, a national organization for the promotion of circus music. She conducts for the Sailor Circus in Sarasota, and she marches with the Naples Daily News Band as a clown. She also volunteers for Naples Community Hospital's arts and healing program called Clowns on Rounds.

The circus music came about when Mrs. Scott became a close friend of the late, great Merle Evans, who conducted the Barnum & Bailey Circus Band for a half century.

When she isn't playing and conducting, Mrs. Scott is working on a business start-up in health and wellness. Her husband, meanwhile — now also officially retired — hasn't really retired, either. He's kicking off a new nonprofit organization called Volunteer Collier, which pools and screen volunteers to best direct them to agencies where they're needed.

Meanwhile, adds Mrs. Scott, "I really like doing a community group such as the Naples Concert Band. That's because of the range of the audience you're playing for. You're producing wonderful entertainment of a high quality, and I like the full range you can offer in concerts in the park — classical, jazz, Dixieland."

The full range makes concerts in the park a strong American tradition, Mrs. Scott says.

Clearly, too, the full range characterizes the woman herself.