Traveling to the Beat of A Different Horn
By Patrick Tandy

The arts have had a strong, lifelong influence on real estate attorney Jeffrey Fisher – good music, fine food, foreign lands…even the odd film festival (or not). Kenneth and Mildred, the nice old couple sitting quietly in the waiting room of Fisher’s Upper Marlboro office, will attest to that.

Not in so many words, mind you: Kenneth and Mildred don’t talk much. But they speak volumes of the musician and world traveler who is Jeffrey Fisher.

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“I would say that if the full, registered ensemble showed up on any given occasion it would probably be 70 people,” Jeffrey Fisher says of the Southern Maryland Concert Band, in which he plays the French horn. “Generally, I think [that] when we play we probably play with about 50.”

And finding time in today’s world to fine-tune such an art can be, by Fisher’s admission, a task no less daunting than getting nearly six-dozen people to show up at the same place at the same time to play the same thing. “Frankly,” he says, “If I’m able to pick up the horn once a week between practices I’m lucky.”

Yet Fisher’s love for playing music perseveres, much like the very concept of the community concert band itself.

“At the turn of the century, when we didn’t have TV or DVDs or computers and all that kind of stuff, the band was really a very central part of many of the towns in our country,” Fisher explains. “People would go to the town square on a Saturday night and they’d listen to a band concert. You had John Philip Sousa as sort of a national symbol of that, but there were bands all over the place. Now we’re competing with more things.”

A GOOD OPPORTUNITY FOR A PICTURE: Jeffrey Fisher, staying put

As one might expect, playing venues that range from county fairs to nursing homes to Fourth-of-July celebrations requires a broad repertoire.

“Basically, the band repertoire will have a lot of marches,” Fisher says. “It will have a lot of patriotic music, transcriptions of classical pieces, a lot of show tunes and concert suites. It’s lighter than a symphony concert would be, but there’s still ample opportunity to play classical things.”

Fisher’s own preferences include “a lot of the Russian music – Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov – things like that translate from an orchestra to a band very well. And that to me is probably the most interesting.”

Like the history of the American concert band, Fisher’s own musicality can be traced back to his childhood, when his father’s Air Force career afforded the family many opportunities for travel. “When I was about 12, I expressed an interest in playing an instrument to my mother,” he explains. “Well, my mother jumped on that immediately and said, ‘You’re not going to wait until after your bar mitzvah; you’re going to start playing now.’”

So Fisher started on the trumpet. But when the school band voiced a need for a French horn player soon after, Fisher volunteered. And it was on the French horn that he stayed throughout his high school career, playing in the school’s marching band as well as a community band.

“But [playing in the community band] wasn’t particularly fulfilling at that time,” Fisher says, “and it sort of went by the wayside as life went on.”

Decades passed without Fisher once picking up the horn – until a moment of chance rekindled his long-dormant urge to play.

“About three years ago, they had a reunion for my high school band program – Oxen Hill Senior High School,” Fisher says. “It was a nationally known band program, and this reunion was to honor the 30 years that Mr. Johnson had been the director. I had intended to perhaps play for that, but I never got around to it. I attended the reunion, however, and it was just so unbelievably inspirational, exciting.

“The following week or so, we were at a Japanese restaurant down in Waldorf that was next to a music store. I walked out of the music store, and there was a sign saying that the Southern Maryland Concert Band was recruiting members, and it said – and here was the funny part – ‘Call Mr. Mortimer.’ Well, Mr. Mortimer was a guy who was student-teaching back when I was in high school – he’s now retired and is the director of the band. So I called him up and I started going. And I’ve been playing in the band now for three years.”

By Fisher’s estimate, the band plays between 12 and 14 performances a year, though he concedes that the number in which he can be heard on the French horn has been somewhat smaller as of late. “I’m afraid my attendance this year hasn’t been very good because my travels interfere with that a lot,” he says.

And for good reason…

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“The place we bought seems to be right in the center of everything,” Fisher says of the 650-square-foot, one-bedroom condominium in Cannes, France, that he and his wife closed purchase on in late November. “[It’s] within a five-minute walk of where the [Cannes] Film Festival is, of the traditional “old town,” which has maybe 150 restaurants in it. It’s right by the old port, right by beaches. It’s a small town, but it’s big enough that it has amenities. [There were] a lot of choices we could have made along the coast – it’s the one we happened to fall in love with.”

Their choice of location was by no means impulsive. “We decided we were kind of interested in being in town, which is a different experience than what we have now,” Fisher says, comparing his domestic home with his new French digs. “We live in a suburban house here, and we’ve sort of gotten interested in the cities and the towns there. One thing that they have in France that we don’t have – and I don’t know whether they’ll be able to hold on to it as they have to make economic changes – but the center of town is a fundamental center of existence there. People meet and congregate. They still have bandstands. They have community events. They have a Christmas festival – each and every little town. I’m quite serious about this: We know more people in the neighborhood in Cannes where we’re going to be than we know in our own neighborhood, in our own subdivision where we’ve lived for 12 years.”

And that’s saying quite a lot, particularly at a time when relations between France and the United States have grown increasingly strained in the course of world events. But for Fisher, whose travels have taken him from Spain to the Caribbean, from England to Morocco, it’s a sentiment that’s been an even longer time in the making.

“We probably started traveling to France [about] 10 years ago,” he says. “You know, a lot of Americans don’t get along with the French, and…”

Fisher pauses, mulling over his words. “Actually, a lot of Americans don’t really get along with anybody that’s different,” he continues. “We’ve seen a lot of Americans who think that the way to communicate with somebody is to talk louder. And they go there and they order steaks well done and whatever else.”

When it comes to international relations, Fisher, who augments the “little French” he speaks by listening to French music and watching French-subtitled films, favors a less confrontational approach.

“Our secret for getting along with other people in other cultures is to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in their language, to try their food,” he says. “And we’ve found that we’ve gotten along. We’ve had several experiences that have just been phenomenal.

“One January, we went to an upscale bed-and-breakfast place in the Loire Valley, which is where the castles and chateaus are. We took a mid-level room, but it turned out we were the only people in the hotel that night because it was January, so they put us in their Signature Postcard room, which was extraordinary. In the Loire Valley, they have sandstone cliffs along the side of the valley, and for centuries people have lived in rooms and houses carved into the side of the cliffs - they’re called troglodyte rooms. Anyway, we’re in this room. They opened the restaurant for us. We were the only people there, and they opened the restaurant. We had a waiter, a maitre d’, a busboy and a sommelier. We had this magical experience. And we just fell in love with France.

Such “wonderful little stories” might be dismissed by skeptics as pure luck if Fisher, like Sterne’s Yorick, were not strangely full of them. He fondly recalls meeting the congenial restaurateur that he refers to as “Monsieur Jacques,” in the coastal town of Menton, near the Italian border, two summers ago.

“We were referred to his restaurant,” Fisher says. “Well, there was nobody else in the restaurant. It was just this little old guy, and he served us. He was the waiter. He was the busboy – he was the whole thing. He spoke no English at all, but he spoke his French very clearly and distinctly and slowly. And we just had a wonderful evening with this guy. So you know how you can never go back to something like that and recapture [it]? Well, we decided to try, and when we went last winter we took our daughter – she didn’t go with us in the summer because she’s at camp – [and] son of a gun if the same thing didn’t happen again! We were there, alone, and he took care of us just wonderfully.”

“I think that travel is really broadening and that [it’s] so important in bringing people together. As the war in Iraq was approaching and we would talk to local people over there about their fears and concerns, to us it was very clear that they understood that this was Bush’s war and Chirac’s opposition and they didn’t view it as affecting a whole people. I think that when we talk about the French or the French talk about us, they are talking about a certain stereotype and we are talking about a certain stereotype. And the way that you get rid of those stereotypes is by dealing with people one-on-one. When you deal with people one-on-one, you realize that they don’t fit the stereotype and then, hey, maybe more people don’t fit the stereotype. And that’s how people come together. That’s not to say we haven’t met people there that do fit the stereotype because we certainly have, but I don’t think any more so than we’ve met similar, unkind people in the United States.”

Through such technologies as a webcam and a DSL, Fisher plans to expand his work capabilities to the new condo, hopefully doubling the roughly two weeks the family currently spends in France each year. But five-minute walk or not, don’t expect to see Fisher at the Film Festival any time soon.

“We’ll probably never go,” he admits. “I’ll believe it when I see it, but I’m told that the rentals we’ll be able to get for the week of the Film Festival will pay the condominium fees and the real estate taxes for the whole year.”

Besides, the irony of a tourist town being a tourist town, foreign or domestic, is not lost on Fisher. “It’s kind of like New Jersey,” he adds with a chuckle. “You go from one town to another – it’s all one big suburb. But I do jokingly say to my wife every time we go there, ‘Hey, to them, this is Ocean City.’”

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Fisher has no intention of fostering his love for his adoptive community abroad at the expense of the one at home. “I’m going to continue to play in the local band,” he says. “Once we get to the point where we’re staying a month or two at a time in France, I will probably try to find another French horn I can keep over there. [Then I’ll] try to join a local band over there, which I think would be a wonderful way to meet a group of local people.

“The important thing about a band, besides the connections and the friendships, is that it teaches you discipline in terms of following a leader, blending in with a group. There are lessons in all kinds of things in school that aren’t right in the classroom, and there are a lot of important life-lessons that are involved in that kind of experience.”

Fisher does offer a few words of caution for those looking to purchase their own foreign address. “You have to get an idea of what you want,” he suggests. “You don’t want to do it if you’ve only gone to a place once or twice, because, just like all of us know, living [there] is different than visiting. You have to be sure that that’s a place you want to have a connection to.”

And it never hurts if the food is decent. Which brings the conversation back to Fisher’s native shores: What does the man with the plan in Cannes think of Freedom fries?

“I’ll speak carefully,” he replies with a hearty laugh, followed by a brief pause, “but I’ll keep it on the record. I believe that any representative of government that would spend public money making resolutions and passing bills over something so insignificant and silly probably shouldn’t be reelected.”

And judging from the silence in the waiting room, you’ll get no argument from Kenneth and Mildred.

DOUBLE-TAKE: Life-size couple Kenneth and Mildred in the waiting room

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Publications : Bar Bulletin: December, 2003