As Concord director Max Jones started what would be his final marching season, he had already achieved legendary status around the state. He’d won state championships in each of four decades and had a reputation as a master teacher who could take any group of kids and mold them into fine musicians. Before he left Concord, though, he wanted to build one last dynasty.

max jones
director of music

“Max stood alone on the tower. After his father retired as a Methodist minister, the elder Jones said to Max, ‘I know you didn’t go into the ministry. But as a band director, you have ministered to thousands of students and families.’ Max had grown up in parsonages around Indiana; he’d majored in organ music at Ball State. But he kept his faith to himself. The tower was Max’s pulpit. Never mind that he couldn’t see any of the 206 churches in the Elkhart phone book. He couldn’t tell which kids, in the sea of teenagers below him, wore T-shirts that proclaimed their personal relationship with Jesus Christ, which kids attended the evangelical churches that had sprouted faster, even, than the subdivisions. He’d heard the jokes, too—how Max, like God, could control the weather; how already that year, a freshman saxophone player, asked Mr. Jones’s first name by his parents, had supposedly replied, ‘God?’

Whatever would come to pass was ahead of him. In a few moments, he would call his newest band to attention. He would have them march in sets of eight, first without playing, then playing the B-flat concert scale, and finally playing ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ He would watch them individually and he would watch them collectively, seeing things that no one else could see. He would listen, and when he spoke, the trio of loudspeakers attached to the tower’s metal stilts would magnify his words—correction, challenge, condemnation, praise—and boom them out across the parking lot to echo off the hard walls of the gym, off the performance center, off the long wing of the music department, out over the subdivisions and the fast-disappearing corn fields. From down on the practice field, the voice of God would seem to come from everywhere.
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