Unlease the Magic of Brass

The birth of the Ron Leas Big Band was almost by happenstance. Back in 1991, when the Masonic Temple was turning into the Scranton Cultural Center, they reached out to Ron and asked if he wanted to play at a ribbon-cutting event. He said of course, even though he didn’t have a band. “I was too dumb to say no,” Ron recalls now with a laugh. It was in its most embryonic stages, but something began with that performance. Over the quarter century that followed, Ron’s band morphed and expanded a few times over, becoming a local institution. 

It had been a long circuitous route back to music for Ron. As a child in the ‘50s, he grew up playing piano by ear and started learning trombone for the school band. It had been his parents’ idea to pick up the horn, mentioning Ron’s cousin Johnny O’Rourke, who was a successful trombone player in New York. One day, Ron’s dad took him to a pawn shop and they bought a “real wreck” of a trombone for 10 or 15 dollars. He practiced at home and used the school’s horn for performances, before he fell in the love with the instrument and called up his cousin Johnny to see if he could buy a better one off him. Johnny had just the thing for him: a King 2B, the same model played by the legendary Tommy Dorsey. 

But Ron wandered from music when he got out of high school and began working. He started a family and a business, and his recreational time was more occupied with his love of automobiles. It wasn’t until the ‘80s when things began to change. By then, Ron’s son Jeff had shown aptitude as a young musician, and was playing trumpet in the local Scranton ensemble, the Crystal Band. Sitting in the audience, Ron began to think: I could do this too. Inspired by his son, Ron picked his trombone back up in earnest. He, too, began playing in the Crystal Band, but he had to relearn how to do it all. He spent countless hours teaching himself how to read music again, practicing and practicing, until he felt he could accept an invitation to go play with Marywood’s band as well. 

By the time of his fateful 1991 performance at the Scranton Cultural Center came around, Ron had been building a reputation in local music circles for years. What could’ve been a one-off gig yielded the idea of starting his own band for real. One night, he was at the bar at Jim Dandy’s, the beloved, old-timey, and now bygone establishment he frequented at the time. Various other patrons and employees helped him brainstorm names for his new group. After some sly but less-than-helpful suggestions — such as Ron Leas And The Brass Balls — were vetoed, they decided to keep it simple. The Ron Leas Brass Band was officially christened. 

In its earliest iteration, the band was a brass ensemble — featuring both Ron’s son Jeff on trumpet and his daughter Laurie on French horn — that primarily performed march music at patriotic events in the summers, alongside some mid-century material akin to what Ron had heard at his own father’s gigs with a square dance band back in the day. The band gradually evolved, as Ron grew interested in expanding its mission. As they gravitated towards big band music, they did away with French horn and tuba, adding drums and standup bass. Eventually the Ron Leas Brass Band would evolve into the Ron Leas Big Band, with a final lineup solidified at two trombones, two trumpets, two saxophones, bass, and drums. 

While Ron had experience as a businessman and mayor, he had never been a bandleader before. “What I did to make it work is I hired everybody that was better than me,” he quips. “And I listened, and I watched.” Already having learned the ropes from playing in the Crystal Band and Marywood ensembles, he established a band atmosphere where he called the shots, but took input from those who had been in the trenches longer than him. He began to develop a stage presence, bantering with audience members, testing their memories on old classics. As the band became more and more of an official prospect in-demand around town, he hired an arranger, and began fleshing out their repertoire. 

In those days, the Ron Leas Big Band was a garage band in spirit, though not in sound. To learn that new material, the octet would gather at Ron’s garage, music stands circled next to his vintage cars. Ron warmly describes a loose, convivial atmosphere at the rehearsals, with various band members giving him grief when he made mistakes, and him giving it back, and then everyone piling into the bar he’d built in his house for cocktails and cigars afterwards. Sometimes, if the weather was nice, they left the garage doors open while they practiced. Folks from the neighborhood would walk by, stop, and listen. “They’d say, ‘Boy, that’s pretty good, you guys should be a band,’” Ron recalls. “And I’d say, ‘Well, we are.’” 

And indeed they were now. The band had grown popular performing at country clubs, bars, parks, churches, and the occasional wedding. They donated their time to charitable organizations like Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Women’s Resource Center and Children’s Advocacy Center. Ron now had another idea on how they could take it further. He decided he wanted to begin playing Christmas music, and launched another project that was parallel and symbiotic with the Big Band. 

Originally called Santa Ron & The Brass Elves, the Christmas version of the big band became even more popular than the normal one. Each year, they played all over town, with an annual appearance at Jim Dandy’s and, when Ron’s old haunt closed, Formosa. The atmosphere at those shows was even more jovial than the band’s usual gigs. “I had antics, like bringing friends up to play bells only to realize they couldn’t count,” Ron says. 

In 2015, Ron decided he wanted a document of the band at its peak. At this point, lineups had shifted back and forth, but he and his son Jeff had been joined by local music community luminaries like Tom Heinz, Jim Buckley, and Tony Marino. Ron booked some studio time for the band to record an album. He and Jeff deliberated on what songs to cut, selecting tunes that were highlights of their live sets and that they knew would record well. “Recording is such a different atmosphere than playing live,” Ron says. “I was wearing headphones so I could hear the bass and drums in the other rom, and my horn kept bumping into my left headphone.” While he, Jeff, and Buckley convened for a single mastering session, the project was left incomplete until 2024. 

In the interim, Ron had retired from the band. Playing the trombone had proven strenuous for him as he aged, but the aches ended up presaging a bout with prostate cancer. Now on the other side of that battle, Ron’s happy to see his friends at Kyoto or the Scranton Club for a cocktail and occasional cigar, leaving the band’s ongoing activity in the hands of his son. But now with the album completed, capturing the band in the studio and onstage at their famed Christmas shows, there’s one last word on the story of the Ron Leas Big Band. There in those songs, there’s 25 years of history, of all the joy the band brought to friends and family around NEPA. The whole saga of the Big Band began unexpectedly, but in the end — even against a life’s work in the communities of Scranton and Clarks Summit — became perhaps the biggest part of Ron’s legacy.