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NABBA championships are April 21-22 at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Friday the 21st is solo & ensemble competition, and Championship, 1st Section, and 2nd Section required test pieces. Saturday the 22nd is 3rd Section both pieces, Open, Youth Championship, Youth 1st Section, and Youth Open, and the Own Choice pieces for Championship, 1st Section, and 2nd Section (not in that order).

For details see https://nabba.org/championships/. The page lists participating bands, required test pieces, own choice pieces being played, the schedule, and much more. This will be the second largest number of participating bands ever for NABBA.

It seems that NABBA will be livestreaming and archived on YouTube this year without need for a subscription: https://nabba.org/championships/champio ... ivestream/

There are streams for both auditoriums. Names and times of bands are available on the NABBA phone/tablet app.

NABBA results are here: https://nabba.org/championships/2023-recaps/. Links to detailed scores are below each section. This is transparent and a nice improvement. The information was gotten out VERY quickly this year.

If you download the NABBA app, it gives the times that each band played, and in which auditorium. Click on the Schedule button on the bottom left, and then choose Concert Hall or Playhouse at the top. The times listed are for your time zone and not necessarily Central Daylight Saving Time, where the contest was held. For example, Saturday in the Playhouse, the first band, Roman Festival Brass (the group I'm in) played at 9AM Central time, but I live in the Eastern time zone, and the time reads as 10AM in the app.

This makes a useful guide to which bands are playing at what time, as the livestream archives (https://nabba.org/championships/champio ... ivestream/) do not have chapter markers or timestamps. I do not know how long these archives will be up on YouTube. There were some amazing performances that will be well worth watching. As each band begins to play, they put the name of the band onscreen for a few seconds. There's a gap between bands for setup, so that makes a visible distinction for when the bands start and stop when scrubbing through the stream. I suggest headphones or really good speakers. Some of the recordings are at very low volume levels and need a boost.

My wife pointed out that the app auto adjusts to the local time when being viewed.

I enjoyed being in Huntsville even though we didn't leave with the results we sought. Always room for improvement while having fun.

I live in Missouri. Congratulations to the Fountain City Brass Band on 2nd place in the Championship section.

This is the first year that I've been privy to the detailed score recaps of all the groups. I think they've been available but I just haven't looked deeply enough.

Some of the sections saw pretty consistent judging, but the judges seemed to be all over the place in others. It wasn't uncommon for bands to receive a great score on one piece and then get butchered on the other. I'll leave to interested readers to look at the placement numbers beneath each score to see what I mean. There were also VERY inconsistent judgments by individual judges who were in major disagreement with the other two judges. This is not at all uncommon in band judgments of all types, unfortunately.

Frankly, it would be impractical for NABBA to use the Olympic system (5 judges, drop the high and low scores, if my understanding is correct), but it might make judging more consistent.

FWIW, I can't complain at all about the judgment in our section. I think they got it right.