The band in action.   (Photo: Courtesy of The New York City Department Of Sanitation Emerald Society Pipes And Drums Band)

Wedged between two cemeteries on 58th Street in Maspeth, Queens, up a ramp and past a security guard’s booth, 18 members of the New York City Department of Sanitation’s band, the Emerald Society Pipes & Drums, are circled beneath an American flag. Facing two bass drummers in the center is retiree Bryant Small, the band’s 53-year-old blond-�mustachioed drum major.

Small joined the Sanitation Department in 1989 and soon became a district delegate for the Emerald Society, a group of civil servants with Irish heritage. Back then, music for the funerals of any of the department’s 7,200 members was provided by the NYPD Emerald Society’s band. �It just looked ridiculous,� Small says. �We had sanitation, and we’re all in green, and you’ve got these guys in blue doing these funerals.� To add to the insult, every March 17, when the Emerald Society departmental delegates marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, �I noticed that we were hiring a high-school band from Long Island to lead us up [Fifth] Avenue,� remembers Small, who had played drums since he was 15. �Eventually, some of us were saying, �Wait a minute, police have a band, fire has a band, corrections has a band. Back then, transit police had a band. How come we don’t have a band?’ � Small and about a dozen of his colleagues launched Pipes & Drums in 1993. Quickly, though, the new band encountered a problem: �The pipers, God bless ’em, none of them had ever played a musical instrument before.� Nor could they read music, says Small. With the help of two instructors from the NYPD, the band started taking regular lessons as a group. �You’ve got to blow at the same time as you’re squeezing,� says Roger Leahy, the 44-year-old bagpipe major who joined the DSNY in 1992 and admits he initially peeved his neighbors with his practicing. �It’s a really unique instrument.� The complete band was not deemed �street ready� until March 17, 1995.

These days, the band’s schedule of about 50 events per year may include weddings, funerals, minor-league baseball games, street-naming ceremonies, and 9/11 commemorations. The 40-plus-member band has also participated in four ticker-tape parades: two for the Giants, one for the Yankees, and one this year for the U.S. women’s soccer team. Often after practice, the men � who are each required to memorize between 50 and 60 songs � will repair to Donovan’s, an Irish pub down the street, for burgers and Guinness. Eddie Hicks, 45, who was elected bandmaster in 2012, likens the band’s camaraderie to that of a sports team. On rides to events, �the bus kind of becomes that locker room,� he says. �Everybody’s friends with everybody, whether there’re people making fun of each other or we’re just joking around.� He’s thankful for appreciative listeners, who are �treating us as if we’re doing them a favor, but really they’re doing us a favor, because as players, all you want to do is make people happy.�