Ennis “Buz” Bisbano’s love affair with his trumpet ended when he entered public life, serving as schools superintendent until he retired in 1987. Now, he and his wife, Terry, live in Florida and Cranston, and he’s got a gig as a solo jazz trumpeter with InGroov.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

CRANSTON — Theresa Bisbano, happily married for 56 years, didn’t want diamonds for her 50th wedding anniversary.

Instead, she wanted her husband, Ennis Bisbano, retired Bristol superintendent of schools and onetime big-band trumpeter, to get his instrument out of the closet and play at their reception, for the first time in nearly 30 years.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to do it for yourself as well as for me and the children,’ ” Terry recalls. Bisbano’s two daughters, four granddaughters and five great-grandchildren had never heard him play.

So Ennis, now 78, retrieved his trumpet from the closet, where it had been sitting since he accepted the job as superintendent in 1977, and began to practice.

And a year later, when the golden anniversary reception was held in West Warwick, Ennis played the couple’s theme song, “I Can’t Get Started With You,” by Bunny Berigan, for his wife and an audience of about 150.

“Every time he plays it’s just like I fall in love with him all over again,” Terry says, smiling. “When he put the trumpet away … It was heartbreaking.”

Ennis calls that decision his “biggest mistake.”

“The superintendent job is a 24/7 job,” says Ennis, who retired in 1987. “It got to a point when I had to call [a bandmate] and say ‘Ralph, I have a meeting, I can’t make it.’ ”

The former superintendent pauses, staring down at the scrapbook he’s made of his time in the big bands of Rhode Island. “And that’s when I put the horn away.”

But, thanks to a persistent wife who said she never believed for a minute her husband was done playing, Ennis is back to his former musical alias of “Buz Terry,” a combination of his and his wife’s nicknames. He plays with InGroov, a band composed of ex-professional musicians in Punta Gorda, Fla., where the Bisbanos live seven months of the year.

They started going to hear the band and “he used to keep saying, ‘I can do better than that,’ ” Terry says. “So finally after a year [in Florida], I said to him, ‘Don’t keep blowing smoke, you’re either going to do it, or you’re not!’ ”

With some urging from Terry, Buz approached band director Fred Capitelli and said if he ever needed a trumpet player, he’d be available. After subbing for a player for two weeks, Buz was asked to become a permanent fixture within InGroov as a jazz soloist.

“I’m happy to take my horn, go there and take it out of the case and play my part,” Buz, who plays with three other trumpeters, said.

In the 1950s, the popular Buz Terry Orchestra played gigs at Bristol and Warren high school proms, the Alhambra Ballroom in Riverside and other venues in Rhode Island. Buz has quite the history with the trumpet. Though he’s tried everything from the bagpipes to the piano, he’s stuck to the trumpet, the instrument his father played as well. From the time he was 9, Buz played in public. He began his professional training at age 11 with Edward Dennish, leaving school 15 minutes early to catch a trolley to Providence from Bristol and walk to his teacher’s house for lessons once a week.

In his high school years, “Music was everything to me. My horn was always under my arm; my mouthpiece was always in my pocket.”

His constant musical presence at a Bristol speakeasy earned Buz the nickname “Hot Lips,” which he said, “only referred to the trumpet playing.”

Even today, in their summer home in Cranston, Buz has displays of his musical achievements, with a frame filled with more than 15 medals, sheet music strewn about the area where he practices — for “at least 20 minutes every day,” according to Terry –– and pictures of him and former bandmates. Along the way, Buz played with the Maguire Sisters, Frankie Avalon, Johnny Nash and Don Cornell, among countless others.

As he grew into his teens, the orchestras took notice. Buz said he nearly dropped out of high school when several bands attempted to talk him into playing with them full time. But his father intervened, advising him to “finish college, then do anything you want to do.”

The former Bristol resident listened to his father and wound up at Rhode Island College, thanks to a chance presentation during a “boring” study hall from a RIC representative. “In three weeks …I received a letter in the mail and they said examinations are being given … If you’re interested, please call us,” he says. Eventually he earned his bachelor of education and later his master’s degrees at RIC.

But music was still on Buz’s mind. While teaching at Park View Junior High School in Cranston for 15 years after college, Buz performed at night and taught trumpet between school and gigs. He even helped one student control a vocal stutter by teaching him proper trumpeting techniques. When asked if he preferred teaching, playing or listening, Buz didn’t hesitate.

“Playing,” he said. “No matter how angry I was, no matter how frustrated I was or how bored I was, once I picked up the trumpet, it was all gone.”

Buz nearly lost the ability to play April 15, 1951, when he suffered a fractured skull, a brain contusion, a broken jaw and nearly lost his lip –– the key to playing trumpet — after his car hit a tree on his way back from a jam session. It was later discovered that a steering rod had snapped in his car. He was hospitalized for a month, and was in recovery at home for months afterward.

“I have four days of my life I have no memory of,” he says. “They told me I would never play trumpet again.” But within six months, Buz was playing –– and engaged.

Buz and Terry had known each other for years, even going dancing on occasion. But, at 14, she was too young to date. Then, after the accident, when she was 18, Buz asked her out and shortly after proposed over the phone. Terry said they’d officially been on three dates.

The Bisbanos don’t believe in coincidences, whether that involves Buz’s attendance at RIC, their impromptu marriage, Buz’s accident and recovery, his rediscovery of the trumpet at the golden anniversary or his newfound interest in InGroov.

“God almost took away from me that talent, and it could have ended,” Buz says. “If I had relied on just music, where would my life be? … I think the Lord steered me [toward RIC].”

Terry said in a separate interview, “If you believe, and you think good things every day, then I believe good things will happen. You have those bumps, don’t get me wrong, but it always ends up right, and that’s the important thing, the ending.”

Tearing up in the middle of her interview, Terry gazes at her husband in the next room and says, “He’s doing something he just loves, and I pray he does it until he dies. Until we die, because we’ve always said we’ll die together.”

cthompson@projo.com