One could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is getting out of hand. There seems to be no limit to the proliferation: The Beekeepers Hall of Fame, Whack-a-Mole Hall of Fame, Hot Dog Eaters Hall of Fame…Trust me. These actually exist. But do we need them in drum corps? Really? We’ve got a “World” […]
Let’s get it straight right away: It’s not the composers and publishers who are ripping off the drum corps. It’s been the other way around from the beginning. Allow me to explain. When Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British fleet on Lake Erie on September 10th 1813, he famously bragged, “We have met the enemy, […]
Were it not for a controversial 1980 mid-season programming change, Myron might very well have gone on to become a noted horn soloist and possible brass guru. Dave Barduhn, Ralph Hardimon and Fred Sanford had penned an extraordinary arrangement of “Caravan” for SCV, which featured a solo for French Horn. There was little debate as […]
One day in the fall of 1960, an older gentleman handed a shiny chrome bugle to a 13 year old and showed him how to hold it properly. The youngster already knew a few calls, but had never been this close to a bugle with a valve.
Somewhere among my mother’s long-ago stored effects there is a photograph of a 3 year old boy, standing on a sidewalk in New York as a parade passes by, waving a small American flag, an expression of pure joy on his face. That boy was me and, though I do not recall the details, I […]
Big G: “Behold, you are all my peeps. Now go forth and get along with each other.” Crazy G 1: “But they are all different. You can’t expect that.” Big G: “Actually, I can. I Am Who Am, after all. Besides, they are all the same, in essence. They’ll figure it out.” Crazy G 2: […]
His name was Clark, and he wanted more than anything else to play a horn and make sounds like the ones he was hearing on the radio every time he walked home from school past the barber shop, where the men laughed, smoked and told stories about “The Great War”.
-being a short anthropology of the bugle, more or less- The following is a Fractured Fairy Tale, though many of the details are absolutely true. As for the rest… As dawn broke in a boreal woods long, long ago, a drowsy Neanderthal trudged out of the brush and promptly tripped over an old Triceratops skull. […]
On a beautiful summer day 69 years ago, a young Joe Montanaro took some of his buddies for a short boat cruise. They bobbed in a channel for a time and then headed straight for the opposite shore. When they crested the breakers there was much shouting and anticipation, but this was no ordinary beach […]
My friend Curt Moore, drummer with the extraordinary Latin/Jazz group Soul Sauce, was in an earlier life the lead stick in the Santa Clara line of the early’70s and subsequently a top-gun instructor and DCI adjudicator. He has played with Grammy nominees, written books, created videos and conducted clinics and seminars in the US and […]
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