Tenoris4Jazz

Let's face it... for several years now the formula has been if you could take GE and Visual, it didn't matter if you didn't have a 1st place sound technically. GE/Visual/Music Analysis make up 80% of the score. Actual playing only counts for 20%.

I couldn't help but think of VMAPA this evening while discussing responsibilities with my 14 yr old daughter. She keeps trying to impress upon me that practicing guitar is more important than folding clean laundry. "But, we have to have 2 new trucks for tour!" But if you buy them now, you won't HAVE A TOUR!!!

Given what you're been through and the lengths to which you have tried to help, anyone trying to hush you should be banned from the forum. We disagree a lot, but we don't tolerate suppressing people around here. The first amendment carries a lot of weight with us old folks.

It all depends who's running the show and how strict they are with the checkbook. Wanna know how Alabama and Georgia always have a Top 3 recruiting class in football? They spend over $5 million on recruiting. But they have a budget that allows for that and expects that. Other schools whine about the money spent recruiting HS talent, but they fritter away $$$ left and right until they don't have anything left to work with. I think we're seeing that SCV made 1 year of poor decisions financially and now they're inactive. Likewise, lots of colleges had to cut non-revenue generating sports (tennis, wrestling, golf, etc...) because the well ran dry in football and men's basketball. A lot of people bet big on crypto... and went bankrupt. Just like the rest of the US, drum corps has organizations that know how to handle operations, and some that don't.

It's not unprecedented to have the percussion trailing behind everything else, even in a championship level group. The '81 Blue Devils finished 2nd by 0.3 points with a 9th place percussion caption. They were 1.6 points behind Vanguard (2nd) and 2 full points behind The Bridgemen in 1st. If they had just finished 5th in technical percussion (BD was 2nd in drums GE), they would have beaten SCV by 0.7 points for the title and won 4 titles in a row (1979-1982). The brass line, meanwhile, didn't drop a sub-caption during those 4 years. It's also not unprecedented to have the brass line trailing behind. Check this out: Vanguard Year Brass Placement in Finals 1973 8 1 1974 5 1 1978 7 1 1981 4 1 Bottom line is: there are four scoring areas, you need to nail GE and finish high in two of the remaining three.

That makes perfect sense, because the Canadian corps could all go to Montreal without the diplomatic issues of crossing the border.

The best was when people were listening to Garfield '87 trying to find a single mistake so they could claim "Nyet!" on the perfect percussions scores. smh

My HS jazz band played at some type of event at our local Arts Guild. Played outdoors in the parking lot. If we got paid for that gig, I didn't see a dime, and I was playing lead tenor sax, so I had several solos and features. I imagine the band was "asked" or "invited" to play instead of having a DJ playing Beethoven's hits.

They are in Georgia as well. There's one about 4 miles from my house. Good burger, you pay what you would expect. They even realize you'll have to wait on your food to cook so they have designated wait areas in the drive thru lane. I prefer the custard at Freddie's, but Culver's is okay.

I found a recap for 8/11/75, CYO Nationals in Boston. They got a 19.6 and 19.4 for an overall of 19.5 Finished 2nd behind Madison 90.55 to 88.70

Back in 1982, I bought a copy of Drum Corps World at the show in Atlanta. It had a two page chart of every year of DCI and every corps that marched in that year. One year in the mid 70's, it listed over 200 units that competed that year (I want to say 234, but I can't say that with any certainty). I was new to DCI at the time and even then I was amazed at how many corps went away by '82. Looking back on it, "marching Finals week" was the wrong verbiage, but there were over 200 on that list.

I did not intend to offend you. I am wholeheartedly sorry if I did that. What I am trying to convey is that this issue of trying to manage a non-profit drum corps and achieve a balance between maximizing 1) the competitive ability 2) the MM's experience 3) the sustainability of success and 4) the sustainability of the organization has been going on for decades, and there have been close to 100 failures for every success. DCI once had over 200 members competing during a single year. Now they're down to less than 35, and that number seems to gets smaller every year. Blue Devils, Bluecoats, and to some degree Blue Stars have managed to accomplish all 4 fairly well, and now we can add Boston to that list. (Maybe everyone should change their name to start with a B????) DCI is a copycat world, except where it comes to financial management, which is the first place that success should be copied around. We're all just incredibly frustrated that we see what's been coming, have been sounding the alarm on finances and abuse for years and years, and yet the people who can actually DO SOMETHING have their heads stuck in the sand and refuse to change. I applaud you for choosing to get involved and try to help, but I imagine it's only frustrated and traumatized you even more to see how little has changed in 50 years. SCV is kind of like everyone's favorite grandpa, except he's losing his home because he just kept trying to make a fortune selling Amway, even when everyone told him it wouldn't work.

I appreciate what you are saying, but this goes back to before you were born. The details specific to Vanguard's failures are varied, I'm sure. But this has been a contention among those of us who have been looking at the financial aspects of DCI since we first got involved, back to DCI's origin in some cases. Ballet companies and orchestras don't have backup dancers and cellists handling the finances, and the prima ballerina or the principle conductor don't get the final say on how money is spent. The CEO and CFO of these NP's should be telling the corps director and design team what they are allowed to spend and then design a show that fits into that profile, not the other way around. The BoD isn't supposed to be a rubber stamp for the artistic director. Too many people have been trying to turn what was once a military veterans backed drum and bugle corps show for their annual conferences into a two-month long off-Broadway musical production lasting only 11 minutes. The entire business model should have changed along with the show designs and judging criteria during the '80s and '90s, but it didn't.

Boy, this didn't age well...

That was the genius of Bill Cook's plan to fund Star. Use the buses and trucks for 3 months and then have someone else pay for them the other 9 months and fund the corps' operations. It took a few years, but by the time they made a push for a title, they were self sustaining financially.

Which would make the decision to buy the trucks even worse. Ugh... after 25 years of corporate finance, hearing about people doing these things just makes me want to start punching people left and right.

Going the opposite way... does anyone recall the show where Muchachos percussion got a zero-tick score? I want to say it was late in '75.

If they are willing to risk the viability of the entire operation just to keep their design staff, that tells me they needed to fail. There is a HARD reset needed in the attitude out there.

1987 was quite possibly their best horn line ever. One of the best contra lines I've ever heard.

On the DCI historical cd collection for 1983 the 11.5 minute guns were edited out of every performance. It must have been done to the original masters because the '83 albums still included them. They literally just cut the fraction of a second or so out of the recordings. What an utter shame.

It was '15 and the penalty was for amplifying their metronome signal so loud that it could be heard next to the stadium. Oregon got the same penalty earlier that day.

1984 The switch to 100% subjective judging raised the scores and eliminated the 11.5 minute guns

Not drum corps, but a very similar thing happened with my neighborhood HOA before and after we moved in. A guy with no financial background or training was the board treasurer. He filed the HOA taxes for 7 years... as a FOR PROFIT ENTITY. He paid himself between $100 and $350 each year to cost the HOA upwards of $50,000. It wasn't until someone else took over as treasurer and she asked me to look at the paperwork for the HOA. I solved the issue in 10 minutes over lunch with the Director of Tax for my company. It cost the HOA a 1 pound cheeseburger from Fuddruckers to file amended taxes for the last 3 yeas and get over $20,000 back. NP's have a lot of rules to follow and deadlines to meet, but the benefits of being tax-exempt are worth spending $300/hr on a CPA or tax attorney to handle it.

Maybe it's the accountant in me, but if I'm the CFO of a drum corps, we don't tour without the cash in the bank to pay for the season. If that's impossible to do now, then the entire business model of DCI needs to go in the trash. If the local food bank runs out of money, they just don't feed people. If a corps runs out of money, they do what the Bridgemen did... leave people stranded next to a crashed bus with no idea how to get home. There is no excuse for that. I might be harsh in saying this, but DCI has gone so far beyond what drum corps was supposed to be that it's coming back to bite them in the ###... and I think they deserve it. Banks were "too big to fail" back in '07... well, so was Vanguard.

I hate to pull this one up, but... Jim Ott. He never taught SOA's horn line to play scales or arpeggios. He taught them how to breathe, how to hear the ensemble, and how to crank it when it was called for. He also carried a baritone bugle around and played in the arc on a regular basis. Spirit's '77 horn line wasn't anything special. They came in 17th in brass, and they didn't get a ton of high end talent in '78 to come in, but Jim elevated that group to God-status come finals night in 1978. They scored a 14/15 in brass ensemble... and Devils came in 2nd with a 13... a full point behind. They won High Brass a year after finishing 17th. That's teaching.