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Snare Drummer


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I was fortunate to take private lesson's from Steve Chorazy for a while in '77. I would drive over too his apartment by the St. Lawarence Expressway for lessons. He was a god to me as far as drummers go and I was fairly intimidated by him as he worked me on the 1st page from Anthony Serone book and the intricacies of proper grip and wrist rotation. The guys chops were built on raw muscle and a quiet and yet rollsroyce like engine of desire. His wrist were as big around as my thighs. Really.

One day I got up the nerve to ask how he got so good at drumming. I recall some answer to the effect about there was absolutely nothing to do but play pinball machines in Casper and that was alot more boring than drumming. It stuck with me.

He was the percussion caption head for the Knight Raiders where I was playing snare at the time. He was responsible for developing a young line into a focused and serious chops centered group of kids. He wrote some great parts including our drum solo after a Frank Zappa tune, St. El Fonzo's Pancake Breakfast. It had some fun 3's and 4's per hand with syncopating split part swiss flam triplet's that were really fun to play.

Steve was all business and I can only remember him really busting out laughing once. It was at a night show in the miiddle of July the Summer of '77 in a small town somewhere in Oregon. We were really excited to see him. He had been away for part of our tour and had just come back. That day he had us do an endurance roll for about 45 minutes and pushed us to the very end. Next he pointed to this dirt covered hill that was full of gopher holes and high dry prickley weeds. He pointed to some big bolder near the top of hill and said that's the 50 yard line. He had us march up down that hill while playing the show as well playing it clean. Mind you were using slings. That night in the lot we found some cement slab to stand on for the preshow warm up. The line peaked right at that moment. He was so stunned how clean the show had cleaned up that he just started laughing. That geniune expression of joy was very uplifting for us and our confidence was never stronger. There was an awesome fisheye photo of the snare line right up on the 50 that was on the front page of the paper the next day.

Edited by Snapettes Mom
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I would go with Pat Fitzgibbons... 3 DCI (00-02) and 5 DCM (98-02) wins is pretty impressive... (correct the years if they are wrong but im pretty sure that is right...) plus he is a really humble guy. He is teaching Southwinds Snareline now with his big brother also former madison snare and drum major T.R. as Caption Head.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I marched for 12 years and by far the best snare drummers I have ever seen were Nick Angelas, Jeff Queen, Paul "Rudy"Gowern.

by the way..the kid from Star 93 who did the tongue trick was Paul "Rudy" Gowern. nick actually asked him if he could use that in the Blast! solo.

Speaking of Star 93...2 snares (Rudy, Nick), 1 tenor (Brian Tinkel) all marched in BAC, there was actually a 3rd snare that had to leave during move in that was also from Boston. Add Colin Mcnutt into the mix BAC 88-91 and I would say the BAC drumlines have had a lot of impact in DCI.

Nick caption head Colts

Colin caption head Madison

Brian T caption head Carolina Crown

Rudy former caption head BAC

Not to shabby ...

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Ivan Pacheco gets my vote

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  • 1 year later...

JOHN ODDO

:lol::cool::lol::cool::santa::cool:

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