You’ll Pardon Me If I Look Unsurprised

About a year and a half ago, I published an item here which noted some of the people whom I consider influences on my musical life – teaching, performing and arranging.  Somehow, I didn’t spend much time on one of them, and now seems like a moment to adjust that, a bit.

In that post, I described the day on which I first heard a college band play an arrangement of mine in public, in performance, in uniform. It was UMass, and the band’s primary musical arranger was standing next to me. “How’s it feel to write for UMass?” he asked. How did it feel? … “You have no idea,” I said cheerily. “Oh wait, right … you do.” Because the gentleman to whom I was speaking, and this was twenty-two years ago now, had already experienced that feeling, many many times over – in association with that college band, and in association with a number of fine (national-competition-grade) high school bands, and particularly in association with a little group called the Garfield Cadets.

He had come to UMass as the marching band graduate assistant during my junior year (this would be 1986), and although I myself was hardly connected to the drum corps world, I knew that he had already been drum major for one world-championship edition of the Cadets, and brass arranger and caption head for one other. And the more arrangements he cranked out for us, the more clear two things became: [1] he could really write; and [2] as a burgeoning musical arranger hopeful, I needed to get inside his head!

One afternoon we happened to arrive in the same room in Old Chapel, then the home of the band, at the same time. I waved a piece of staff paper at him … yes, this was in the days when we wrote band tunes by hand on actual paper, what about it? … and said, “question. How do you deal with low brass?”

Before he had a chance to provide the obvious snarky answer that came with intentional misunderstanding of my question, I continued, “I came from a high school band that didn’t have much low brass, and I’m a woodwind guy, so I’m not really sure about how to write good notes for low brass.”

He put down whatever he was doing, and said, “okay. Go to the piano. Play three notes that make a chord you like but which don’t make a muddy sound. Put those notes on the trombone 1, 2, and baritone staves. Add a tuba bass line. If it sounds decent on the piano, it’ll be OK in the brass. That’s it, pretty much.”

Simple as that. Except: boy, did I dissect a lot of his handwritten band scores – and saw chords that looked logical enough, and which followed that rule, and which looked pretty innocent (B flat, F, B flat, D … B flat major … OK, got that) … but somehow, bands that played those relatively innocuous-looking chords and such … sounded disproportionately great. There was some other element to his work that tended to transcend merely writing the right notes.

Throughout my time as a band person – playing, conducting, arranging, instructing – I have undertaken this process an awful lot:

Step one: listen to a score by this gentleman played by a decent band or corps.

Step two: smile and admire.

Step three: wish I could claim to have written it myself.  I mean!– Silverado, Jupiter … Phantom, Henry V … Pirates … and that’s before we get over into the drum corps world, about which I need say only one thing: Appalachian Flippin’ Spring!

Here are a few other examples of this gentleman’s fine work: as performed by the UMass Minuteman Marching Band, or the Garfield Cadets of Bergen County (well, he wrote for them for a long while!), or Carolina Crown … just to name a few of the groups that have benefited from his writing and whatever it is that he does in order to teach an ensemble to make such sounds! Heck, he even wrote an arrangement that made me enjoy Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” — and there’s a tune I don’t care for at all.

Today, came the announcement: Michael Klesch will be inducted into the Drum Corps International Hall of Fame this summer.

Not a shock, exactly.

Bravo, sir.

Macy*s Parade Memories, Part 1: Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christm– Aaaaaaaaaaa!!

I just got to thinking about an event that I hadn’t thought about for quite a while.

 

Earlier today, there was BREAKING NEWS! My alma mater’s marching band was announced as a participant in the 2013 Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “Pretty cool,” I posted online, “and potentially pretty cold on Thanksgiving Morning.” In the great pantheon of high school and college bands, statistically speaking not too many bands get this gig. Very exciting!

What struck me as a trifle odd, as I read the press release, was the realization that I had been involved with a band that played New York City in this manner long before the Minuteman Band will have done. I’m not used to seeing news of an upcoming UMass gig and thinking, “yeah… been there.” Before joining the Minutemen, I’d never been to a Presidential Inauguration, or BOA Grand Nationals, or even the “Big E”. Or a UMass home game, for that matter.

But the Macy*s gig? Yes. Yes I have.

So, beginning here and probably continuing in a couple of blog posts to come, are a few memories of my NYC travels with director Joe Wright and the Boston University Terrier Marching Band, sixteen years ago (oh ouch).

 

What everyone sees of the Macy*s Parade is truly not the full measure of the experience. On Thanksgiving morning, NBC viewers tune in to what appears to be a variety show mounted on a runaway conveyor belt moving frantically across a stage whose backdrop is an art deco department store building. To be honest, I generally don’t watch the thing because I’m not that interested in singers on floats not really singing; lately too many of the “acts” have been thinly-veiled promotions for upcoming NBC sitcoms or similar entertainments; and I has heard all I wants to hear of Willard Scott mispronouncing names, and I don’t wants to hears no more.

In fact, the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade is quite a bit longer than one block long; a lot of the real fun comes as the bands march past an estimated three million people sitting on bleachers and standing six or seven deep, all along a parade route that starts at 77th Street and Central Park West. Never mind the estimated 44 million TV viewers – playing for three million live people amidst the urban canyons of New York City constitutes the kind of public exposure you almost can’t get in any other single live performance.

There are challenges. For one thing, for bands who will perform in this parade, it means designing a performance for the TV cameras which uses a “field” with parameters like no other (certainly with no yardlines or hashmarks), and which lasts for probably less than the length of a TV commercial – and nonetheless needs to display the character and personality of that band clearly. And… go.

In 1996, when I was a grad assistant with the BU band, the BUMB’s task was happily complicated somewhat, by the fact that we were the last performing unit in the parade. Therefore we had the honor of escorting Santa Claus (on his sleigh/float) into the square. What I remember most about the actual performance is marching into the square– well, truly, the Terrier Band entered the square very nearly on the run, played a quick Santa-esque tune, turned and jazz-ran out of the square. Don’t blink!– ’cause there they go. Yay Santa. All go home now.

In short – and I’ll get a little more detailed about a few things in ensuing posts on this blog – it was a wonderful, harried, amazing, hurry-up-and-wait, entirely surreal experience. I imagine that my impression of it is at least somewhat in line with others’: I only vaguely remember most of it … at the time it was almost entirely too cold, too early in the morning, and too inconvenient, and felt too much like we were being propelled along a nearly-out-of-control factory assembly line … and after the fact, I knew it was a great trip and I was really pleased that I got the chance to do it.

Knowing the Minuteman Band, for them it will be all these things and probably something more – something very uniquely UMass-more, I can imagine.

The Voice

There are lots of famous speaking voices in the world. They’re usually famous because they’re distinctive, either because of their tone and timbre or their unique cadence … distinctive enough that you wouldn’t mistake them for anyone else.

Such as?  Right off the top of my head, I think of people like Groucho Marx … John F. Kennedy … Woody Allen … Carol Channing … Johnny Carson … William Shatner … James Earl Jones … probably most of the cast of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” … and for those of us in the marching band world, there’s nothing quite like the voice of Chuck Henson.

… And, certainly in western Massachusetts, there was nothing like Jim MacRostie.

 

Jim MacRostie passed away this weekend.  He was a lot of things (I certainly learned some things from reading his obituary!), but perhaps his most public “gig” was, during the 1990s and much of the 2000s, as the voice of the UMass marching band. “Annnnd nowwww… please welllll-come… the POWERRRRR [just a bit of a growl to that word] and CLASS! [an ascent of at least a major sixth, in pursuit of that word] –of New England … … the University of Massachusetts .. Minuteman .. Marching .. BAND!”

There were those of us who thought his “AND NOWWWWW…” could be a wee bit over-the-top. Certainly, any time anyone holds forth in a booming voice, any mispronunications or halting turns of phrase are similarly amplified. Occasionally, particularly if it sounded as if perhaps MacRostie was improvising a bit toward the end of his post- postgame remarks, I would find myself murmuring with a combination of sympathy and embarrassment, “…ah, Jim…”

But if ever there was an organization that was a bit over-the-top itself, it would be the Minuteman Band. One might be forgiven for getting stentorian. When MacRostie began his UMMB intro, you couldn’t miss it. Sometimes it seemed he didn’t need amplification, so large was his voice.

The Jim MacRostie memory that makes me smile the most … is in fact a MacRostie impersonation. On a Drum Major Academy summer afternoon, one of my learned DMA staff colleagues unleashed his MacRostie impression on a dorm hallway full of other staff members — and it was so good and so funny that it cracked everybody right up, and caused one particular staff audience member to laugh in such a way that she almost literally couldn’t draw a breath. Part of the ferocious impact of his impersonation was thanks to his own rather humorous self — and surely part of that impact was due to the fact that the impersonator looked NOTHING like his source material — but if Jim MacRostie’s voice had been less distinctive, the impersonation might have fallen flat.  Or … he might never have ended up as the Voice of the Minuteman Marching Band to start with.

 

Perhaps when we next hear a rumble of thunder in the distance … it might be the start of a marching band show, up yonder.