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I've spoken quite a few times about my friend (growing up in a very modest home as the son of a working mom railroad widow) who was an amazing talent in high school on the tuba, worked very hard several hours every night after school with a fiberglass model 36k Conn sousaphone, took on a very large wee hours paper route to help support the family, and auditioned into the Army (12th grade - no lessons...ever) and was put into Pershing's Own a year or so later - when there was an opening (this, during the Vietnam draft era, when young men were stepping on each other's heads trying to get into any military band anywhere).

This memory involves when I was in the 11th grade (he in the 12th) and he and a couple of others encouraged me to try out for the regional honor band thing, ensuring me that I would make the band and that I would be able to get out of school, play with a good band, and have some fun. The only reason that I was the least bit interested in playing the tuba was because of how well he played it. Again, I was really just an (underage but tall) gigging solo guitar player who was playing tuba in school as a "class", and was putting in as many hours practicing the guitar as my friend was putting in practicing the tuba.

Okay, of course my friend was awarded first chair in that band and also first in the All-State band (as he always was since 8th or 9th grade), and I (as I had been told that I would) made the band as well.

It's funny how - prior to the internet and social media - everyone in all these schools that were spread out all over our fairly large city and even our portion of the state knew or knew of all of the "big hitter" players in all the various high school bands...As an example, all the boys who played the tuba knew that - before and after my friend always made first in the regional and state bands, that there was no chance of being awarded those chairs, because our high school always took them, and indeed took it many years before him and several years after him.

There were a pair of brothers (who attended another school) who played trumpet and percussion. For some reason, the percussionist was very well liked and the trumpet player wasn't particularly liked. I believe it may have been because the percussionist (who is still an active timpanist to this day in Upstate New York) was very talented and absolutely modest and the trumpet player was fairly talented and a bit presumptuous.

Just as often happens with hurry-up cattle-call high school tryouts for honor bands, judges don't always sort out the players quite as they should be sorted. The trumpet player ended up being first in the band, even though everyone in the band knew that another young man - who was placed second and went to a private Catholic school - should have been first.

The (judged as first) trumpet player wanted to show off to the section and to the band and brought his new C trumpet, and did not bring his B flat at all.

*Clarence Sawhill (who had just retired from UCLA) had been brought in as the guest conductor, noticed the C trumpet at the first rehearsal, and said something about it, including hoping that it wouldn't end up being a problem.

OK... I guess during all the rehearsals it wasn't a problem, but Sawhill finished up the show with the Carmen Dragon "America the Beautiful" arrangement. As most who are reading this will recall, there's some triple tonguing in the trumpets at the very end, and it's pretty easy on B-flat trumpet with pitches fingered as first finger, no valves and first finger... but - with a C trumpet - the penultimate pitch is fingered with the tenuous 2-3 valve combination on the 8th partial. Sure enough, that not particularly popular trumpet player splatted that pitch at the end of those triplets.

As we all stood up to take our final bow, I remember my friend (the amazing tuba player) turning his head over towards that splatting trumpeter and yelling "YOU CLOD !!!!!" at him.


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* http://uclaband.com/Files/sawhill/index.htm

“Clod”

Thank you for posting the link to Dr. Sawhill's biography. He and the head of the music department at little Tarleton State College (now University) in my home town had a connection/friendship over many years, and he came to direct the summer band camp there starting in 1948 and ending well over 20 years later. The first year I played tuba (9th grade), I was at camp when he made the offer to work with anyone who wanted extra help after rehearsal. I wound up hogging as much of his free time that week as I could, and he is the person who actually taught me to produce a true tuba sound. After high school, he asked that I teach tuba at that camp, and I always looked forward to working with him. As his biography says, he made people feel very comfortable. The last time he did the camp, the tuba section was pretty weak so he asked that I play on the final concert. I was supposed to pick up my then fiancée (now wife of 52 years) from her job an hour and a half away at the time of the concert. I couldn't tell him no, so I was over two hours late picking her up. She never said a word about it, and it's a wonder she didn't dump me right then. Thanks for bringing back great memories of a great man.

And your story was a good one. Trumpet players and their egos.

I enjoyed that two or three days of rehearsals and concert. It was the first time I'd done something like that except for back in the 8th grade when I was volunteered by my junior high band director to be in something called the "All City Band" for younger players. When I was in that kiddie junior high honor band, I probably only knew two or three scales in one octave, and probably would have been made uncomfortable had I been shown an E flat up in the staff or certainly an F or G.

The summer before 9th grade, though, I was well aware of my future year-older friend/colleague (referred to in the original post here - who was already playing the tuba at a professional level) and his tuba prowess, so I got a hold of a school sousaphone, went up into the attic, and learned all 12 major scales in at least two octaves - as well as figuring out how to play all of the false tones down to double-low B-flat. (A decent mouthpiece would have helped a lot, but whatever about that.)
I also went through the entire concert folder and tried to wig out some of the more difficult tunes such as the Holst Suites, "Universal Judgment", and such. I also worked my way through the 70 or 80 (real) marches in our little paper march folios (as that era predated "junk" pep band music).
Rather than being taught a handful of concert pieces by rote, during that era we were expected to be responsible for the entire thick/years-established concert folder, as well as the thick cardboard covered little march folios. Even if we didn't rehearse something in that march folio, we were expected to be able to play it - if the band director called it up at a football game.
As far as making that semi-quantum leap in playing prowess during that summer in my parents attic: Simply: I didn't want to be thought of as a "clod" either.
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As memories trigger memories, I'm now remembering that the band was pulled together in mid-June (before my first year in the senior band, though the upcoming ninth graders were pulled in in May to play at graduation) to march in a Flag Day parade in downtown Memphis, and there was going to be a cash award for the best band. We worked out a little marching show to do on the street, and brought home that money - which helped pay for our annual band camp, which was two weeks each year up in the woods of northeast Arkansas. At that camp, we worked on parade marching, the basic parts of a halftime show (whereby the middle of it could be changed weekly), concert band music, and jazz band music. During the hottest part of the afternoon, we hiked about a mile and swam in the big lake - Lake Charles - that was in the same state park. Each night, we had a big campfire and people would tell stories, sing gospel songs in harmony, or play guitars and sing pop tunes and such. Most nights, I would play one or two solo pieces on my nylon string guitar that I would play (movie themes, arrangements of popular songs, Bossa Nova for dancing, etc.) when hired to entertain at people's cocktail parties and such. We all slept in old green canvas tents that the band owned.
(These days, bands don't actually "camp", do they?)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+ ... 91.1528536