Dec. 19, 2005
 
COMMENTARY: A Big, Hearty Bass Round of Kudos to Christmas Tuba Players
 
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
 
Huntington, WV (HNN) – To all those who missed the Tuba Christmas Concert in Pullman Square Saturday afternoon, Dec. 17, 2005, sooorrry! You really missed some wonderful music performed on tubas and euphoniums, their higher-pitched cousins, by a hastily assembled but great-sounding ensemble. Musicians came from all over the Tri-State to bring Christmas joy to Pullman Square.
 
I don’t think there’s a better instrument for Christmas music than the tuba. A band of tubas needs no amplification and the mellow, resonant sound is perfect for crisp winter days. But, then again, I’m prejudiced, having played sousaphone in my Illinois high school marching band and playing the tuba – there’s only one – in our award-winning orchestra. I was converted from my trombone ways (I still wake up the neighborhood occasionally with my valve and slide trombones) by a music teacher who saw potential in my broad shoulders and substantial size. It takes a big person to march with an all-brass sousaphone. We didn’t have the lighter weight fiberglass ones back in the 1950s.
 
A couple of decades later, as a reporter and editor at The Milwaukee Sentinel, in my off hours I played an over-the-shoulder B flat bass in the 1st Brigade Band, a Milwaukee area Civil War re-enactor band that’s the oldest and one of the most accomplished in the nation. I wore a Union Blue uniform – it’s a Wisconsin band, after all and I grew up in the Land of Lincoln – and played an antique horn with the bell facing rearward. The instruments were designed this way so the troops could hear the music better. Even the arrangements were authentic, based on charts of the 1850s and 1860s. For more info on the 1st Brigade band, check out: www.1stbrigadeband.org.
 
I saw and heard my first Tuba Christmas concert – now a nationalwide phenomena with concerts played at hundreds of towns and cities, including, I hope, Tuba City, AZ -- at UCLA in Los Angeles, in the 1980s. I was living in the Los Angeles area in 2000 and heard one outside the restored Alex Theatre on Brand Boulevard in Glendale, a big L.A. suburb. Five years later, I heard the Pullman Square ensemble. Although I haven’t actually played a tuba in decades, I always get teary-eyed listening to the wonderful sound of a tuba ensemble.
 
Tuba people are among the nicest I’ve ever met. They play instruments that rarely carry the melodic line, but without a solid foundation of deep bass instruments, even the largest bands sound wimpy. More power to the tuba and more power to the Tri-State Tuba Christmas ensemble!