THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512220227
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
There's an old musician's joke about the violin player lost on the streets of New York. He asks a passer-by, ``Hey man, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?''
The answer is quick: ``Practice, man, practice!''
But that's a lot more truth than joke to Andy Omdahl, Marine Corps captain and commander-in-chief of the trumpet. Twenty-some years ago, he met Doc Severinsen, the trumpet virtuoso of the ``Tonight Show.'' Severinsen autographed a music book for Omdahl with the same no-nonsense message: ``To Andy - Practice.''
It sounds simple, but practice means discipline, and here was a star reminding a youngster that discipline was the only way to go. ``An inspiration,'' Omdahl said the other night. ``It made an indelible imprint on me.''
Indelible, indeed. Omdahl, who teaches at the Music and Arts store in Greenbrier, maintains a relentless daily 2-hour-plus practice schedule. Music is central in his life.
``Music for me,'' he says, ``is a deep emotion, a psychological release. When I'm playing, I'm set free.''
He comes from a family both musical and Marine. His dad was a career Marine who played the clarinet and sang barbershop harmony. His mother played the piano and sang barbershop, too. So it was a natural event when a Boy Scout troop in Cherry Point, N.C., needed a bugler and he answered the call.
It wasn't long before he graduated to a trumpet. His role models were players like Severinsen and band leader Maynard Ferguson, both technicians capable of blowing the roof off the Astrodome. But his first teacher, a retired circus trombone player, taught him the importance of good tone and stamina. Circus music, loud, long and constant, can be the orchestral equivalent of running a marathon.
Omdahl's next teacher instilled the perfectionism that still challenges him. ``I would spend a week on one chunk of music,'' Omdahl says, ``and it seemed to me that there was always something new and exciting.''
After high school, he spent some time on the road with a rock band. ``It got old real quick,'' he says. Then he followed his father's lead into the Marine Corps.
Ah, the music of boot camp. Like the baritone voice of the platoon drill instructor screaming the recruits awake. There was a percussion section, too; the sound of the instructor kicking trash cans to chase any last traces of sleep.
Trumpeter or not, Omdahl wasn't about to volunteer to toot a more mellow reveille. ``The bugler had to get up half an hour before anyone else,'' he says.
But Omdahl graduated honor man of his platoon and embarked on a Marine Corps career that has given him the chance to play all kinds of music for all kinds of audiences. His Tidewater visitations have included duty at the Armed Forces School of Music in Little Creek, and that's where he is now.
A high note for him came in 1986 when he led a 126-piece Marine Corps band in the Tournament of Roses parade. When I said how I admired those ultra-snappy Marine dress blues, he said they were form-fitting and high-collared; a semi-straitjacket when it came to playing a horn.
``But we were Marines, and Marine Corps pride took over,'' he said. ``We marched six miles and gave 110 percent.''
A tour of duty in New Orleans whetted his enthusiasm for Dixieland music, a free-wheeling jazz sound. Omdahl calls it a kind of musical vacation from the strict confines of metronomed times and notes on a printed page. In his non-Marine Corps hours he has played almost 200 jobs - musicians call them ``gigs'' - this year; everything from small combos to the big bands that re-create the wonderfully relaxed precision of bands like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.
It seems odd, but he doesn't listen to recordings of other trumpet players. He doesn't want their styles to influence his. ``I don't want people to say, `You sound like so-and-so,' '' he explains. ``I want to sound like me.''
He'll tell you, too, that he likes to plan things with a musician's mental discipline, that music is unbeatable for teaching diligence and teamwork. And music is a lifetime companion, a sort of eternal emotional teddy bear for flagging spirits.
He makes me realize that one of the great regrets of my life is that I didn't get serious about playing my trumpet 50 years ago. Go learn to make your own music, friends, even if it's on a kazoo. You won't regret it.
Meanwhile, I doff an admiring hat to Omdahl, still perfecting and polishing. Hey, Doc Severinsen, you told him to practice and he took your advice to heart, to lip and to lung. by CNB