Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 5, 1994 TAG: 9412050077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If the Grinch had been kicking around the mountains above Roanoke on Saturday evening, he would have had his shriveled little heart warmed by the mellow sounds rising up from the valley below.
No, it wasn't the serene "wa-hoo doray" of the Hoos down in Hooville, holding hands at the center of town.
It was a band of 70 tubas and the timid voices of spectators harmonizing on a dozen or so Christmas carols in the chilly evening air outside Tanglewood Mall.
Tubas? Just tubas? Playing Christmas carols?
Listen, you just haven't lived until you've heard the intricate harmonies and call and response of "Carol of the Bells" blasting triumphantly from a couple of thousand pounds of baritone brass.
This was no run-of-the-mill oompah band. It was a collection of tuba, sousaphone, euphonium and baritone players from as far away as Greensboro, N.C., and Baltimore conducted by a guy billed as a "distinguished tuba virtuoso."
Robert Chernault of the Brass 5 band and Leed's Music organized Roanoke's first "Merry Tuba Christmas." He said it's one of many that take place all over the country.
James Davis, 37, came all the way from Woodbridge to pucker up and play with his brothers and sisters in brass. He goes to a couple of the concerts a year. Davis - a husky fellow with hair halfway down his back, a Santa hat and thick beard - sat on the ground hugging a dinged-up tuba with one arm, his sheet music in the other hand.
He came to this one because he has friends in Blacksburg. But he doesn't play tuba with them.
"Our parties cause enough trouble with the neighbors without hauling out the heavy metal," he said.
Conductor Kevin Stees called out numbers from a song book, and with about an hour of rehearsal, the orchestra inhaled and sent the soothing tones of "Joy to the World" and "O Holy Night" out over the parking lot next to Applebee's Grill and Bar.
When the lights set up around the perimeter of the makeshift orchestra pit went out because of a blown fuse somewhere in the mall, the group squinted at the music and kept on puffing.
Ellen Hannan of Roanoke, a trombone player by trade who "gave up [her] slide tonight for valves," said she wouldn't have missed this for the world. She said there's a certain attitude among tuba players. As proof, she cites Garrison Keillor's "Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra." Keillor describes tuba players as the only guys in the band you are sure change their own oil.
"It's a small brethren," Chernault said. "There aren't that many of us."
Stees, the aforementioned virtuoso and a professor of tuba at James Madison University, said tubists labor under not only the weight of their instruments, but under a stereotype.
The defining characteristics: "A little dim-witted or slow, and usually overweight."
For the record, the professor weighs in at about 160 pounds.
The group gathered Saturday was an eclectic one, ranging in ability from concert musicians to beginners.
There was 85-year-old Kazim Band member John Edwards of Roanoke, who has been playing tuba since 1925. He sat next to Paul Vernon, an 11-year-old Hidden Valley Junior High School band member. Vernon took up the tuba four months ago.
"It's not something you see every day," said Radford University history teacher and trumpet player John Long, 28.
Erik Kahill, 16, a baritone player at Cave Spring High School, came because he gets points for lettering in band.
Would he have come if he didn't get the points? Of course.
"The tuba has been neglected too long," said Robert Wall, band director at Christiansburg Middle School.
But the tuba has been coming into its own of late. Chernault said concerts like this one have been going on since Dec. 22, 1974, when former Indiana University Professor Harvey Phillips got 350 tubists together in New York.
Phillips also organizes an annual fall tuba festival, called - what else? - "Octubafest."
After about thirty minutes, the guilty fuse was located and the lights came back on. The band played a few more songs. And then, though weary from clutching and kissing cold, heavy instruments for nearly an hour, they played an encore.
As they packed up their mouthpieces and horns, they patted one another on the back in a show of fraternity, and smiled with the sensation of a job well done.
But it was Paul Vernon, the littlest tubist, the Cindy Lou Hoo of the group, who perhaps best summed up the comfort one takes in being among one's own kind:
"If I made a mistake, no one could hear me."
by CNB