The Perfect Tuba
Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
From National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Sam Quinones, the story of a demanding instrument, the determined people who play it, and the hope they offer a fractured nation.
"[A] delightfully offbeat book with unexpectedly profound overtones."-The Wall Street Journal
The tuba's sound is mighty, emerging, it seems, from deep in the human body. Very little music has, up until recently, been written to play to its strengths. The best the tuba seems to promise is a seat at the back of the band. No stadium shows, no Internet adulation. And yet, this horn-the youngest of all brass instruments-has captured the hearts of an inspired group of musicians ever since its invention in 1835.
In The Perfect Tuba, Sam Quinones embarks on a trek to get to know American tubists. He tells the astounding stories of two men who set out to replicate the "perfect tuba," an instrument made by York & Sons in the 1930s and never since equaled; of Big Bill Bell, whose 1950s album rearranged the tuba landscape; and of Arnold Jacobs, a tuba guru at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who studied the physiology of breathing and offered rune-like nuggets of wisdom to his legions of students. Quinones also takes us through the tuba scenes of New Orleans, Orlando, Knoxville, New York City, and, most importantly, Roma, Texas, a dusty town in the Rio Grande Valley where a visionary high school marching band director fashioned a program that now regularly wins state championships and sends its students off to college.
After nearly a decade on the front lines of America's battle with drug addiction, Sam Quinones delivers another story of our nation, this time brought together by the transformative power of shared joy and humble achievement.
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Journalist and NBCC award winner Quinones (The Least of Us) assembles an eclectic and affectionate ode to the tuba and those who devote their lives to it. Roaming far and wide through the instrument's history, he highlights legends like New Orlean's Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen (1950–2004), who innovated New Orleans jazz and blues, and New York's Bill Bell (1927–2005), who played with the New York Philharmonic as well as in Broadway shows and circuses (and may have kept a sousaphone in a Grand Central Station locker so he could join parades on short notice). Elsewhere, the author captures the tuba's role in genres ranging from jazz to punk rock, explores its ubiquitous presence in marching and military bands, and spotlights musicians who have spent their careers mastering the instrument. Along the way, Quinones emphasizes the tuba's unique demands on musicians, like the mega lung capacity and impressive lip musculature needed to produce a special ear-throbbing sound called "grit" (which fills halls and stadiums but is "not necessarily pretty to hear close up"). Quinones finds in the tuba and those who play it a surprisingly moving symbol of tenacity in today's hectic, destabilizing world—a quiet willingness to work at one's "craft, usually alone, in spite of the... indifference of others" in pursuit of that "which cannot be purchased other than by hard work, preparation and persistence." Attesting to the tuba's central place in American music, this exuberant love letter resonates.
