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"Last year, I beheaded someone." Heather Luck, flutist, is the instrumental music director at Steele Canyon High School in Rancho San Diego. "It was really cool. The kids loved it."
"We did a Civil War show," says Michael Benge from Helix High School. He is the associate music director and he plays trombone. "At the end, when we were finished, everyone on the field was dead."
Not to be outdone in this game of marching band halftime show one-upmanship, Mitchell Way, saxophone player and Helix band director chimes in. "When we did A Day In the Life?" He pauses for effect. "At the end, the band lay down and they all pulled a giant blanket over themselves." He grins.
It's the District Fall Showcase in November, an exhibition of High School marching bands in the Grossmont Union High School District and staged on the football field at Grossmont High School in El Cajon. It is billed as the grand finale for the school year. Following this performance, uniforms will go back into garment bags and mothballs. Music instruments will be packed away in cases that are plush-lined like small coffins.
There are ten bands in all tonight, performing, as Luck says for the fun of it.
"This is an exhibition for the district and the parents. The kids love it," she says, "because it's not a competition. There's no stress."
El Capitan's marching band is on the field as we speak. They are small in number with only 26 total kids, but they are doing some kind of routine featuring the music from the soundtrack of Avatar the film.
The drill team wears blue body suits.
For whatever reason, Luck has drastically toned down her school's season closer. No beheadings. "We're doing a pyramid instead."
Her school's band is larger than most here tonight but at 78 members, it is not huge by marching band standards. Some of the schools on the field in fact have as few as 15 musicians in their bands.
"We started with 14 kids," Luck admits. "What they needed [at Steele Canyon] was someone to promote the program."
But many of the other band programs in the East County district simply shrank for lack of funds. A sad state of affairs, says Michael Benge.
"The biggest bands in San Diego came from this district. Did you know that Helix went to the Rosebowl four times?" The Rosebowl being the Mecca for virtually all school marching bands.
Benge says the main culprit is the ACLU -- the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The ACLU doesn't want people to have to replace programs that go away for lack of regional or government funding. But the problem is that when this stuff goes away, it doesn't come back."
"They’re holding our feet to the fire to uphold the law that's always been there," says district executive director Mike Lewis.
"The law that public education should be free," explains Benge.
"You can't charge a kid to play football or be in band," says Lewis. "So any fundraising we do is voluntary. We can ask parents for a donation, but that's all. This has hurt everything considered an extracurricular activity. Consider the Associated Student Body (ASB) card," he says. "Kids don't have to buy those any more." He explains that ASB dues were at one time a huge source of funding for arts and sports programs. "That whole program has taken a big hit."
"You can complain about it," says Benge, "or you can find other ways." He says that fundraising, for example, has become an almost full-time job for High School band classes throughout the East County as compared to North County school programs which he says are well-funded.
Katie Leonard, who plays French horn, is the band director at Monte Vista high in Spring Valley. She has 36 kids in her marching outfit. She says academics, and not just underfunding, have eroded the numbers of kids available to suit up and play in band class.
"They're adding more units to graduate and they don't give physical education credits any more. The kids still have to take two years of PE, but now they have to do something else to make up the credits to graduate. Band ends up getting a lot of competition from other classes."
Both agree that district graduation requirements and ACLU enforcement, well-intentioned or not, have only served to diminish arts programs throughout the Grossmont Union High School District.
"But there's one group that is stronger than the ACLU," says Benge. "And that's the parents."
A small cluster of band moms stands in the shadows directly behind a band that is warming up on the Grossmont High School baseball field. They are bundled against the brisk, damp, dark bowl of a November night.
One of the moms is holding a trombone.
"A boy had to go to the bathroom. It was up to me hold his trombone. Otherwise it would have just laid on the wet grass." Is it her kid's bone? No.
Another mom is ministering to an eight grader, a trumpet player who is now bent over in the bushes, suffering from either pre-show jitters or a wicked case of food poisoning.
"Probably food poisoning. He must have eaten something bad," she says with that assuring tone of voice that is particular to mothers.
Later, one of the moms will say "you don't mess with us. We get things done." Indeed -- the band's parents are a force to be reckoned with. They dress the kids in their matching uniforms, make costume repairs, provide food and transportation, handle emergencies.
Meanwhile, the band blows long and sonorous tones that are intended to warm brass and mouthpieces. Another marching band does the same within earshot, but is out of sight. The world on the baseball field tonight is as large as is the reach of the portable lighting.
"Don't play splatty, trumpets," says the band director. The woodwinds warm up separately across the field due to intonation issues in the cold and damp. Better to ferret them out apart from the brass players. It occurs that there are no drummers present.
"Sometimes," says one of the band moms, "we don't even see the drum line until we go up on the field."
"The earliest marching bands in America," says Folkstreams.net, "were most likely the fifers, drummers, trumpeters, and pipers of Colonial-era militias." Essentially, these outfits existed as military adjunct: to pass orders in battle, to boost morale.
Some historians think that when the United States Marine Corps was formed in 1775, there were provisions made as well for a Marine Band. Marching bands were integral to the military existence.
By the 1860s, during the time of the Civil War brass instruments had become the norm. The marching band, peopled largely by African American musicians, had become a recruiting tool. Experts think that such marching bands may have drawn close to 200,000 young men into the ranks of both Yankee and Confederate armies.
The first halftime show by a marching band at a football game is said to have been created by the University of Illinois around 1900. It has since become part of the fabric of football game halftime shows. I learned to play sax, in fact, as a member of Ozzie's Marching Chargers, a unit that dated back to the 1960s, when Ozzie's Music on El Cajon Blvd in La Mesa was contracted to provide musical entertainment for the home team.
Last year, the Huffington Post ranked the 10 best college marching bands of all time. They are 1) Univ of Texas, 2) U of Michigan, 3) Ohio State, 4) Univ of Illinois, 5) USC, 6) Purdue, 7) U of Tennessee, 8) Ohio University, 9) Texas A&M, and 10) Jackson State.
When I was in high school, Will C. Crawford to be specific, San Diego State University was the marching band to beat. They seemed to number in the hundreds. They inhabited a field so much as marched onto it. In fact, they did not march. They ran, sometimes, in tight formation, and they blew like pros.
Not that I was any fan of such music. We'd actually been drafted into playing in the Crawford marching band as part of a graduation requirement. It was a decent enough trade-off that allowed certain others of us to play in the East San Diego school's award-winning jazz ensemble for which we got letterman's jackets.
I still have mine.
But the marching band experience itself was wicked. I remember freezing in those shitty summer-weight Crawford Colt band uniforms we had to wear, the legs of which were perpetually damp from the wet grass and muck we marched through on the field at night games.
I played alto sax, the most common of them due to size and cost. Since virtually every kid in the sax line had an alto back then, the instructor put me on baritone sax.
I was tall enough to be able to manhandle the giant horn across a football field and make sound come out of it, but I wasn't musician enough to compensate for the horrific intonation problems that were inherent to the battered old school district instrument.
Jazz sax wonder child Hollis Gentry, who also played alto sax, chose instead to replace graduating bassist Gunnar Biggs as drum major. I want to believe that the choice was made because Gentry refused to allow his beloved Selmer Paris to be defiled by such cheesy hoopla as we played in that forlorn unit: bad Stevie Wonder arrangements and so on.
The field light tonight inside Jack Mashin Stadium at Grossmont High School scours the football field and the 600+ parents and classmates in attendance in a cool blue-white. This lends an atmosphere of almost surreal proportion to the evening: day for night.
They are probably bright enough to be visible from outer space, these stadium lights.
And now, over one hundred kids in uniforms are double-stepping onto the grass with an authority punctuated by the rifle shot of a single snare. Now, the kids move as one unit. Earlier, they self-policed up to the field's perimeter in two shabby and smart-assed lines.
But once under the stadium lights, it is game on. The students take formation on the field in silence, improbably finding invisible marks on the field known only to themselves and to each other. They become identically uniformed points of reference in an imperceptible grid, their movements triggered by cues in a score that they have memorized.
Not a piece of sheet music in sight.
"Director," barks the emcee. "Is your band ready?"
But the director does not answer. In fact, he does not so much as acknowledge the question. He is in his zone. Instead, he counts a silent four beats with his hands. And suddenly, the stadium walls reverberate with the sound of 125 musical instruments. The music they make is huge. It is at once both frightening, and magnificent.
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/nov/15/35511/
"Last year, I beheaded someone." Heather Luck, flutist, is the instrumental music director at Steele Canyon High School in Rancho San Diego. "It was really cool. The kids loved it."
"We did a Civil War show," says Michael Benge from Helix High School. He is the associate music director and he plays trombone. "At the end, when we were finished, everyone on the field was dead."
Not to be outdone in this game of marching band halftime show one-upmanship, Mitchell Way, saxophone player and Helix band director chimes in. "When we did A Day In the Life?" He pauses for effect. "At the end, the band lay down and they all pulled a giant blanket over themselves." He grins.
It's the District Fall Showcase in November, an exhibition of High School marching bands in the Grossmont Union High School District and staged on the football field at Grossmont High School in El Cajon. It is billed as the grand finale for the school year. Following this performance, uniforms will go back into garment bags and mothballs. Music instruments will be packed away in cases that are plush-lined like small coffins.
There are ten bands in all tonight, performing, as Luck says for the fun of it.
"This is an exhibition for the district and the parents. The kids love it," she says, "because it's not a competition. There's no stress."
El Capitan's marching band is on the field as we speak. They are small in number with only 26 total kids, but they are doing some kind of routine featuring the music from the soundtrack of Avatar the film.
The drill team wears blue body suits.
For whatever reason, Luck has drastically toned down her school's season closer. No beheadings. "We're doing a pyramid instead."
Her school's band is larger than most here tonight but at 78 members, it is not huge by marching band standards. Some of the schools on the field in fact have as few as 15 musicians in their bands.
"We started with 14 kids," Luck admits. "What they needed [at Steele Canyon] was someone to promote the program."
But many of the other band programs in the East County district simply shrank for lack of funds. A sad state of affairs, says Michael Benge.
"The biggest bands in San Diego came from this district. Did you know that Helix went to the Rosebowl four times?" The Rosebowl being the Mecca for virtually all school marching bands.
Benge says the main culprit is the ACLU -- the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The ACLU doesn't want people to have to replace programs that go away for lack of regional or government funding. But the problem is that when this stuff goes away, it doesn't come back."
"They’re holding our feet to the fire to uphold the law that's always been there," says district executive director Mike Lewis.
"The law that public education should be free," explains Benge.
"You can't charge a kid to play football or be in band," says Lewis. "So any fundraising we do is voluntary. We can ask parents for a donation, but that's all. This has hurt everything considered an extracurricular activity. Consider the Associated Student Body (ASB) card," he says. "Kids don't have to buy those any more." He explains that ASB dues were at one time a huge source of funding for arts and sports programs. "That whole program has taken a big hit."
"You can complain about it," says Benge, "or you can find other ways." He says that fundraising, for example, has become an almost full-time job for High School band classes throughout the East County as compared to North County school programs which he says are well-funded.
Katie Leonard, who plays French horn, is the band director at Monte Vista high in Spring Valley. She has 36 kids in her marching outfit. She says academics, and not just underfunding, have eroded the numbers of kids available to suit up and play in band class.
"They're adding more units to graduate and they don't give physical education credits any more. The kids still have to take two years of PE, but now they have to do something else to make up the credits to graduate. Band ends up getting a lot of competition from other classes."
Both agree that district graduation requirements and ACLU enforcement, well-intentioned or not, have only served to diminish arts programs throughout the Grossmont Union High School District.
"But there's one group that is stronger than the ACLU," says Benge. "And that's the parents."
A small cluster of band moms stands in the shadows directly behind a band that is warming up on the Grossmont High School baseball field. They are bundled against the brisk, damp, dark bowl of a November night.
One of the moms is holding a trombone.
"A boy had to go to the bathroom. It was up to me hold his trombone. Otherwise it would have just laid on the wet grass." Is it her kid's bone? No.
Another mom is ministering to an eight grader, a trumpet player who is now bent over in the bushes, suffering from either pre-show jitters or a wicked case of food poisoning.
"Probably food poisoning. He must have eaten something bad," she says with that assuring tone of voice that is particular to mothers.
Later, one of the moms will say "you don't mess with us. We get things done." Indeed -- the band's parents are a force to be reckoned with. They dress the kids in their matching uniforms, make costume repairs, provide food and transportation, handle emergencies.
Meanwhile, the band blows long and sonorous tones that are intended to warm brass and mouthpieces. Another marching band does the same within earshot, but is out of sight. The world on the baseball field tonight is as large as is the reach of the portable lighting.
"Don't play splatty, trumpets," says the band director. The woodwinds warm up separately across the field due to intonation issues in the cold and damp. Better to ferret them out apart from the brass players. It occurs that there are no drummers present.
"Sometimes," says one of the band moms, "we don't even see the drum line until we go up on the field."
"The earliest marching bands in America," says Folkstreams.net, "were most likely the fifers, drummers, trumpeters, and pipers of Colonial-era militias." Essentially, these outfits existed as military adjunct: to pass orders in battle, to boost morale.
Some historians think that when the United States Marine Corps was formed in 1775, there were provisions made as well for a Marine Band. Marching bands were integral to the military existence.
By the 1860s, during the time of the Civil War brass instruments had become the norm. The marching band, peopled largely by African American musicians, had become a recruiting tool. Experts think that such marching bands may have drawn close to 200,000 young men into the ranks of both Yankee and Confederate armies.
The first halftime show by a marching band at a football game is said to have been created by the University of Illinois around 1900. It has since become part of the fabric of football game halftime shows. I learned to play sax, in fact, as a member of Ozzie's Marching Chargers, a unit that dated back to the 1960s, when Ozzie's Music on El Cajon Blvd in La Mesa was contracted to provide musical entertainment for the home team.
Last year, the Huffington Post ranked the 10 best college marching bands of all time. They are 1) Univ of Texas, 2) U of Michigan, 3) Ohio State, 4) Univ of Illinois, 5) USC, 6) Purdue, 7) U of Tennessee, 8) Ohio University, 9) Texas A&M, and 10) Jackson State.
When I was in high school, Will C. Crawford to be specific, San Diego State University was the marching band to beat. They seemed to number in the hundreds. They inhabited a field so much as marched onto it. In fact, they did not march. They ran, sometimes, in tight formation, and they blew like pros.
Not that I was any fan of such music. We'd actually been drafted into playing in the Crawford marching band as part of a graduation requirement. It was a decent enough trade-off that allowed certain others of us to play in the East San Diego school's award-winning jazz ensemble for which we got letterman's jackets.
I still have mine.
But the marching band experience itself was wicked. I remember freezing in those shitty summer-weight Crawford Colt band uniforms we had to wear, the legs of which were perpetually damp from the wet grass and muck we marched through on the field at night games.
I played alto sax, the most common of them due to size and cost. Since virtually every kid in the sax line had an alto back then, the instructor put me on baritone sax.
I was tall enough to be able to manhandle the giant horn across a football field and make sound come out of it, but I wasn't musician enough to compensate for the horrific intonation problems that were inherent to the battered old school district instrument.
Jazz sax wonder child Hollis Gentry, who also played alto sax, chose instead to replace graduating bassist Gunnar Biggs as drum major. I want to believe that the choice was made because Gentry refused to allow his beloved Selmer Paris to be defiled by such cheesy hoopla as we played in that forlorn unit: bad Stevie Wonder arrangements and so on.
The field light tonight inside Jack Mashin Stadium at Grossmont High School scours the football field and the 600+ parents and classmates in attendance in a cool blue-white. This lends an atmosphere of almost surreal proportion to the evening: day for night.
They are probably bright enough to be visible from outer space, these stadium lights.
And now, over one hundred kids in uniforms are double-stepping onto the grass with an authority punctuated by the rifle shot of a single snare. Now, the kids move as one unit. Earlier, they self-policed up to the field's perimeter in two shabby and smart-assed lines.
But once under the stadium lights, it is game on. The students take formation on the field in silence, improbably finding invisible marks on the field known only to themselves and to each other. They become identically uniformed points of reference in an imperceptible grid, their movements triggered by cues in a score that they have memorized.
Not a piece of sheet music in sight.
"Director," barks the emcee. "Is your band ready?"
But the director does not answer. In fact, he does not so much as acknowledge the question. He is in his zone. Instead, he counts a silent four beats with his hands. And suddenly, the stadium walls reverberate with the sound of 125 musical instruments. The music they make is huge. It is at once both frightening, and magnificent.
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/nov/15/35511/