Marching to Another Octave

The best part of watching a good high school marching band is watching the tuba players move backward.

Leave grace to others. Let the trumpets prance like stallions. When it's crunch time, tubas know the score. They may look, delicately backpedaling, as if they're trying to remove large appliances from a small apartment without slamming through a wall. But let's see you try it.

Like many tuba players, those at Buchanan High School have the work ethic of longshoremen as they practice under a warm November sun.

Even at midday, it sits low in the southern sky, baking what may be one of the last sunny days of the year in the Valley. The grass on the school's practice field is brown and muddy, a barely distinguishable touch of green fighting to survive a season underfoot.

Sweat drips, particularly off the tuba players, who must lug "45 pounds of twisted metal," as Buchanan's Chris Arredondo fondly describes his instrument, everywhere they march.

And, yes, technically they know they're not tubas but sousaphones. There's something about being wrapped inside your instrument that puts you at one with your boisterous side.

Arredondo is no exception. He's loud and proud, and his band is on a tear. One of 55 schools entered in Saturday's Western Band Association championships in Fresno and Clovis, Buchanan has won two straight titles the past two weekends against some of the biggest high school marching bands in the state. (Bullard also won the Big Orange Classic title last weekend, for small schools.)

Buchanan's tuba players start, as they often do, in the middle of things. But as the band weaves its way through practice, the tubas waltz toward one end of the field, often on their heels and backward.

Imagine Fred Flintstone tiptoeing out the door while carrying Dino on his shoulders and around his neck. Or Michael Jackson moonwalking while removing every last gold record from his den into the front yard in one trip.

You get the idea. But here's the thing: Tuba players don't care if you find them comical. In fact, they kind of like it that way.

"We know how to have fun, and we know how to turn it on," Arredondo says. "We also know how to be serious."

It's a given in marching band circles. Tuba players? They're different.

Chris Whiteman, one of the tuba section leaders at California State University, Fresno, has played the instrument for 10 years.

"I have noticed some differences between tuba players and regular human beings," Whiteman says. "Tuba players are a special breed. Tuba players are the craziest bunch of people in the band."

First to arrive. Last to leave. The ones with embarrassing nicknames for one another. Most likely to be found behind the opponents' bench at Fresno State football games, taunting players right before halftime.

"We never swear," Whiteman says. "We just say things like, 'We hope you guys are getting a good education wherever you are, because you're not going anywhere in football.'

"I've had water spit on me. I've had cups of water thrown at me. It's just a fun thing we do. We just start something everywhere we go."

That being assaulted with fluids counts as fun says all you need to know about tuba players.

"Sometimes tuba players can be real pains," says Daniel Pena, marching band director at Sanger High School. Sanger also will compete this weekend. "But if you don't have a good tuba sound, you're not going to be any good."

Besides, their antics can infuse a band with the energy they need to play at their best.

Travel can be a bear. The Buchanan band left at 7 a.m. Saturday for the Big Orange Classic in Riverside last weekend. Their slot was at 6 p.m. Some band members got home at 5 a.m. Sunday.

"When we go places, it's usually a long day," says Whiteman, who will perform an exhibition with the Fresno State band this weekend at the championships. "You start to drag around sometimes. But we get excited, and we yell about it."

Players often feel as if the instrument chose them, and not the other way around.

"I was the biggest kid in class" as a fifth-grader, says Whiteman, who now stands 6-foot-8 and 300 pounds. "It was like, 'OK, who can carry it home by themselves?' It was like it was in my DNA."

Arredondo also first picked up the instrument in fifth grade. He was out sick the day everyone chose what they would play. He came back and asked what was left.

So the tuba it was.

"You can almost look at a person and say, 'You should be [playing] this,'" says Key Poulan, Buchanan's marching band director. "One thing tuba players need is to love to dance with their instrument. . . . They've got to have strength. They've got to be outgoing."

Pena says tuba players are kids who aren't afraid "to put air through the instrument."

"That's probably why you get tuba players who stand apart from the rest of the crowd," Pena says. "They're wild and crazy. If you have a tuba section that's gung-ho, they can take your band far."

Larry Huck, who organizes the annual Tuba Christmas in Fresno, says he knows no introverted tuba players. In 26 years teaching music at\ McLane High School, he found the loudest students made the best players.

"They usually are the most-loved members of the band," says Huck, 70, who's retired now. He switched from trumpet about 20 years ago, in part because the tuba is a little easier to play competently but also because he enjoys the camaraderie.

"You know that you are the bottom, the most important, even more than the melody," Huck says. "They're the foundation of the band. They play the part that everything else is built upon."

Such responsibility attracts a certain breed of musician; one likely, the Buchanan players say, to sometimes feel a stronger connection with tuba players in other bands than they do with other sections of their own band.

Arredondo says they sometimes share tips about their "horn moves."

"Wanna see?" he asks.

The Buchanan senior starts with his tuba on the ground. As he lifts, he begins spinning like a discus thrower, and the tuba jumps in his hands, up his arms, sunlight glinting off the shiny metal. Tellingly, the other tuba players back up a step or two.

They've seen this thing fly before.

But there are no mishaps as Arredondo finishes his moves, the tuba landing gently on his shoulder. He flashes a self-satisfied smile.

"That's what four years of playing tuba will get you," he says.

Don Mayhew is a general assignment reporter in the Features Department of the Fresno Bee, in Fresno, Calif., where he has worked since 1978. He's reporter primarily on pop music during the past five years. He is mocked mercilessly by his wife and three children for his inability to carry a tune while singing along to the stereo in the car and has never seriously considered picking up a tuba, much less blowing air through one.