The Perfect Tuba

The Coolest Book in America

“A Mind Cleanse for our Time”

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Purchase: Amazon Bookshop.org Parnassus Books Warwick’s

Sam sells signed hardback copies of The Perfect Tuba, $25+shipping: samquinones7@yahoo.com

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The unexpectedly perfect sequel to Sam’s two books about America’s drug-addiction epidemic …

Stories of people finding fulfillment not from a product they buy … but from pursuing something they love, through hard work, with others, persevering through failure, yet without the promise of wealth or fame.

Great, offbeat American stories …

The two Perfect Tubas – the Chicago Yorks, the Holy Grail of tubas, which nine companies have tried to replicate – and two tuba players/engineers who figure they have the data to do it right.

And Zig Kanstul, the country’s greatest brass-instrument craftsman, whose last act is to try to save his company by replicating the perfect tubas.

 Tuba Woodstock, the first gathering of the national tuba tribe, igniting a tuba consciousness and the Tuba Civil Rights Movement, aimed at liberating the horn from the limitations others imposed on it.

There’s the love story of Tuba Fats in New Orleans. And of a man who built a 38-foot-long practice hall, long enough to fit a tuba sound wave, to liberate his horn once and for all.

The story of Chalino Sanchez, who made the tuba dangerous and hip in L.A.

There’s H.E. Nutt, who became like a Buddhist monk of band directing and sent thousands of students out to spread his gospel of proper baton technique.

 And the wondrous stories of South Texas band directors — Roma and Lopez high schools — who absorbed Nutt’s teachings and created systems for training kids too poor to afford music lessons, into bands that compete head-to-head with the state’s wealthiest schools.

A school band “Stand and Deliver.”

 Through these stories, Quinones came to see tuba players and band directors as an antidote to our time of addiction and the pursuit of “happiness” from something we buy.  They were, he saw, teaching the values that sustain community -- cultivating love for something through persistence despite failure, a love no drug can compete with.

The Perfect Tuba bellows with joy in strange true tales that are Quinones’ journalistic hallmark.

He offers another story of our nation—this of people brought together by shared joy, humble achievement, and hard work.