The two Perfect Tubas – the Chicago Yorks, the Holy Grail of tubas, which nine companies have tried to replicate – and of 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, where the Tuba Civil Rights Movement began, aimed at liberating the horn from the limitations others imposed on it.
The Perfect Tuba
Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
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Sam sells signed hardback copies of The Perfect Tuba, $25+shipping.
Please contact him for details: 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 …
There’s the love story of Tuba Fats in New Orleans. And the story of the man who tried to corner the U.S. tuba market. And of another who built a 38-foot-long practice hall, long enough for 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, the short, thin aesthete, 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 teaching the values that sustain community -- cultivating love for something through persistence through failure, a love no drug can compete with.
Call it the tuba approach to life.
“I got into this to change course and write about something very different than drug addiction,” he says. “Then this tuba trek of mine became a book about repairing shredded community bonds. finding passion that cannot be purchased other than with focus and discipline. Tuba players and band directors, I realized, remind us of the answers to the problems I’d been writing about for the last dozen years.”
The Perfect Tuba bellows with joy in offbeat 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.