The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band and Hard Work

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. (Sept.)