Yes, Virginia, there is … . And right this minute the yuletide frequent flyer, just in the door from his annual year-end accumulation of miles crisscrossing America`s night sky, a heap of warmed hearts in his wake, is plopped in an overstuffed chair in front of a roaring fire, sipping the first of his 12-eggs-3-pints-heavy-cream-1-pint-milk-t hree-quarter-pound-sugar-1-quart-Wild-Tu rkey-Bourbon-1-pint-each-Myers`s-Jamaica -Dark-Rum-and-Courvoisier-V.S.O.P.-Cognac eggnog.
He`s tugged off his uniform, the red and white furry one, and slipped into easy clothes, bib overalls and Tubasocks. He`s got the phonograph going, the first tunes he`s heard in days that don`t feature the oom-oom-oom of the tubas. (The pah, he`ll have you know, comes from the French horns.)
It`s Christmas morning, and the right jolly old elf is fresh from a 12-day, 18-city TubaChristmas tour of the country and is back home at
TubaRanch, his 104-acre spread outside Bloomington, Ind., so marked by the Tuba Street sign at the end of the drive, the helicon (a predecessor of the sousaphone) hanging from the side of the barn, the TubaSanta at the front door, and the seven tubas (two of them gold-plated) crowding the living room. (Such reverence is there around here for the four-letter T word, every time it`s used with another word, it`s preferred that the two be pushed into one and capitalized.)
Make no mistake. We`re talking Harvey Phillips here, distinguished professor of music at Indiana University, co-founder, past president and chairman of the board of Tubists Universal Brotherhood Association or T.U.B.A. (there are now more than 3,000 dues-paying members worldwide), and America`s No. 1 salesman, evangelist, ambassador and promoter of that orchestral underdog, the one that looks like a coiled clump of plumbing, the tuba.
It`s plenty easy, you might have noticed, to confuse Phillips with that other guy who`s believed to rack up millions of sky miles each December. His eyes how they twinkle. His dimples how merry. His cheeks, like roses, his nose like a cherry. His droll little mouth is drawn up like a bow. And he has a belly that shakes when he laughs, like a bowl full of jelly. All that`s missing is the beard, white as snow.
But, just like the other guy, he`s got energy to boot.
”I`m not exhausted, I`m inspired,” says Phillips, who for the last 18 years has packed up his ”Carols for a Merry TubaChristmas” song books, his crates of TubaChristmas knit caps and TubaChristmas scarves, and gathered the tubists of America for a low-note tribute to their instrumental heritage.
This year, TubaChristmas came to 126 American cities, a dotted line of burgs that bellowed forth from South Portland, Maine, to Lancaster, Pa., to Manhattan, Kan., to Kahului, Hawaii, and points between. TubaChristmas didn`t stop at the U.S. border. It took the leap to Munich. Unfortunately, Phillips, constrained by airline timetables and flight plans unlike that other jolly guy, could make it to only 18 stops this year.
He landed in Chicago the Wednesday before Christmas, on the eve of a TubaChristmas concert for 250 tubists who first practiced, then poured themselves onto the grand staircase of the lobby of the Chicago Hilton and Towers for a 37-minute bass and tenor blast. The tubists ranged in age from 10 to 69. They included an assistant general counsel for Sears, Roebuck and Co., a clerk from the liquor department at Osco, a signmaker, an actuary for an insurance company, a retired psychology professor and a half-dozen 5th graders.
They lugged tubas decked with boughs of holly, battery-operated flashing lights and tinsel by the yard. One arrived with a foot-high Christmas tree protruding from its bell, and another came complete with two stuffed bears, one stuffed moose, one string of lights, a rope of silver garland, a wreath made from dry-cleaning bags and a dozen red-velvet bows, all precariously attached with sticky tape and string.
”It`s so wonderful to see what TubaChristmas does to an audience, for an audience, with an audience,” says Phillips, who is beginning to sound a lot like another voice of Christmas, Burl Ives, as he sits and talks tuba in his hotel room the night before the Chicago concert.
Twinkling eyes
His eyes twinkling, you can almost see a videotape somewhere in there rewinding to the scene on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center, where two Sundays before Christmas some 380 tubists, ages 9 to 91, convened for one big holiday blow-out.
More than 30,000 New Yorkers, an unlikely lot for oohing and ahhing if ever there was one, came to listen. And, yes, they oohed and ahhed. Even wiped away a few tears, as often happens, Phillips says, when that many tubas break into an oxymoronic ”Silent Night.”
”In New York, there we were on the ice, under the big Christmas tree, our 18th year in a row. You can imagine what it does for a 9-year-old just getting started, when next to him is the tubist from the symphony orchestra, and then an 80-year-old enthusiast who`s so committed after all these years.” The twinkle now registers in mega-watts. ”And then to see how the audience reacts, it gives that 9-year-old tubist a pride and a purpose that I`m sad to say a lot of other instruments don`t have.”
If Phillips sounds like a man on a mission, he is. There is, he says, a rampant prejudice against the curled-up brass tube. Some dimwits consider it a clunker, a croaker or worse.
”All prejudice is born of ignorance. Racial prejudice. Religious prejudice. Instrumental prejudice, it`s born of the same thing.
”They want to limit the potential of the instrument based on their own limited experience with it. Even people who attend the symphony credit a beautifully played tuba to the (French) horn,” says Phillips, shaking his head in utter disbelief and not a little disgust.
”If the public prejudice is allowed to continue, great young talents will go unrecognized. So that`s one of my main missions in life.”
Dumb remarks
You can tell this tubist is used to moving tons of air. He doesn`t take a breath. ”Years ago, when I was championing the tuba, a colleague said:
`Harvey, what are you knocking yourself out for? You can`t change a thing.`
Well, prejudice is like crabgrass. You have to keep at it, or it`ll come back. ”Even now, after all these years, I can walk down the street with my tuba, and if I walk 10 blocks, I can get 10 dumb remarks.” (These include: Is there a parade today? Play anything good with that lately?)
”Some of the worst enemies of the tuba have been some of the people who played it and played it poorly. They don`t sing through the instrument. They belch through it.
”Or, as is the case of so many football marching bands, they play too loudly and incorrectly and give a large segment of the public a totally wrong perception of the instrument.”
Finally, at the end of this long stanza, Phillips takes a deep tubists`
breath but doesn`t miss a beat: ”The only reason Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel and-I could go on-the only reason they didn`t write for the tuba, they had no tuba to write for.
”Our instrument was one of the latest instruments developed. There could not be chromaticism (half-tone progressions) until the valve was invented, and the valve was not invented until 1815. It took another 20 years of experimentation before a valve cluster of three was added to the instruments, making them chromatic.”
Constant companion
Another breath, another stanza: ”Berlioz, who was one of the great orchestrators of the 19th Century, when he first heard the tuba, he went nuts. He fell in love with the tuba.”
So too did the man who now logs millions of miles on the instrument`s behalf. Forty-nine years ago, back in Marionville, Mo., the 10th of 10 children grabbed hold of the brass and never stopped blowing.
”Think of this,” says the 61-year-old. ”I started when I was 12. We entered World War II in 1942, and all the young men were joining the service. The one sousaphone player in our high school joined the Navy. Because I always hung around the band, and I always wanted to play but my folks couldn`t afford an instrument, the band director asked me, did I want to step in and play the sousaphone? I jumped at the chance.
”That instrument became my constant companion, you could ask any one of our friends or neighbors back in my hometown. I was working at the funeral home then. Before school, I`d stoke the furnace, straighten chairs. After school, I`d go back, mow the lawn, sweep snow. I rode my bike back and forth, and I carried that instrument on my shoulder. If I got a strong wind at my back, I could not even pedal. You could tack the bell like a sail on a sailboat.”
Phillips is telling the story with his eyes squeezed shut, his ample hand hooked on his chin. His wife, Carol, who always travels with him and ”is just about the best audience there is,” has just poured him a martini, which rests by his elbow. (The Phillipses have three sons, 27, 25 and 23, all tuba players. One is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon in Indianapolis, one is finishing law school and about to start medical school, and the youngest is in the Navy and plans to start business school in the summer.)
Phillips goes on to tell about how, when he was 15, he got a summer job playing a York BB-flat tuba with the King Bros. Circus in Waterbury, Conn.
”I`d never been away from home before, and this was quite a shock for me.”
He is interrupted by a ringing telephone, and news that a missing box of TubaChristmas caps and scarves has been tracked down, and will make it to the Hilton in time for the next day`s concert. These are the near-misses that come with living a UPS-Next-Day-Delivery kind of life.
Paganini to Iacocca
Back to his story, he tells about his step into the Big Ring with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Band, a four-year scholarship at the Juilliard School, and free-lance gigs with the Voice of Firestone Orchestra, Lucky Strike Hit Parade, Bell Telephone Hour Orchestra, Andre Kostelanetz Recording Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky Recording Orchestra and on and on.
He`s played Carnegie Hall, 24 times. He`s made solo appearances at the Mozart Festival in Vermont, with the U.S. Air Force Band, the U.S. Army Band, the Salvation Army New York Headquarters Band and on and on. And he gave the first-ever tuba concert at the Library of Congress.
Some days, he must wonder who he is. He has been called ”the Paganini of the tuba,” ”the Heifetz of the tuba . . . and the Segovia as well.” ”He is to the tuba what Carlos Montoya is to the guitar, or Gene Krupa is to the drums.” And then this: ”Harvey Phillips is to the tuba what Lee Iacocca is to Chrysler.”
`A good friend`
Phillips takes all this with the good cheer you`d expect of a 6-foot giant who has laid copyright claim to two religious holidays, TubaChristmas and TubaEaster; the secular star of one of those holidays, TubaSanta; two seasonal festivals, Octubafest and Summertubafest; a drawerful of household products, Tubatoothpaste, Tubaglue and ”anything that comes in a tube is fair game”; and no less than two months of the year, Octuba and Septuba.
”It`s been a good friend. The tuba has been a good friend,” says Phillips, whose work is far from finished, though he certainly deserves Christmas Day off, with his eggnog always in reach, and the tuba-less carols always on.
