Seventeen-year-old Manny Cordova knows that some of his schoolmates at St. Rita of Cascia High School think he’s a geek.
A band geek.
But Cordova, a senior, said he is “having a blast” this year as drum major and trombone player for the flashy Marching Mustangs of St. Rita, located at 7740 S. Western Ave.
And right after seeing the opening-night performance of the musical extravaganza “Blast!” with the rest of the Marching Mustangs and their band director, Cindy Gradek, Cordova happily tossed the dreaded term into his impromptu review.
“This show is where band geeks go and perform, and this is their future,” said Cordova. “It was the best thing I ever saw in my life. It gave me the shivers.”
For St. Rita trombonist Peter Ferreri, seeing “Blast!” was “the pinnacle of being in band. I’m going right home and put on the CD.”
You could call it Revenge of the Band Geeks.
Take a Big Ten football game half-time show. “Stomp,” the brass section of a big band, hyperkinetic drumming, turn the volume up, all the way, and you have “Blast.”
With musical numbers ranging from Ravel’s “Bolero” to the sensuous finale, “Malaguena,” plus Broadway, jazz, blues and techno-pop in between, “Blast!,” which plays through Sunday at the Oriental Theatre, manages to bring down the house again and again.
“Blast!,” in other words, makes band cool.
As one former percussion player for the University of Illinois’ Marching Illini who still loves to crank Sousa on the car stereo says: “If marching band members could go pro, like football players, `Blast!’ would be their NFL.”
Northwestern University music education major Tim Fawkes, a drum major and trumpet player for the school’s marching band who also attended the opening of “Blast!” said: “It is really wonderful that people will come see this show and get a different idea not just about marching bands, but also music in the schools. I was sitting in the theater amazed at how far this kind of activity has come. It started as a very militaristic thing, but to see all this different kind of entertainment, with the twirling and tossing and drumming and the variety of music, is really awesome.”
Added Northwestern mellophone player Julie Dawson, a senior from Austin, Texas, majoring in German and ethnomusicology, “It’s so exciting for musicians to be up there onstage and have their moment in the spotlight.”
Dawson, who conceded it may seem geeky to others that band members “get a kick out of marching around in the snow and rain,” pointed out that the Northwestern band has “an official band geek” who is elected every year, and wears a sort of toy monkey on his or her back. “It’s a long-standing tradition,” she said. The geek’s duties are “to act, well, geeky.” (The NU band geek, a musician in the group, does not perform as geek on game days, confining that role to rehearsals, added Dawson.)
Fawkes, Dawson and two fellow musicians, who practice 15 hours a week with their 160-member group, stood under the Oriental Theatre marquee after the “Blast!” opening, offering their insiders’ perspective on why the show makes being a band geek seem super-cool. They noted that, like any talented and well-rehearsed performers, the 60 cast members of “Blast” (average age: 23) make extraordinarily difficult moves look effortless, from split-second timing on baton catches to lunging while playing a tuba.
Kimberly Bohannon, a senior from Boise, Idaho, who plays a 42-pound sousaphone in the NU band, said she had been watching the tubas. “I was really impressed with the way the players moved so precisely and rapidly without running into each other onstage with such large instruments.”
Moving and playing at the same time looks deceptively simple, explained Dawson. “You have to remain stationary from the waist up,” keeping the instrument very steady to make it sound good. “I don’t think people give enough credit to the physical energy it takes to play in a marching band,” she added. “It’s also mentally taxing. You have to be very conscious of what you’re doing and you’re blowing out the whole time. After any show, we’re all breathless.”
And sweaty?
“You could probably wring out a glass of water from your clothes after a long day of playing,” said NU percussionist and Glenview native Rob Siwiec.
In “Blast!” cast members aren’t merely marching or high-stepping, noted Fawkes, “they are doing all sorts of movement, leaping and tossing their horns.” To master the high-flying catches, with several cast members synchronized on a single beat, “you develop a technique to control the number of spins for the baton,” said the NU drum major. “You say, this is going to spin three times, or eight times or 25 times, and the timing of when you toss and when you catch is based on the number of spins.”
And then there is the exhausted-lips challenge for brass players. “When you play brass for any length of time,” said Fawkes, “it really creates a lot of fatigue in your lips. It’s a big endurance issue, but I thought [the “Blast!” horn players] had a really great sound through the whole show.”
St. Rita of Cascia High School band director Cindy Gradek had some thoughts on why her quick-stepping, music-loving band members seem geeky to some students: “That has always been a perception of people who aren’t involved because they have no clue what the [band] kids have going for them.
“I think you tend to have your smarter kids in band and maybe some are the more non-athletic kids. In today’s society, athletics is king, so sometimes if you’re not involved in athletics, you’re considered a geek, whether you’re in band or chess club.
“But if you compare it to athletics, the sports teams always have a bunch of people riding the bench. In the band, everybody is out there performing.
“We don’t have anybody sitting on the sidelines. The kids know they’re going to be ridiculed at times, but they’re confident in who they are and they feel good about themselves.”
According to Cordova, “The football players feel we don’t work as hard as they do because we just play instruments. And sometimes we get made fun of for wearing our uniforms” (which are royal blue and black with red and silver sashes, gloves and plumed hats).
“But mostly we just blow it off,” added the drum major. “The other kids don’t understand how cool being in band is. If we could take the whole school and bring them to `Blast!’ I bet they would have a whole different perspective.”
