DISQUS

Wow, sounds like a lot of stage work and a lot of money. My era was urban D&B, the last years of it, anyway, and the emphasis was maximizing exposure to error against performance quality. (When we played orchestral; or operatic stuff, for instance, the sopranos ended up with transcriptions of fucking violin parts.) Falcons was the epitome of that genre. Their OTL (which Gregg should still use as lead in music to his Podcast!) was considered really high end concert band literature, for a professional sit-down ensemble. Their redraft for a fielded D&B brass line kicked up the tempo on an already insanely difficult piece. I know a guy who recovered the chart and the soprano and mellophone parts look like clarinet etudes. Running sixteenth notes splashed across pages of manuscript. They came in 13th but, still, any time you mention Falcons around anyone who marched D&B in NJ around that time, they all squint and go, "oh, fuck; insane fucking show.'

I think he is confusing marching bands with competitive drum and bugle corps. Actually, since they dropped the G instrumentation, I haven't been able to tune in. I remember Bayonne actually kept their old valve-rotor horns into 1978 and lacquered them. The sound of field bugles with (2- and then 3-valve) clusters could be OK but it was still not as broad as the old valve-rotor instruments. Now that they've switched to band/orchestra instruments, you don't get any of the sonic shock of the field instruments when you have twisted, haunted, enraged kids on them. It's amazing to listen to Anaheim's 1972 show - they won DCI - and realize they fielded 44 guys on the horns and turned the stadium to fucking talcum powder. This summer I saw 70+ man horn lines that placed in DCI but sounded like wind symphonies with dance companies. Prommy would have liked 1975 Chicago. He'd be one of those guys who stood and screamed all the way through Russian Christmas Music and spilled beer on people and gotten beaten up by alumni from the Toronto Optimists or something.

Right. Spraying more money around like we've been doing the last 15 years will fix everything.

This comment system bites donkey balls!