The Perfect Tuba: How Band, Grit, and Community Build a Better Life (with Sam Quinones)

Sam Quinones: Well, it’s great to be back with you, Russ. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure talking with you.

Sam Quinones: Well, you were very much like I was. I do not play the tuba. I was never in marching band. I knew zero about the tuba when I started this. I wrote a couple of stories. At one point, there came upon–I was at the LA Times [Los Angeles Times]–there was this report that tubas were being stolen from the high schools, predominantly in the Mexican areas. And I knew why. It was because the tuba had become this huge instrument in Mexican LA. Very, very important. I grew up in Southern California; it was the guitar back then. Now it’s the tuba, took over.

And, the reason for that is varied, but it has a lot to do with Mexican immigrants wanting to show how well they’ve done. And so they hire bands with tubas, and big, brass, golden things, and just gorgeous stuff. And, because of this popularity of the tuba in that area, you were getting lots of tubas stolen. So, I wrote two stories in a month–two front-page stories at the LA Times in a month–about tubas in Los Angeles.

And from then on, I just began to interview tuba players. And I could not tell you why, Russ. I was in the middle of these books right here, the Dreamland book, which is about the opioid epidemic. I was just getting going on that. And I just kept on interviewing tuba players. But, mostly, I think it was because I found–and these were not just Mexican tuba players, this was all sorts–they were people who did it because they truly loved it. They truly loved it. There was no promise of wealth or fame. You could not name a tuba player. I couldn’t at the time. And, I just kept on interviewing them without any point really. It was just random stuff, but with the faith that I had learned from my journalism career that if you stick with people who are doing something productive and positive with their lives, they will generate great stories.

And so, I kept on doing it as I wrote Dreamland about the opioid epidemic and Oxycontin, and all that. And then, The Least of Us, which is about the Mexican trafficking world and switching to fentanyl and methamphetamine. And these were all very grim things. And then, after those books were done, my agent–I said, ‘I can’t write any more about this extraordinarily grim topic. It’s really about people looking for happiness from something they buy.’ And, she said, ‘You should see what book you might be able to write about that tuba project that you had told me so much about.’ So, that’s what got me into it–without, again, knowing a thing about really the horn, or certainly not how to play it.

Sam Quinones: I play the guitar. I grew up in the 1970s in Southern California, man. Half my friends played the guitar, everybody played the guitar. Those days are over. We used to have five or six guitar shops within a three-, four-mile radius of my house. Those days are gone, for sure.

So, no, I don’t. I love music. I’ve listened to all forms of music all my life. So, I just got into this. But, then, see, what really got me going was I began to find–I wanted to find a path away from writing about addiction. And what really started me down that path were these beautiful, beautiful stories. As a journalist, I was very attracted to amazing stories of liberation. Really, the tuba in its essence is about liberation. It starts , first, I think, with the great Bill Bell. Bill Bell was the greatest tuba player of his time, worked for the New York Philharmonic. And, his importance is that he recorded the first solo tuba record ever.

Sam Quinones: So, in 1957–what’s that?

Sam Quinones: There were none at that time. There are many more now, but there were none at that time.

But, what most struck me was that all the tuba players, the young kids at the time in the mid-1960s as this record began to percolate out, they were all alone with their tuba and directors who didn’t understand their instrument and what they could do with it. And, they listened to Bill Bell show them a brand-new world that liberated their horn in their own minds. I talked to many guys for whom this was the case. It’s very much like when jazz players heard Charlie Parker for the first time, or rock guitar players heard Jimi Hendrix. All these tuba players hearing Bill Bell all of a sudden lifted the blinders.

And then, a few years after that, there was the event that I call ‘Tuba Woodstock.’ Which was the first conclave of the tuba nation, essentially, at Indiana University in 1973, where hundreds of tuba players were convened, an enormous symposium at the university. And, for virtually every one of them, it was the very first time they’d seen more than, like, four or five tuba players in one place. They realized they were part of some large, beautiful nation. This created this kind of tuba consciousness and began what was also then the Tuba Civil Rights movement. Which is to say, ‘We are worth more than just being at the back of the band playing oompah and quarter-notes and whole notes.’

Sam Quinones: Well, I guess what I like about this story is that there are–the truth is, tubas come in as many kinds as there are almost as human beings. By that I mean, in different keys. There’s C, there’s Double B-Flat, there’s E-Flat, there’s F. Some of them are enormous and very wide. Some of them are very small. There’s the euphonium, which is the tenor tuba. There was eventually the sousaphone, which John Phillips Sousa invents, which is the marching band that wraps around you. And then, there’s of course the concert tuba, which goes with the bell going up, facing skyward.

But, what I loved about it was the tuba is not done being tinkered with. I still love the idea that they’re still trying to figure out how to make it better. And, now with worldwide competition, particularly lately the Chinese, there’s been all kinds of new, better approaches, different approaches to the tuba.

But, just generally speaking, it went from very low-quality–like in the 1920s and so on, and 1930s–horns, to what are now quite majestic and able to channel the virtuosity of players much more easily. That’s what I’ve found to be fascinating about the whole thing.

Sam Quinones: I agree, that’s true. I would say that there’s a big difference, though, and that is that–well, first of all, think about how people come to the tuba. It’s almost always in band. You cannot really play the tuba before you’re 12 or 13-years-old. You don’t have the lung power–

Sam Quinones: Exactly. And, it’s frequently people who don’t want to play the tuba: some of them have never even heard of the tuba before they take it up. They are late for band class first day of seventh grade, and then all the other instruments are taken. I mean, really, that’s a very common story. And, frequently these are kids maybe at the lower end of the social pecking order in high school. Remember, we’re talking about high school band here.

But, through time–many people drop it obviously, as many people drop all kinds of instruments–but, the ones who stick with it, what I’ve found in common they share is this feeling, like, through the tuba, they began to understand something about themselves. It was almost like it showed them their own capabilities, when all around them were their peers telling them they were probably worth nothing.

Sam Quinones: And, when you find that, that is–if you find something that says you are worth something and you are capable, that is in my view–people would come up to me and go, ask me previous to the tuba, ‘How do I keep my kids away from drugs?’ Really, it’s finding that feeling that you are worth something through another endeavor that doesn’t have to do with drugs. It could be anything. In this case, for so many people it was the tuba.

So, it does breed this feeling like, ‘All of a sudden, I’m worth something.’ And, that is a powerful, powerful, I would say narcotic, but that’s not really–let’s find a different word.

Sam Quinones: It’s this feeling of ‘I can do something.’ And then, when you want to do something, when you see you can do something, you want to do it more, and it breeds that. And plus, then you’re around people; and, in the band world, the tuba player–you cannot have a good band without a good tuba section, tuba player, or tuba section. It just doesn’t happen. And so, you really come to believe in yourself and see yourself as capable, and then that’s extraordinary. Again, I said the tuba is about liberation. It’s about freeing yourself to see all that you are capable of.

Drugs are very different. Drugs are enslaving. They narrow your world–or addiction in general–narrows your world into this is all you can do, all you find interesting. So, I would say this is really the big difference here.

Now, a lot of kids don’t go on to continue to play tuba, but what they learn playing the tuba they carry with them. Attitudes, habits, etc. that help them throughout their lives.

Sam Quinones: Well, I agree with–that’s one of the things that first connected me up, strangely, to these other two books I’d written about drug addiction because drug addiction is really based on the shredding of community. It’s all about your own isolation. You find yourself only caring about other people to the extent that they can help you find your drugs. And, here, I found the tuba was the community enhancer. Right? Everybody feels so much like they’re doing better when you have a good tuba player and a good horn to play with it. So, to me, that’s absolutely what goes on.

And on the contrary: Frequently tuba players begin to believe that, ‘Well, I actually lead the band because all we need to do to prove that is if I play a little bit out of tune, the whole band falls apart.’ But, that’s a whole other story, I suppose.

Sam Quinones: Oh, I agree, and I’m so happy you brought up these stories because I was only going to write about tuba players. And then, I began to realize that band directors are like tuba players, but on a big scale. That’s what one of them said. ‘We’re not doing this for wealth or fame, we do it, put in unbelievable hours.’ I’ve never seen people work so many hours as these band directors in these small towns. And, why? Because what motivates them is they see the lights go on in the eyes of their kids, frequently because that’s what happened to them when they were in 10th grade, or a freshman in college, or whenever. It was them.

And, the story I think mostly you’re referring to, although there were two great stories of this kind, was the story of Al Cortinas. Al Cortinas was himself saved by being able to attend a small college where he majored in musical education, became a band director in the Rio Grande Valley, the area you’re talking about. It’s the Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Texas, along the Rio Grande, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, the last 100 miles or so was the Rio Grande Valley. Almost entirely Hispanic–98% Hispanic or something. There’s many just from Mexico; many of them are Mexican American.

But, what the kids as a rule share is that they can barely afford their instruments. They in no way can afford musical lessons. So, Al Cortinas, teaching in the Rio Grande Valley for a number of years, develops some ideas about how to change that. And, he realizes it’s essential because at the time he’s doing this, the drug cartels are really growing big, and they are attracting a lot of these young kids. Lots of easy money, fancy cars, and all the rest.

And, at the same time, Texas band competition is becoming like football. So, you compete, and a band wins, and someone comes in second, third, fourth place. And, he realized that if he didn’t improve the quality of his bands, his bands would never be able to compete across the state, and also a lot of his kids would be lost then to these drug cartels.

He gets the opportunity to put his ideas into practice when he’s hired at the Roma High School in Roma, Texas. Which is a town, as you say, 11,000, almost entirely Hispanic. And, the ideas that he has is in order to nurture the kids who he sees have amazing talent that are being gone to waste, just as his was about to years ago when he was a kid–he says, ‘What we need to do,’–he convinces the board and the superintendent that what they need to do is hire 10 band directors. One for each instrument, and each band director will take kids who play, say, the clarinet for example, and teach clarinet all the way through kids to 12th grade. So, kids will move to six, seventh, eighth with the same teacher. Same with the French horn, same with percussion, same with tuba.

In this way, he believes–years of band directing convinced him of this–that you will not lose these kids along the way. This was what was happening. By eighth, ninth grade, they’d begin to fade away. This will still happen. But, when the Cortinas’ system came to Roma, Texas, Roma had barely had a band. It was really just a social scene where kids met and monkeyed around.

And, all of a sudden, over the next several years as these sixth graders became seventh, eighth, ninth, and the whole school got better, all of a sudden you begin to see Roma, Texas competing with, yes, the suburban bands from Dallas, from Austin, from Houston. The first time they ever went to finals, the state finals where they’re competing, there’s like 250 bands in their class and it’s down to 12 finalists. Many of them are from very wealthy suburbs of Austin or Dallas.

Sam Quinones: That’s what one guy told me. ‘We’re competing with the kids who are taught by the symphonies of Texas, and we’re not going to stop until we burst our way through there.’ And, Roma, Texas, to this date has never come in first. However, it has shown–I don’t think it matters either–it shows the beauty of band. I was interviewing lots of these band kids, the first time they ever went to finals was 2003 and 2004, that whole season. And, now, so it’s 20 years later, I’m interviewing them, and they’re all doing wonderfully well. They all have these prosperous, happy families, good jobs. Many of them are not in music, some of them are band directors again. Al Cortinas, Al Cortinas has 81 students who are now band directors somewhere in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s a remarkable idea.

But, most of his kids did not go on to that. They go on to solid middle class lives because band teaches the values that sustain community. That’s the raw, the beautiful, natural resource that is marching band in America. It’s unlike any other public education, public music education system in the world, according to people I’ve talked to about this.

Sam Quinones: That is correct.

Sam Quinones: That is absolutely correct. And, it’s also a little bit their parents saying, ‘You do this because there’s nothing else.’ Or, ‘You do this, you’re kind of chubby, you don’t run fast. You’re not fast enough for the football team or the basketball team,’ and all that. And, what’s amazing is that this took hold after that, in the Rio Grande Valley. And so, bands all across–there are many, many, many small towns. I can’t even count them all. There are many. And, each one has their own school district, and so on. Every one has a band now.

And, remarkable thing: There’s this thing called Tuba Christmas, that every December that people come together and play. Tuba Christmas in the Rio Grande Valley is very different than Tuba Christmas anywhere else in the United States because it’s almost entirely kids 18 and under who are still in high school. Across the country, people play the tuba, give it up, but still keep their tubas and they bring it out to play Tuba Christmas. But, in the Rio Grande Valley, people do not have money to hold onto a very expensive tuba for the rest of their life, for the luxury of playing it once a year, and so on. So, all the people who play Tuba Christmas are 18 and under. And, there are hundreds of tuba players.

Now, I went post-COVID [coronavirus disease] 2023–in 2023–the 50th anniversary of Tuba Christmas, and there was 350 tuba players. All driven to the McAllen, Texas Performing Arts Center by their band directors, by the way–by their tuba instructors, and so on. But, before COVID, before COVID, they had 650 tuba players.

And what that means is that people see and they understand the threat of not being in something that will take up so much of your time and channel your energies. Because the drug cartels are right there. There is no mistaking who these people are and what they’re about. And so, people are, like, ‘My kids are going to be in band.’ And they let those teachers–it’s none of this coddling. One parent said, ‘Parents come to say do you mind your kids being out there working in the rain and marching and I said no, because that’s how they get to where they are. If there was lightning, I’d say okay. But everything else, I’m fine with it.’

Sam Quinones: Oh, I could not agree more. And, it’s also the antithesis, the answer to all that we have allowed to develop in our country, in my opinion, through social media apps, and pornography, and gambling, and video games, and porn, and you can go on. Junk food, and hyper-potent marijuana, and on, and on, and on, and on. All of this is–this is what one guy was telling me. One band director said, ‘You know all that stuff that you wrote about in The Least of Us and Dreamland? The answers to it are right here.’ And, it’s when he told me that, I began to think of this book in a bigger way. It’s about providing–

How do I think about it? The extraordinary importance of insisting on hard work–that’s why it’s in the subtitle. Of perseverance. Of quiet focus. As you say, training kids early on with just one note. This leads to very well-adjusted–frequently well-adjusted anyway–kids who do well in school, who love what they do, and who go on because they’ve been trained in certain values that, again, sustain community and sustain strong–I would say strong businesses. They sustain strong personal lives, churches, and all the rest. You get from band this enormous impact that is countering all the things that I think afflict many people, but certainly young men, as you rightly say, I think. You get away from the easy, the kick back, the immediate gratification, which is what drugs are all about, but so is a smartphone with TikTok. And so is all the other stuff.

And, again, there was this story, I don’t know if it’s true or not; it could be apocryphal. But, band directors ask, ‘How did your band do this year?’ You know, at the end of the year. ‘How did your band do this year?’ And, the band director goes, ‘You know, too soon to tell. Ask me in 10 years.’ Because band is about winning later–

Sam Quinones: It’s really the idea that one can come in first and second, that’s fine, but it’s really not about that.

Sam Quinones: And, I think yes. Thank you for another thoughtful question. To me, this is an essential part of this book–I hope and I think. And also, an essential part of why band is so important.

Talent is overrated.

Sam Quinones: Some people are enormously talented right from the get-go and that’s wonderful, and you should nurture them. But, talent is overrated. Hard work, which is just another way of saying agency according to your fellow there–

Sam Quinones: To me, that is where you come to–but you have to build that, you have to nurture that. You have to teach kids, particularly nowadays, how you find–the benefits that they will find by hard work, by channeling that, developing agency.

And I think there are many ways of doing this. I chose tuba playing and band. I’m sure you could write another book about chess in high schools, without a doubt. But to me, I loved the idea about band and tuba playing because nobody pays any attention–

Sam Quinones: They get no props. They’re not famous.

Sam Quinones: And yet–and we all hear all these, I would say, platitudes almost now, about the importance of sports and teaching life lessons. And, I played sports in high school and I buy some of that. I don’t think it’s wrong. However, doing this book I began to realize, you know, the people, the kids who were learning the most precious lessons, the kids who were putting this into practice, and then going on in life to put these ideas and these values into practice, or the kids up in the bleachers playing for the athletes down on the field: that’s where you find. And, any Board of Education, any superintendent, now I believe would be committing almost education malpractice to be cutting the budget constantly for those endeavors. You are getting such enormous bang for the buck in terms of just human impact. And, getting beyond the idea that in order to be good, to be valued, you must be talented from the get-go.

Sam Quinones: And this is, again, the beauty of band because it is very inclusive. That term is overused today, I think, but in band it’s absolutely true. All you need really is the desire to play better, and to march better, and to work with others, and work hard with others. And also, you don’t face–most of the time, you don’t face any life-mangling injuries as a result of it.

And so, what’s beautiful, though, is, I find, is to find people who were in band once and they will tell you–all you do is scratch them a little bit–‘Oh, you were in band? What did you play? How did you like it?’

I was talking with a judge, a Federal judge, West Virginia. ‘Oh, man, I played trombone in band.’ ‘How’d you like it?’ ‘It changed my life.’ I mean, you hear this. It’s not uncommon to hear this stuff. He didn’t want to be a trombone player–or maybe he did, but he didn’t become one.

One of the beautiful images I love about the tuba is the tuba is a little bit like a folk saint. So, you may know: I lived in Mexico for many years, and I’ve written a lot about Mexican immigration, and my first two books were about Mexico. So, the idea of folk saints: of your own saint to kind of watch over you as you go through life. Many tuba players–for many tuba players, the tuba is a folk saint in that it teaches them all these really, really important lessons in life. Again, hard work, attention to detail, focus, perseverance through failure, all of these things. It just frequently cannot give you the professional economic sustenance for a real happy life, so people leave it behind.

But, many times I hear this, it’s like, ‘What I learned from the tuba stays with me.’ It’s, like, ‘The tuba is watching over me, even though I’m not playing it, and I always dreamed that I could.’ That’s why so many people have tubas in their basement and play Tuba Christmas, it’s because they thought one day they wanted to, and then it never happened, but the tuba is still there watching over them.

Sam Quinones: Encouraging stuff, eh?

Sam Quinones: But, it’s also–you know, I think frequently those are the lucky ones.

Sam Quinones: Those are the ones who say, ‘I can’t be this great basketball player,’ whatever, football player. ‘But, I can use what I learned in doing the sport to be a success, and happy, and content, and frankly fulfilled.’

This is a very important word to me. After writing about addiction, where people looking for blasts of pleasure, I’ve come to understand fulfillment as being the deeper thing that we are looking for. And ‘happiness’ doesn’t quite get there in my opinion. So, you’re looking for that fulfillment. Yeah. The difference with band is just so many more kids can be in band than can play football. Or basketball, certainly, for that matter.

Sam Quinones: It’s a way of saying, ‘We want all of you to be part of this beautiful experience of working hard and competing, and relying on each other. It’s not just for the athletes, it’s for you, too.’ And, it gives me chills, I get chills right now talking to you about this, Russ, saying it’s such a beautiful, beautiful thing. And again, of course, so opposite from the addiction to dope, and everything else we’re addicted to in our culture that I was writing about in the previous two books. Anyway, it makes me kind of almost get romantic and carried away. What can I tell you?

Sam Quinones: No, I think that’s why Tuba Christmas continues to be this huge thing. Huge thing all across the country with hundred of tuba players from Kansas City, Dallas. New York was where it started. But, down in McAllen, Texas, too. You’ve got all these people all across the country who hold on to their tubas. And people, in a different way, who hold onto their memories of band.

I’m trying to come up–this is a pipe dream of mine–but at some point I’d like to come up with some kind of tally of what percentage of Americans were at one point in band. I think you may be talking about 20% of the country at some point. I don’t know if that’s true at all, of course. But, it seems to me such an important part of people’s lives that you would never know until you dig down into their conversation with them. And then, all of a sudden you say, ‘Oh, yeah, they played piccolo.’ Or, ‘Oh, yeah, I played trombone.’ And, you begin to see how important this endeavor is to creating happy lives–contented, fulfilled lives. But also I believe that you learn in band essential elements–elements essential to sustaining community in a broader sense. [More to come, 50:33]