300 Tubas Give Angelenos a Yule Sound to Remember

Eat your heart out, River City. You only had 76 trombones. We’ve got 300 tubas.

Elephantine in appearance, but mellow in sound, the big brass instruments were affectionately cradled by musicians from several western states--and even one from Sweden--who celebrated Christmas Saturday with a program of carols at the Music Center.

Appropriately, the unique--and free--performance was called “Tuba Christmas.”

Lined up on the staircase to the Founders’ Circle of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the players--mostly students from California, Oregon, Arizona and Nevada, along with thirteen professionals in the front row, created a giant sound of Christmas before the regularly scheduled performance of the Glendale Symphony Orchestra, which sponsored the tuba event.

Summed up Pat Detweiler of La Crescenta after witnessing her first tuba concert: “It was very awesome, very impressive.”

Actually, tubas bellowing carols are no more bizarre than Rudolph’s built-in nose beam piercing the Christmas Eve night, according to the event’s organizer and professional tuba player, Jim Self of Los Angeles, who said the event has proved popular for the Music Center since 1982.

“In the last 20 years, this has become the golden age of the tuba,” said Self, 44, who led most of the numbers.

On Saturday, the Pavilion was no place for a mere oompah-oompah performer. The performance was made to order for tuba purists--an unusual chance to play melody on an instrument that usually plays second fiddle, so to speak, to an orchestra’s more popular instruments.

Among the tuba professionals present was Tommy Johnson, who, along with Self, provided the musical effects for the film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Professional Loren Marsteller of La Canada brought along his ophicleide, an instrument which preceded the tuba and which, as Self described to the audience, looks like “an upside-down saxophone.”

Tuba player Michael Lind of the Stockholm Philharmonic was there, too. His wife, Georgia Mohammar Lind, is a flutist with the same Stockholm orchestra. “Tuba players have a need to be together,” she laughed.

Sitting beside Lind was Stephen Klein, a professional tuba player from Los Angeles, wearing a blue sweatshirt with white words on the back reading “Happy Tuba Hanukkah.” Klein directed two Hanukkah numbers, “Mo’oz Tzur (Rock of Ages) and S’vivon (“Top”).

Tubas have been around for more than 150 years, and have been popularized in parades, circuses and even by an apocryphal character named Tubby. And, to be sure, Brahms, Wagner, Dvorak, Copeland and Stravinsky all wrote serious parts for the tuba.

But rarely are tubas so displayed, bright lights bouncing off a sea of gold and silver bells while the warm, penetrating sounds reverberated throughout the Pavilion’s foyer. Self and others, such as the Glendale Symphony’s John Covelli, directed the numbers.

“Merry tuba Christmas,” Self said, as he pinned a red button saying just that on Covelli’s black tuxedo. Facing the big crowd were big tubas (weighing up to 70 pounds) and little tubas (only 20 pounds) and tuba-like sousaphones (supported on the musician’s shoulder with the bell pointed outward) and symphony tubas (held on a musician’s lap with the bell upright) and three- and four- and five-valve tubas and a double-bell tuba and even a tuba decorated with Christmas lights.

Directing the large crowd’s attention up the elegant staircase, Self said, “If you look up at the tuba choir here, you’ll see every tuba in captivity.”

Festive occasions often inspire. Players were caught up in the spirit of the season, adorning themselves in colorful red knit caps with white tassels and red, green and white holiday scarfs around their necks.

“It’s a wonderful thing,” tuba professional Self said. “We have a lot of fun.”

In fact, tuba players elsewhere have had fun with tuba Christmas since it was first organized at New York City’s Rockefeller Center about 13 years ago by Harvey Phillips, himself an accomplished tuba player and music professor at Indiana University. Phillips’ friend, the late American composer Alec Wilder, arranged music for those first tuba Christmas concerts, including scores for “Silent Night,” “The First Noel” and “Joy to the World.”

“By chance, I walked in on the first one at Rockefeller Center,” recently recalled Roger Bobo, a tuba player with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1964. “I saw a sea of tuba players. It was wonderful.”