‘My Buddies All Dared Me to Take the Tuba’

When Stanford Freese was 9 years old, he told his parents he wanted to play the tuba.

They did not laugh.

His parents were music educators who saw no harm in letting their son try out the 50-pound instrument. Little did they know it would change his life.

“The high school band directors would come around to the elementary schools and do a demonstration of all the instruments. So my buddies all dared me to take the tuba,” said Freese, a 52-year-old Placentia resident. “So I signed up for the tuba and I brought it home. Actually, my folks were very cool about it, because they thought for sure I would bail on the thing after about a month.

“For some strange reason, I just took to it and had more fun with it. It’s such a fun instrument. It became the personification of my whole attitude, which is: Don’t take yourself too seriously.”

His performances on the tuba and the identically fingered sousaphone eventually brought him international attention and led to a 26-year career with the Walt Disney Co. In 1971, Freese became the founding conductor of the Walt Disney World Band and Orchestra in Florida. He transferred to Disneyland in 1974, where he spent about 13 years as band director. He has spent the last three years as talent casting manager, in charge of hiring all musical talent for Disneyland. He also fine-tunes musical shows at Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland.

The tuba might not be an instrument commonly associated with virtuoso playing and concert hall solos, but Freese has soloed with symphony orchestras throughout the world. He has performed such technically challenging compositions as “Hungarian Dance No. 5” and “Carnival of Venice,” an acrobatic piece often performed by trumpet players as a show of speed and dexterity.

“My dad was a trumpet player, and he never told me that I couldn’t play a bunch of fun stuff on the tuba. He started bringing home coronet books of marching music, so I could play melody lines right off the bat. He never told me that tubas weren’t supposed to do all these technical fun things. So I just went ahead and did them.”

As a beginning musician, Freese also created a repertoire of animal impersonations on the tuba and the sousaphone, which developed into a comedy act. By age 14, he was a veteran performer at trade shows and conventions throughout his home state of Minnesota.

“A musician wrote some charts for me and I would come out and do a 15-minute act. My dad would drive me around to the different hotels. In those days, all the hotels had house bands, and I would carry around these arrangements for the band. I’d do tunes like “Tiger Rag” and “Darktown Strutters Ball” and all these animal impersonations. I wasn’t much taller than the sousaphone.”

His unusual act led to a guest appearance on the Lawrence Welk Show and an invitation to appear on the television program each week. But Hollywood was too far from Minnesota, and Freese spent his high school and college years performing locally.

By 1969, he was 24 and beginning a career as a high school music teacher in Minneapolis when he was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a soloist with the University of Minnesota Wind Ensemble. It was a kind of diplomatic concert tour, inaugurating the reestablishment of cultural relations between the two countries. On his return to the United States, Freese performed at the White House for President Richard Nixon.

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His short-lived teaching career was over. He had earned the applause of world leaders, an intoxicating experience for the young artist. It did not last long.

“After the White House, I had a job three days later playing for the monthly meeting of the Rural Electrical Assn. in some small town in Minnesota. I went out and played “Carnival of Venice,” which I’d just played at the White House. These guys were all in this high school gym eating out of their box lunches while we performed. No one clapped. It was probably the best thing that happened to me. I said to myself, ‘This is reality. Now I understand.’ It brought me down to Earth so fast. It taught me the value of humility.”

Freese moved to Hollywood, playing on movie soundtracks as a studio musician, before joining Walt Disney World. During his career with Disney, he was a regular on the “Hee Haw” television comedy show for eight years and continued to extend the limits of his instrument, performing with an eclectic mix of artists, from Pete Fountain to Dweezil Zappa.

Freese says he is still amazed that a schoolyard dare to play the most unpopular instrument in the band has taken him so far.

“I am incredibly lucky. There are wonderful players out there who just can’t make a living at it. It’s the curse of the American musician. When I was in the Soviet Union, musicians were making more than doctors. In France, they don’t pay income taxes. But here, that’s just the way it is. So you can either be bitter about it, or you just accept it and try to have some fun.

“I’d be doing this no matter what, just because it is so much fun. When I go out on stage, I just have the best time. I really believe that if you can’t have fun with what you’re doing in life, you ought to be doing something else. Life is too short.”

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Profile: Stanford Freese

Age: 52

Hometown: Minneapolis

Residence: Placentia

Family: Single; two grown sons

Education: Bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Minnesota

Background: Began performing a comedy and musical act with a sousaphone at trade shows and conventions at age 12; featured on the Lawrence Welk television show at age 14; played professionally during high school and college; took a hiatus from his job as a music teacher at Edison High School in Minneapolis at age 24 to tour the Soviet Union with the University of Minnesota Wind Ensemble; performed in the White House Rose Garden for President Richard Nixon; worked as a studio musician before being hired as the first conductor of the Walt Disney World Band and Orchestra in 1971; came to Disneyland in 1974 as conductor of the Disneyland Band; toured China as a tuba soloist in 1980; performed on the “Hee Haw” television show from 1983 through 1991; inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame in 1994 with Prince and Bob Dylan; performed last year with the symphony orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria; played on the Christmas CD released last December by the Vandals punk rock band; currently talent casting manager for Disneyland and show director for Tokyo Disneyland; helping develop entertainment ideas for Disney Seas, a water-oriented theme park planned to open in Tokyo in 2002

On entertaining: “All human beings like to laugh, they like to see entertainers having a good time. I’ve been to every corner of the world, and I’ve found that all people really want to smile and laugh, whether they’re oppressed or not. As a human being, as well as an entertainer, it’s so important that we make people smile and help people to have a good time.”

Source: Stanford Freese; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times