RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29068, 3 December 1959, Page 29

RANDOM REMINDER

THE BACK BOOM BOYS

What is it that persuades a man to become the bass drummer in a brass band? Few pursuits lend themselves so reluctantly to the important task of increasing one’s ego. Up in front, there are tremendous displays of virtuosity by the comets and trumpets and trombones, but at the rear the bass drummer marches stolidly along, his basic beat being no more than the blotting of the manuscript, the dotting of the i’s. He hardly ever has any score in front of him, and it is only on gala occasions that he is permitted to break out ana cross hands,

hitting the left side of his drum with the stick in his right hand, more or less at the same moment that he hits the right side with his lefthand stick. Whereas the drum-major in front is performing all sorts of callisthenics, and the drummers around the bass men are making all sorts of exciting breaks, and dramatic rolls, and tossing their sticks in r the air and catching them in their ears. The bass drummer is a man apart. He must be conscious of his tremendously bulky appearance, and the fact that the bass drum’s most important contribution to society is that people fall through it

in jokes. He does have his moments of glory, but they are brief; they come when the band has tem'porarily stopped playing, and it is his turn to try to keep them in step with a gentle and steady beat. But how he must long, at times, to break into something which sounds like a jungle night, something quite divorced from the steady boom, boom, boom of life in the brass band. Yet the bass drummer must have some rare quality of patience and character. He is probably the first at practice, the last to leave. He is probably the salt of the earth. He must be, to endure it all.