Tag: Passages

My mother mentioned in an e-mail the other day, among other things, that my first ever school band director died last week. I hadn’t seen Mr. Beach (first name Jim) since I graduated high school, but back then he was a fairly heavy smoker and known for his fondness for booze, so his passing isn’t exactly a galloping shock. He looked fairly advanced in years even when I first met him when I was in fifth grade, and his posture was even then terrible; he had a pronounced hunch in his back and his hair was already completely white. It was thus a surprise to learn that he was actually a year younger than my mother.

Mr. Beach was a fairly strange man, as I recall. As a band director, he was adequate, although this is hard to judge by the fact that he was the elementary and junior high band director, so it wasn’t as though he was really tasked with great amounts of musical development on the part of his students. He was fairly encouraging of his more talented charges, but as a direct source of musical wisdom, I don’t recall much from him.

However, I could be wrong here as well, since my own temperament later turned out to be strongly classical, and Mr. Beach’s was strongly jazz oriented. Being a straight “band director” wasn’t really his game, but he was quite good at getting the sound he wanted from the jazz bands under him. The one year that I remember him directing the Senior High Jazz Band was probably the best single musical experience of my high school years; for a high school ensemble from a small town, that band cooked. I can still hear remember our bass trombone player on a haunting arrangement of Gershwin’s “Summertime”, and I can still remember my own frustration that he would never let me play any of the solos. It wouldn’t be until college that I’d realize what he’d surely already known: that I was no jazz musician and had no place in a jazz band other than being a really good section player.

I don’t recall why Mr. Beach only had one year to direct the jazz band, but I do recall that there was some kind of incident that led to our school superintendent stepping in for some reason. The details were never explained to us, but to my knowledge, Mr. Beach never stepped in front of a jazz band again. I had already thought poorly of that particular superintendent, who was one of those guys who takes a position if and only if he thinks it can lead to the next position. (In a fitting postscript, four or five years ago I was in one of Buffalo’s Media Play locations – before they all closed when the chain went belly-up – and recognized one of the cashiers as none other than that ambitious, arrogant superintendent. I found some kind of cosmic karmic justice at work in that; this guy who had once been highly impressed with his own authority in a small town school system was now, fifteen years later, wearing a uniform shirt and a nametag. In his mind, that had to be a blow.)

I remember something else. We used to have a summer jazz band at that school; we’d rehearse a couple of times and then we’d go out and play at various gigs. We’d play the Cattaraugus County Fair, various dances and festivals in the region, and the like. It always went over well; we’d mostly perform the great big-band classics, and the membership of the band would be augmented by other musicians who lived in the area. Those performances were always hard work, but they were also always a joy. One year at the Catt. Co. Fair, we did Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”, but in an arrangement that had an extended clarinet solo. Mr. Beach’s main instrument was the clarinet, and he took that solo himself. To this day that one performance of his – the only time I ever actually heard him perform anything at all – remains one of the most beautiful bits of clarinet playing I’ve ever heard live, and I’ve heard a lot (Richard Stoltzman playing the Mozart clarinet concerto, for example). I wonder if Mr. Beach was one of the many musicians who went to school figuring to be a professional performer, and then found himself a teacher when gigs were harder to come by than he’d thought. I also wonder if he never quite made the transition to teaching in his head or in his heart. Certainly on the night I heard him play “Moonlight Serenade”, it was as if Mr. Beach had grabbed a part of his life he’d maybe thought lost.

Anyhow, I can’t really say that I learned a lot about music from Mr. Beach, but if he hadn’t specifically recruited me for band when I was in fifth grade, I possibly would never have learned anything about music at all. Berlioz? Rachmaninov? Wagner? The Chieftains? Howard Shore? They’d all be just names, I suppose. And I certainly wouldn’t have gone to college in Iowa, thinking to study music; and then I wouldn’t have met a girl a year older than me who played the oboe.

We often judge our teachers by what they teach us, and forget the ones who didn’t so much teach us as simply meet us at a crossroads and say, “Go that way. You’ll like it.” Well, Jim Beach put me on a road, sure enough. So thanks for the nudge down the road, Mr. Beach.

And wherever you are, I hope you’re jamming with Benny Goodman.

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Always remember that, folks: The Internet is made of people. I got that from Warren Ellis, and it’s totally and utterly true. There are good people on the Internet, and bad people; people you’d follow once more unto the breach, and people you’d toss into the breach head-first and then walk away. There are winners and losers, friends and enemies, casual acquaintances and even lovers.

This is about an online friend of mine who went by the moniker “Gumdrops”.

Gumdrops, or “Gummy” for short, was a film music fan. And by “fan”, I mean, “rabid hobbyist”. I’m a gatherer of film music, but Gummy was a collector. He amassed a pretty impressive collection, many of the discs of which were quite rare. His collection includes, to give just one example, a copy of David Shire’s score to Return to Oz. Just try finding a copy of this. You’ll pay through the nose.

Longtime readers will know that before this blog, my main outlet for online blatherings was the Usenet group rec.music.movies. I gradually became disenchanted over there, and when that disenchantment lined up with my discovery of the blogging medium, the writing was on the wall (or the Web), and I departed r.m.m. pretty quickly after launching this blog. For a time, I also posted at the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, and it was there that I met Gummy.

He was a jovial soul, who usually signed off his posts with “Yuk yuk!”. He had a way of disarming many heated discussions with a quip or two, and it might have been tempting at first to not take Gummy very seriously as a film music fan, but one quickly learned otherwise: this guy knew his stuff. He was conversant on many composers and their works, and he knew far more about film than I do. But through it all, he never took it all that seriously — or, more properly, he never took it so seriously that he lost sight of the passion of his film music, and he never forgot what music is for. He looked for music that moved him, that made him feel something. He was the guy who’s constantly coming up to you, discman and earphones held out, grinning wildly and practically tripping over his own feet as he tells you, “Wow, you gotta hear this!!!”

That was Gummy.

When the FSM boards finally became too generically unpleasant for me and some others to stick around there — it happens, you know — we went back to rec.music.movies, which had become pretty much of a wasteland. Posts were rare, and posts that were about film music and not about where we might procure cheap CIAL!$ were rarer still. But we started posting, a tiny little community, and gradually things picked up. Not to the point of r.m.m.’s hey-day back around 1999 or 2000, but we got some nice discussion going. Often the discussions were sparked by Gummy’s thread-launching posts, when he’d throw out single questions or provocative statements.

Gummy also loved to share his music, and he cheerfully made copies of just about any score in his collection that anyone asked for. I was the recipient of more than a few of his mailings. Scores that I now own, thanks to him, include the afore-mentioned Return to Oz, Howard Shore’s Soul of Ultimate Nation and The Last Mimzy, John Williams’s Jane Eyre, and a large number of Japanese filmscores as well. His generosity was stunning, and it often bothered me that my own film music collection is not nearly as extensive as his, not because I was jealous of what he had, but because I couldn’t really return the favor. Some time ago he told me about some items he was looking for, and by sheer miracle, it turned out that I own them. Last week I finally got around to burning copies.

You can probably tell by my use of past tense in this post that he’s never going to hear them.

Gregory — “Gumdrops” — became suddenly ill last week, and by the time he became ill enough to require hospitalization, his fate was set. He finally died today. I never met him in person; to me, he was “only” a set of words on a screen, and an occasionaly envelope in my mailbox. But remember: The Internet is made of people, and Gumdrops was one of them.

Other friends from r.m.m. have been in contact with his wife, and we’ve learned Gregory’s passion for film music was a lonely passion until he first went on the Internet and discovered that there are other such-passionate people around, all over the world. And amidst all the cantankerous discussions that take place in Internet forums on any topic, Gregory was a person motivated solely by the fact that the music, and the act of sharing it, just plain made him happy. His vocation, it turns out, was furnace installation. He loved the Pittsburgh Steelers (he lived in that area), and he lustily cheered their Super Bowl win from two seasons ago. But he didn’t trash-talk a few weeks back when his Steelers tossed my Bills around like rag-dolls. That’s the kind of person he was. He took joy in things, and appeared to have no patience at all for the joyless side of the very same things.

So yeah, I’ll miss him. He was a friend. Tonight I’ll listen to some of the music he shared with me.

Goodbye, Greg. Yuk yuk.

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