The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work

From National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Sam Quinones, the story of a demanding instrument, the determined people who play it, and the hope they offer a fractured nation.

 

Sam Quinones had written two acclaimed books about our nation’s grim opioid epidemic and needed a break. He went looking for stories of people forging fulfillment from within – with hard work, focus, devotion, and collaboration. He found them in the tuba and in marching band.

In The Perfect Tuba, Sam Quinones tells the astounding stories of two men who set out to replicate the “perfect tuba,” an instrument made by York & Sons in the 1930s and never equaled; of Big Bill Bell, whose 1950s album rearranged the tuba landscape; and of Arnold Jacobs, a tuba guru at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who studied the physiology of breathing and offered rune-like nuggets of wisdom to legions of students. We meet a visionary band director in tiny Roma, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. His system of nurturing the talents of high-schoolers who can’t afford music lessons shaped them into a band that competes head-to-head with the state’s wealthiest schools, then sends them off to college.

Quinones assembles offbeat stories that exalt the simple love of effort with no promise of wealth or fame. Tuba and marching band “teach the values that sustain community,” he writes, and thus offer an antidote to our addiction malaise. In The Perfect Tuba, Sam Quinones delivers another story of our nation, this time brought together by the power of shared joy and humble achievement.