Just in time for Christmas, Gilberto has sent me my refinished glock bars. Man are they sweet! The picture doesn’t do justice to their extreme shininess, I’m afraid. Oh yeah–they sound great, too.
Phase two of the project is to get a new case made. That might take a while, since I had to smash the piggy bank for the bars. When I get to that point, this space will have the scoop!
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
My Picture Bio used to start with my college years but I recently found a photo from an even earlier time; high school marching band. Yikes, it’s old school for sure.
This is just about the time I started studying with Tom Stubbs of the St. Louis Symphony. My first real teacher was Ed Erschen, whom I started studying with when I was nine. He was an old dance band drummer from the forties and fifties. When I was in high school I decided that I wanted to follow my buddy Mark Sparks (now the principal flutist of the SLSO) into classical music. It was a big rush for me when I descended down to Tom’s basement (the original Basement?) and saw a room full of percussion instruments. I was hooked immediately, though I had a long way to go to learn the ways of the orchestral drummer.
After high school I attended the late lamented St. Louis Conservatory of Music for two years. Then I practiced like a fiend and was admitted to the Juilliard School in New York City. This was, to say the least, extremely exciting for a midwestern dude.
Here I am around the time of my first Juilliard graduation way back in 1982. 
That was for my Bachelor’s degree. A year later the scene was replayed when I got my Masters, a common occurrance in those days. People used to say that Juilliard was cut-throat and intense, but I really had a blast! I studied with Saul Goodman (in his last year of teaching, 1980-81), Roland Kohloff and Buster Bailey, both wonderful players and people who are sorely missed. I received the Saul Goodman Award for Percussion Performance in 1983.
OK, here I am at my first job, as timpanist of the Evansville Philharmonic in Evansville, Indiana. 
Back then we played in the local civic auditorium with a temporary shell. Now they play in a a restored theatre, which I’m sure is a lot nicer. Note the Ludwig Dresdens. They were a challenge to play on, has you had to finesse the pitches using the pedal and the fine tuner.
I also played in the Owensboro, KY Symphony and they had the same drums. In fact, their current timpanist, Todd Sheehan, informs me they’ve still got them, though he had the pedal ratchets updated by Falls Percussion so they can now (hopefully,) be tuned entirely by means of the feet.
In 1987, I left Evansville and moved back to St. Louis (where I grew up) and decided to go into commercial music with my brother Dan. Unfortunately, a lot of people had this idea at the same time as we did and St. Louis, while a darn sight bigger than E’ville, was no hotbed of jingles and soundtracks. Still isn’t. So that was rough, but we learned a lot and had some fun. We made some dough, too, but it took a while.
We also had this band called Red Weather. (I am the one on the far right in the chapeau and the long lost hair.)
We wrote 100 or so songs and worked incredibly hard at it, but it was a money pit. We’d get guarantees from clubs and pay our people (it was a six piece band) and we’d make zip. In fact, we’d lose money on mailings and publicity, etc. Again, we learned a lot and had some fun. Also pictured are (from left) Mark Foster, Mark Miller, Tom Fulton, Lisa Campbell and my brother Dan.
At the same time, I joined an experimental group called the Nuclear Percussion Ensemble. We did Young Audience shows, a series of concerts, First Night St. Louis and a bunch of other stuff. The reviews were always good and we even won a couple of local awards. I left it in 1996, but it continues to this day. The picture is of the NPE in costumes for First Night in the early 90s.
We did this amazing piece called “The Circle” which was based on Native American mythology. Each of us represented a compass direction (I was south, and green) and we were tied into an enormous 20 foot tall wind chime which we built. I remember it being cold (it was New Year’s Eve) and sweaty at the same time!
Here’s another pic of me and Henry Claude in our NPE glory days.
I went back to school about ten years ago and got a masters in media communication from Webster University in St. Louis. For the last few years I’ve been at Saint Louis University as an Educational Technologist (yes, there is such a thing.) I work with a great bunch of people in the Reinert Center for Teaching Excellence.
I have been a regular extra percussionist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for close to twenty years which I write about here in the Basement. You can contact me by emailing ted(type an ampersand here)rubright(type a period here)com. (This is a vain attempt to try and stop the spam bots. They’re way too smart to fall for it, though).
Well it’s the Christmas season and bells are not hard to find. That makes it a good time of year to get my mangy old Leedy bells restored by Gilberto at Century Mallet Instrument Service in the Windy City.
I’ve had these bells for a LONG time and they always sounded good, but were very funky. They were more brown than chrome on a lot of the notes. In fact, I’m bumming that I didn’t get a “before” picture to go with the “after” picture that I will post when they’re all done. That could be a while because the case remains funky. And it smells bad, even for the basement. My plan is to get a new case made after the bells are done and then have one sweet glockenspiel. I forgot to mention that I’m adding a hi C# and D while I’m at it just in case I ever need to go way up there and ding a high one.