BOOK REVIEW: TRAVELS WITH MY TUBA

Travels with my Tuba by Jim Anderson

BY ALASTAIR WARREN

Jim Anderson has enjoyed a long and highly distinguished career as a tuba player in the UK and internationally, including 30 years as a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, during which time he appeared on TV as Mr Oom-pah-pah in Rainbow, played on soundtracks including Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and worked with a who’s who of conductors and soloists, many of whom make an appearance in his new book.

Travels with my Tuba is a mixture of biography and anecdote: the first chapters deal with Jim’s early life and career in chronological order before moving on to stories grouped thematically that flit back and forth through time, all told with the easy style of a natural raconteur. These anecdotes range from the absurd to the truly poignant; from misbehaving trombonists, to witnessing once great stars of the music world losing their powers and new stars being born. Throughout, Jim gives honest reflections on mistakes made and details personal highlights of his 50-year career in the music profession.

Travels with my Tuba is a must-read for all brass players and can be ordered via Jim’s website. I fervently hope some of his trombone-playing contemporaries are encouraged by his lead and write books of their own. I can only imagine the stories waiting to be told!

An exclusive extract from Travels with my Tuba is reproduced below by kind permission of the author. CHRISTMAS CAROLS IN JUNE Musicians are very lucky – we generally really like what we do or we wouldn’t do it. Sometimes we have reservations about the pieces we play but like any professional performers we just have to ‘get on with it’. The next gig could be wonderful.

I have a great fondness for Christmas carols, for both the music and the words. ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’ … light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings. To me, these words remind me of this magic time of year; of childhood Christmases; of hope; of getting out of the cold into a warm home; of the light shining through church windows.

I often worked for Nat Peck, an American fixer who had settled in London. He had been a trombonist with the Glenn Miller band. Every year we would do two weeks of recording sessions for Nat, for an American friend of his, Brad Junior II. Brad would turn up with a large pile of Christmas carols and songs. He had arranged for these to be played in the lifts of Midwest Bible belt hotels. The first time I was booked, I was looking forward to hearing these. The only drawback was that every year he turned up not at Christmastime but in June.

Brad was a large, pleasant, plumpish man. He had a scrubbed pink florid face and blonde hair, and he always wore the same clothes: a sky-blue one-piece garment that perfectly matched the colour of his eyes. In England

at the time this was only worn by babies and was called a Babygro (now, apparently, they’re called ‘onesies’). My youngest child, who was three, had just grown out of his.

Every June for two weeks Brad would turn up and bring the hot weather with him. We sweated our way through his arrangements of ‘In the Bleak Mid-winter’, ‘See Amid the Winters Snow’, ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ and other warming Christmas numbers, with Brad growing progressively pinker as he waved his arms around in the stuffy hot studio.

Somehow Brad’s arrangements have taken the edge off the Christmas celebrations. I do have the odd nightmare at Christmas time. I imagine an enormous pink faced man clad in a blue Babygro suit, leaping around accompanied by strangely atonal Christmas music. ◆