J.C.'s Review
Drill Baby Drill – Mid-May, 2010
In the wide world of drum corps, May is all about learning drill. Our two “mid-May” drill camps were spent learning, cleaning and coordinating drill for “Ride of the Valkyries”, “William Tell Overture” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Our final runs of these numbers on Sunday May 23 at Ameche Field in Kenosha were pretty near show quality. We are indeed setting ourselves up nicely to be good right out of the chute this season!
The weekend of May 8-9th seems like ages ago, but I do remember that it brought really wet, cold and crummy weather to our neck of the woods, so for the second camp in a row, we moved our operations to the great indoors. We assembled the troops on Saturday morning at Park High School Field House for breakfast and stretch. As always, stretch culminated in our customary “Shaky Shake” wrist warm-ups led by the front percussion ensemble. One would think that wrist warm-ups would be the specialty of the pit and indeed the timing of the exercise was impeccable. A little work on the visual aspect of “shaky shakes” will go a long way in molding the pit into a veritable wrist warm-up fronting machine! In general, the rest of our Saturday efforts were spent on visual basics, and reinforcing the drill and equipment work for “Ride of the Valkyries” and “William Tell Overture”.
Sunday found us back at the Park Field House. Rehearsal began in fine fashion with one of the most memorable “Shaky Shakes” of the season. The Mothers Day “Shaky Shakes” were fronted by all of the “Marching Moms” in the Kilties! Great job ladies! That one will be hard to top! After musical warm-ups, we jumped right into learning drill for “Bohemian Rhapsody”. This drill is, in a word, tough. For me, the tricky count structure is what makes it difficult to learn and execute with the ever changing time signatures of the music. By the end of camp, the Rhapsody drill was what I would call “roughed in”, but not quite ready for prime time. Scott pulled the corps together for announcements and said he was happy with how we are rehearsing. We’re still right on schedule to be able to produce a great show at our first gig in June.
Following a weekend off, we reassembled the troops on Saturday May 22 at our Saturday home base of Gilmore Middle School. For the first time this young season, the weather gods cooperated, providing us with temperatures in the low 60s and dry, albeit sometimes foggy conditions. Suffice it to say that it felt great to finally be outside! After breakfast and stretch, “Shaky Shakes” provided the front percussion ensemble a chance to take their “shaky shake” prowess to the next level. I’m happy to report that their visual presentation was greatly improved from the previous camp. The only thing that kept them from receiving the highest of ratings from the corps proper was a slightly dragging tempo, but overall, a fine effort.
We spent the entire day in sectionals. The percussion section headed off to the West side of the building for a day-long musical rehearsal. The guard took over one of the two East fields and spent most of their day learning new equipment and dance work. The brass line took possession of the other field and did set-to-set work on “Ride of the Valkyries”, “William Tell Overture” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. We spent significant time learning new charts for the opening battle scene in Valkyries. The battle scene has been tweaked to depict the brass line marching into battle, and the guard depicting the approaching Valkyries who will determine the ultimate fate of the warriors in the battle. It’s going to be very cool!
Sunday weather can only be described as glorious; sunny and breezy with temperatures in the mid 80s. We assembled at our new Sunday home base, Alan Ameche Field, just east of Tremper High School in Kenosha. The field is named in honor of 1954 Heisman Trophy winner and University of Wisconsin alum Alan “The Horse” Ameche, a Kenosha native. For all you trivia buffs and football fans out there, Ameche was the number 2 pick in the 1955 NFL draft and played six seasons with the Baltimore Colts, earning the NFL Rookie of the Year award in 1955. He was a four-time pro bowl selection and scored the game winning touchdown in the 1958 NFL Championship Game in overtime. The fantastic astro-turf field named after Ameche is a pleasure to march on, and the high press box provides a great vantage point for our staff to coordinate rehearsals from. The stadium will also be the site of one of the two Kiltie-sponsored DCA Central shows this season, “Sound Explosion Invitational” on August 8th.
After breakfast and stretch, our very own bass drum section led “Shaky Shakes”. The bass drums get high marks for their effort, with bonus points thrown in for sporting very attractive practice uniforms of yellow shorts and sleeveless gray practice tees. Very nice indeed! We spent much of the rest of the morning in sectionals. The guard took the stadium field, while the brass and percussion sections warmed up the chops and worked our entire musical repertoire including concert and parade tunes. Then we did a pre-Memorial Day full corps parade rehearsal, lapping Ameche Field in parade formation to the strains of our new street beat, “Auld Lange Syne” and “Scotland the Brave”. The Kilties take parades very serious. More people see the Kilties on parade every season than see us performing our field show, so we try to present the best product possible for parades. We also use parades as built in basic blocks in our schedule, working marching technique on the entire parade route. We feel like we owe it to our fans and alumni to look good whenever we don the plaid.
Our all-American lunch of build-em-yourself hamburgers and all the fixins really hit the spot! The rest of the day was spent on the field doing full-corps ensemble work, blocking each section of the show. We started with the portion of the show that needed the most work, “Bohemian Rhapsody”. We did a quick set-to-set review of the entire piece which helped the cause greatly. Then we started at the top of the show and fell into a rhythm of marching each segment of the show three times. First we marched the segment with the .midi recording of the show blaring from the stadium sound system while we marched and counted. Then we marched the same segment with the percussion playing and the brass doing “air and valves”. Then the segment was performed full out, all in playing. This methodology was especially helpful when we got to the tricky sections of “Bohemian Rhapsody” where time signature variations make musical cues less obvious and harder to grasp than other parts of the show. It was pretty exciting to see the performance level dramatically improving with each run of each segment. I was especially psyched after the final all in run-through of the complete “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The progress that was made on this piece in particular was beyond what I
would have expected for the amount of time we were able to spend on it. After the horns popped down, you could describe my mood as “giddy with excitement”.
We assembled the troops around Scott Stewart and he told us that he’s excited about the show, and extremely pleased with our performance level. We’re on pace to be better prepared for our first show than we have ever been. The plan is to complete the show by learning the drill for “Bacchanale” at our upcoming Memorial Day camp. Scott confided to me that he thinks that the end of the show will be one of the most exciting endings he has ever conceived. That’s saying a lot, and it has me and the rest of us pretty excited to get that portion of the show under our feet.
We closed out another successful camp weekend with the playing of “Slow Syne”. Playing it outdoors for the first time made me feel like the 2010 season is finally upon us full bore. It evoked a sense of anticipation for a season that is shaping up to have great promise! Is it Memorial Day yet?
WWBD,
JC
