The Perfect Tuba

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. The tuba’s sound is mighty, emerging, it seems, from deep in the human body. Very little music has, up until recently, been written to play to its strengths. The best the tuba seems to promise is a seat at the back of the band. No stadium shows, no Internet adulation. And yet, this horn—the youngest of all brass instruments—has captured the hearts of an inspired group of musicians ever since its invention in 1835. In The Perfect Tuba, Sam Quinones embarks on a trek to get to know American tubists. He 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 since 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 his legions of students. Quinones also takes us through the tuba scenes of New Orleans, Orlando, Knoxville, New York City, and, most importantly, Roma, Texas, a dusty town in the Rio Grande Valley where a visionary high school marching band director fashioned a program that now regularly wins state championships and sends its students off to college. After nearly a decade on the front lines of America’s battle with drug addiction, Sam Quinones delivers another story of our nation, this time brought together by the transformative power of shared joy and humble achievement.