My friend Jay Rozen is out to change all that. He’s a virtuoso tubist (yes, that’s what they’re called) who lives and breathes in the sub-bass region. As you might imagine, it’s not easy being a tubist. People laugh when you sit down to play, and why shouldn’t they? They're ignorant zhlubs when it comes to the tuba.
In his ongoing battle to win recognition and respect for his ungainly icon, Jay has commissioned many new works for solo tuba from contemporary composers, as well as works for tuba and various combinations of instruments...and he has recorded quite a few of them. He plays every kind of music imaginable on the tuba, from experimental music to marches. Somehow, he makes it all look ridiculously easy. Of course, it’s anything but.
Jay is very personable, and quite persistent. He has to be; as a tuba missionary he’s used to being laughed at, if not worse, and he’s had to devise clever strategies for getting his foot in the door. I found out what a thoroughly unassuming and approachable guy he is a couple of years ago, when I met him quite by accident late one night on the Long Island Rail Road; I was coming home from a gig in the city and so was he. He recognized me from a horrible photo in the New York Times, came up and introduced himself, and showed me his tuba case. We chatted pleasantly until he had to get off in Westbury, where he lives. After that, Eric and I socialized with him and his wife Michele, and their daughter Rita, a couple of times, including at a barbeque we held at our old place in East Northport. Jay brought his tuba to the barbeque, and we had a great jam, including a rather free-form version of the Frank Zappa composition “Pygymy Twylyte.” If you’ve never heard “Pygymy Twylyte” on a tuba, you haven’t lived, trust me. But what really impressed me was the way he sounded when he played simultaneous intervals by overblowing. Players of other brass instruments can do that too, of course, but when a tuba pumps out a couple of fifths, say, down in the register where you can really feel it in your digestive tract, it’s quite an experience.
So, when it came time to put a band together to play in Germany last year, Jay was the first musician I e-mailed. Playing in Germany without a tuba in the band was unthinkable. And he and his tuba turned out to be the hit of the Zappa statue dedication ceremony in the public square of Bad Doberan, where he performed his arrangement of the Zappa classic “Sofa”. Originally it was supposed to be executed (if that’s the word) by three tubas, but the festival promoters cheaped out and refused to provide train fare and beer money for the two German tubists Jay had hoped to perform with, so he hastily rearranged the piece for tuba and two saxes. It was still a very moving moment. Jay and his tuba have charisma.
In his spare time (not that he has much), Jay is part of a tuba trio called, aptly, Three. John and I heard them perform a recital at C.W. Post a few days ago. Jay is a professor at Post; head of the low brass department, in fact. (Are you beginning to understand just how many bad jokes a tuba player is subject to?) This recital was a student convocation. The music students had to attend the performance as part of their course requirements and, I think, they were required to write a paper about the performance, to show they had actually attended it. A lot of them seemed to not want to be there. It was just after lunchtime, and a gloomy sort of day to boot. And the students didn’t really want to have to listen to three...well, you know.
Jay and his two cohorts, however, turned in such an entertaining performance that by the end of the recital, the students were yelling for an encore. The trio played a Renaissance dance in 3/4 called a “browning”; they improvised; they played works by contemporary composers ranging from dissonant counterpoint to klezmer; and they finished with Jay’s arrangement of “Sofa”, which makes a triumphant closer under any circumstances. In between the performances, each member of the trio talked to the students about the pieces they were performing, or about playing the tuba generally. Their manner was thoroughly droll. All three of them seemed comically resigned to the fact that if one tuba player was considered bad news, three were...unmentionable. After watching the trio work hard for an hour and a half, I realized that the tuba may have gotten some of its bad-boy-of-the orchestra rep from its physical requirements. Every few minutes, each tubist would casually pop a valve at the bottom of his instrument and release a veritable cascade of spit. Other brass instruments also have spit valves, but the spit valves on tubas appear to be, of necessity, gargantuan. No wonder tubas are usually played outdoors.
But all quibbling and bad jokes aside, as I listened to the thrilling mellowness of “Sofa”, -- a song which Jay had described to the students as causing an “epiphany” for him when he originally heard it -- I realized that there’s only one word for the tuba. Magnificent. And I’m glad there are people like Jay Rozen who are willing to dedicate their lives to sharing their epiphany, whatever it may be, with others, even if it means being mercilessly razzed.
