I Dig the Sound of Tubas in the Morning

Hello, hungry people.

How’s your day going?

Mine got off to a great start, thanks for asking.

As usual, I got up early and walked to pilates class. Which is another way of saying: I got up way too early and walked with my lovely wife to her pilates class. And then I turned around and walked home. Round trip, it’s about a mile.

As is also usual, I was trying to make sense of the morning headlines. Yeah, I know. A fool’s errand. Still, I try. We all try, don’t we? Even those of us who claim we’ve stopped paying attention to the headlines and are seeking inner peace through Ozempic and “Little House on the Prairie” re-runs.

Making sense of the headlines these days can lead to confoundment which, depending on exactly how awful the headlines are, can send us into a total funk, and not the James-Brown, “I-Feel-Good” kind of funk.

But that didn’t happen this morning. This morning, just as I started grinding on the morning headlines, I heard … was that a tuba?

***

Meet Ryan Williams.

Ryan lives in the neighborhood and has started setting up in the park near pilates class and playing his tuba in the morning before he goes to work. I wandered over to listen to him.

I probably know just as much about tubas as you do. Meaning, next to nothing.

“It’s a C tuba,” Ryan told me, as opposed to the big-ass tubas, technically called sousaphones, that you see in marching bands. Still, there’s a lot of tube in a C tuba, 16 feet of tube to be precise, which Ryan was blowing through to produce the music you can hear above.

It’s a number written specifically for tubas by the American composer Frank Gulino. It has a wonderful name — “Effervescent Ballroom.”

And if you’d like to listen to a full seven minutes of it, knock yourself out.

***

All I know is that listening to Ryan play his tuba in the park got my day off to an unexpected good start.

I won’t go so far as to say that it put me in an effervescent mood. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a mood like that, even with the aid of controlled substances. But I was no longer heading down the path of confoundment.

“Thanks for that,” I told Ryan. “It lifted me up.”

“That’s why I come here and play in the morning,” said Ryan. “It lifts me up too.”

***

So here’s hoping you find something unexpected that lifts you up today.

And I’ll leave it to Mr. Brown to get things going.