In no uncertain terms, The Moonglowers were the best thing about high school for me. Read into that what you will about what else I actually did or didn't do during those years. Not unlike the SPFHS Marching Band, the jazz band had a sterling reputation in New Jersey. Traditionally, the band's competition pieces would include one uptempo swing tune, a ballad, and either a latin or a rock tune. Once I was in the band, I typically got called on for the swing tune and one of the others, and there's something to be said for playing jazz at ninety miles an hour to start your school day.

Man, where to begin with this one? In my senior year, we went 5 for 5 on Best Rhythm Section awards, and I won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, mostly due to a composed percussion feature in the middle of one of the pieces. We took first place overall a lot that year, including at the "Festivals of Music" band trip in Ocean City, Maryland, which resulted in playing the awards ceremony in front of about 2,000 people. That still rates as possibly the biggest crowd I've been in front of. However, the most appreciative may have been two student assemblies at the high school that year, where I was pretty much the only one in the band who got applause after a solo. While I wasn't necessarily the most popular person in high school, everyone knew who I was and respected what I could do on the drums, mostly as a result of my playing with the jazz band.

I do have one major regret about my high school jazz band days, and that's that I wasn't actually listening to much jazz. On some level, a big band is almost more like rock than it is jazz in presentation, so I was able to be successful, but when I listen to Tony Williams or Roy Haynes or any serious bebop guys nowadays, I wonder what I might have been able to do in that band if I actually had a clue about really playing jazz.

On the other hand, all of my time learning to read music made me pretty formidable when running down a chart, and I would pick out all manner of phrases to accentuate on the drumkit. I also, as mentioned above, composed a drum and percussion trio part for one piece that had some more of that intricate interplay I was very much into at the time. There was some thought that we should have improvised something instead, but we just weren't good enough to do that then.

I have some tapes of all the competition pieces I played during my tenure, but haven't gotten around to converting them to digital audio. It's definitely something I'd like to do, just don't keep your fingers crossed.