How marching band prepares you for any career

Adam: It's incredibly, I think it's an incredibly difficult thing and it's a thing that I think it's hard to appreciate until you see it done well a bunch of times, and this is no knock, but sometimes when you see the junior high band in the same week because where we live here, you get the opportunity to see a lot of marching bands because the high school and the college right next to each other and you kind of go, “man, that's a huge leap.” That's a huge leap when you're up here and you're doing it in your CMU Marching Chippewa and you're out there, there's this really high quality to it, but you meet all the young people that are doing it and it's not necessarily this group of really rigid musicians who have gotten to this place because they're treating it like bootcamp. They're having a really great time and I think it's also one of those great times, and you can push back on this, but they'll disagree with you. By the end of August, they've also kind of tortured themselves into this great time because it's so much hard work. Talk about some of the challenges that you see students go through as they're trying to kind of balance that at the beginning of every year.

Jim: Well, each year is different and in deference to my colleagues in the public schools, I have the greatest job, for marching band director because I get to work with kids who've already learned a lot of stuff. I get very, very often the very best of those high school kids from those high school bands as a starting point. Plus they've all been accepted to the university. There's a real advantage to working with 280 really smart adults.

Adam: He called you smart.

Jim: Yeah. Well, there's always the exception that proves the rule. In one respect or another, and usually in many respects, what we do and how we do it is going to be different than what they experienced in high school. We have a style of movement, for example, that is different than most high school bands employ. It's the same as some more advanced performing groups use, but everybody comes into it, “Well, in my high school, we moved our feet this way when we backed up” “well, but this is the way we do it” and of course we have to get one another to all move in the same way. Otherwise it's just a mess visually. In order for it to look like anything cohesive, the technique has to be unified, and so that takes a little getting used to. The way we approach playing our instruments. For some of them, we're playing professional model instruments that if they're coming from a small school or they don't own their own instrument, they've played a school instrument up to this point, they've never played on a professional model trombone, for example, that takes a little getting used to. We have a pretty good program for building those skills together. And especially with regard to how they move, that's all based on individual progress, and that's a little different than most high school bands employ too, but again, I'm dealing with adults. So, I can turn them all loose on one, so you're going to teach each other to do this, and there are rubrics that they follow and so on. We're also working longer hours and trying to accomplish more than many of them have ever tried to accomplish in their lives and mixed in with all of that is the heat and the sun and all the rest of that. And we work through the summer with some online training exercises for them so they can get themselves physically ready for preseason rehearsals. We take great care to make sure that their physical wellbeing is seen too, and I'm real proud of how they have done that. I say they because the kids have to manage the whole thing. Our leadership structure is such that they're responsible to and for one another, and the process for doing that is very well developed and we spend a lot of time prepping for that with our student leadership team so that as hot and as nasty as things were this last August, I think we had one minor heat injury with nearly 300 people working from dawn till dusk for 10 days. We take pretty good care of one another

Adam: And they got to make it from August all the way to the end of the football season, which usually results in marching in six inches of snow at some point in the process too.

Jim: It certainly has. Yes. Midweek MACtion, my favorite.

Adam: Yeah, I mean I feel like it's a good character builder that you can get while having a good time. It seems like. It seems to be a really good mix of both of them. I see those students out there at the beginning of the year and I'm like, they're roasting in these uniforms. All of the new uniforms breathe better, and then I see them freezing out there and sometimes at the second half of these snowy football games and some of the crowd has started to clear out on the side that they sit and they're in it. They're in it all the way through. The energy's always there. They're not just the marching band. I think they're sort of projecting this attitude that we want students that come to this school to have in terms of, I'm going to support you. I'm going to show you how to have the right energy to get this job done. I mean, that's kind of how I view it and I think for the most part that's what I see from them. It's an infectious energy to be around during that time of the year.

Jim: Yeah. Well, and we're extraordinarily lucky. We have the support of the university from the School of Music, to the College of the Arts and Media, to the President's Office. We're the oldest longest standing spirit group on campus. We're one of the longest standing student groups of any kind on campus, and we take that charge very seriously. That when, oh, some years ago, about 20 years ago, plus The Morning Sun hit us with a headline, “the spirit of the stadium” well, that kind of stuck and we take that as a challenge to be in the game from the beginning to the end to be with the team no matter what's going on, whatever the score is, the team's going to keep fighting. We're going to be right behind. They're going to know that there's at least three hundred people who are right with them every minute of the game from beginning to end.

Adam: I think it's important to note the band really reaches out. I mean, this is students from all across campus. You almost can't find an area of study that doesn't have a student that's in the marching band. They're not just here because they're music performance or music education. In fact, almost half of them aren’t.

Jim: Yeah, well, in fact, more than half of them.

Adam: There you go, see.

Jim: See, we float right around 60% non-music students and that in no way speaks to a lower quality because the bottom line is you go to any high school band, the best players in those high school bands aren't, in fact, very few of them are going to go into music-

Adam: Yeah.

Jim: Beyond high school. A lot of them are going to go into medicine. A lot of them are going to go into law. A lot of them are going into business. Some of them are going to go into building trades. And this is why it's so important that we don't just acknowledge it, but work with the other offices on campus. We've had as many as a dozen or more new Centralis students in the band every year, since the Centralis program began, and that's part of the deal. There's a lot of smart kids in band in high school, and so a lot of the smart kids that are coming to CMU come here because, hey, there's a band I can be in as well, and some of those then go out and do great things in their field. The current chief meteorologist for CBS Detroit, Ahmad Bajjey was our saxophone section leader, and I got to meet Ahmad in his hometown of Dearborn when he was in high school. He came to a pre-orientation event that Marybeth Minnis and I were there representing the college, and he came over. He says, “I'm not going to be a music major. Can I be in your marching band anyway? Because I'm looking at a couple of different meteorology programs and I'll come to CMU for two reasons. First of all, I think they got the best meteorology program and also because I think you're going to let me in your marching band.” I said, “pal, you can not only be in my marching band, you can be a leader in my marching band. Everybody has that opportunity,” and sure enough, before he was done, he was section leader of the alto saxophones and now he's out tearing it up in his chosen field and we see that in all fields of endeavor.

Adam: Yeah, that transferable leadership's got to be really fun for you to watch over your career. You got a couple other ones? Who else is out there? What are the jobs we wouldn't think come out of those section leaders and drum majors?

Jim: Oh gosh. Well, there are the doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, certainly. Like I said, we've got guys who are emergency room doctors. We've got guys who are in all branches of the military, some of them as musicians. We've got two who are marching with The Commandant's Own Marine Drum and Bugle Corps.

Adam: That’s really cool.

Jim: And others who are leaders in business and who serve on various boards of alumni for CMU and they give back that way too. So yeah,

Adam: I mean it kind of shows you though that leadership begets more leadership, right? I mean there's a “stick to it”-ness that I think it takes to come here and march for four years, so I don't know. They must be successful and look it, the marching bands a really visible version of that, but I think it's a good representation of those co-curricular things that you can do here that are going to show you how to have balance and they're going to show you how to lead the way. Right. I mean, I can't imagine that that isn’t improving the success rate of all of those students that are in the marching band that's also probably representative of other activities that students can do here as well.

Jim: Yeah.

Adam: They're just out there more.

Jim: Right. Well, and again, in terms of developing the band itself and the students who are in the band while they're in the band, it's an opportunity to come together with a couple hundred plus other students, and chances are, you're coming in as a freshman in whatever program you're coming in, chances are there are older students in the band who are in that program who can tell you, “alright, here's what you need to work on in your freshman year because sophomore year you're going to take this class.” They can give them fair warning before they have to take organic chemistry.

Adam: It's always organic chemistry, Jim.

Jim: How to steal yourself for OrGo in 25 years. I know of one of our students who got an A in organic chemistry.

Adam: That is maybe the most notorious class on this campus.

Jim: Oh, well, any campus. It is what it is. Since we had a drum major who was in microbiology. He was working on his capstone project and he was going back and forth with his advisor about, “well, you should say it this way. No, no. Okay, now restructure it this way.” And he brought it to me and said, c”an you look at my paper and maybe give it because my advisor and I keep going back and forth on what it should look like and what it shouldn't look like.” I said, “well, okay, I can try. I don't know the first darn thing about what you're studying, but if what you're looking for is form, sure.” And I look at this thing, I say, well, okay, assuming that this 32 letter word is a proper noun, maybe put it here in the sentence. Like I said, we got a lot of really smart kids in the band.

Adam: Well, yeah, and I think that's a really good point too, is that they're in that situation and they're able to support each other because there's such a diversity of students. I think that's the thing too. If you were able to make a pitch to students that are on the edge about whether they should join or maybe they haven't marched before, but they have some other musical inclination or they just want to join something, why is it worth it for them to come seek you all out?

Jim: Well, the first thing I do is I make sure that they get a chance to meet with some of our students who were in exactly the same place. This has been true of the band every year that I've been the director is that there are people at the top of our leadership team when they came in as freshmen weren't so sure they had time to do this thing. We try to, I meet with parents and I get great help from the admissions counselors to explain, look, the idea that my-maybe I'll wait till my sophomore year when I'm not quite so busy, proceeds from a mistaken premise that the sophomore year is going to get less complicated than the freshman year, which there is no field of study where that's the case. The time to explore and find your place at CMU is right out of the gate. So when I'm meeting kids who are looking at it, it's an extension of the whole “We Do” ethos at CMU really is that yes, you can. You absolutely can do this if it's something you want to do. I mean, if the kid doesn't play an instrument, it's going to be a problem. I mean, there's got to be something there, but has never marched before? Well, that just means they've got no bad habits to correct.

Adam: Alright, there you go.

Jim: And then further on down, even kids with physical limitations. I mean, kids with whatever sort of mobility challenge is in their life, right up to and including a kid who off and on because she's got muscular dystrophy was in a wheelchair, that's fine. You're a great clarinet player. I'll figure out a way to move you around in the field. I didn't-when she came into the band, I hadn't looked ahead to the specter of when we were playing “Proud Mary” and on the chorus and the line is “rolling” there's somebody pushing her around doing wheelies in her wheelchair at the front of the field and the students are screaming,

Adam: Oh yeah.

Jim: But if a student has a desire to be a part of this and they have a certain basic musical talent, certain developed musical technique, they'll be fine. They might not progress as quickly as some of the people around them, but if they stick to it, they'll get to the goal and by the end of band camp they'll be at performance level. Because smarter and more talented people than I populate this group and know that that's our goal. We get there together.

Adam: And then, so right next to that though, let's talk about the students that maybe they didn't know they were going to do this. Maybe they didn't know-we just talked about, sorry, we just talked about those. Maybe they didn't know the benefits, they didn't know they could pull it off. Then there's the students who, they're going to be in the marching band ecosystem. Let's talk about what that looks like professionally. Because I do think there's something worth noting here, that this is a big industry that exists outside of when you march in college, right? Sure. There's opportunities that are directly marching band related and adjacent to marching band related that people can have as they continue on with their lives and their careers.

Jim: Sure. There's a whole community of competitive drum and bugle corps. That I was involved when I was a teenager, although what that looks like today is different than it did in the 1980s when I did it because it's, I mean, giant set pieces and they're climbing props and they're costuming and sound reinforcement and all kinds of groovy stuff. For the duration of our history, since that drum and bugle corps movement came into national prominence in the 1960s, there have been people in the marching band who participate in that simultaneous with-some are simultaneous-to their participation with us or after their participation with us. In some cases, they come to us having had that. But then in other cases, we've had a couple of drummers end up playing in street lines, drum lines, and there are comparatively few professional or even professional adjacent volunteer organizations that perform for professional football games, that sort of thing. There are very few actual marching band activities after college other than teaching, and a lot of our guys do that. They help out with and write shows for-even the guys who don't go into music education, they teach at camps. They're brought in to help with high school bands at their band camps. They learn how to choreograph field shows, and they write those for high school bands and some of them for Drum and Bugle Corps. The only professional level marching band per se, to be found in America anyway are the military bands and all of those for the most part, again, with the exception of the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps, which is primarily a marching group, all the rest of those are primarily concert organizations that also march for parades and events and that sort of thing, but we've had kids go off and do that too.

Adam: What advice would you give for students that are looking to incorporate music or their musical experience into different careers?

Jim: Oh, well, careers that involve music obviously require a certain amount of time and training, if not getting an actual degree there's apprenticeship involved. Whether it's writing, composing, arranging, film scoring is a thing, and of course we have a brand spanking new degree track in commercial music and songwriting, and so I mean, there are those things to consider, but for somebody who's not looking to be in a musical career, per se, to keep music in their lives, there are any number of ways. I tell them, sing in your church choir. If there isn't a community band, start one. Most in Michigan, it's hard to go more than 50 or 60 miles without running into an adult band that you can play in. Those who are really quite good continue to play in some of the semi-professional orchestras in Michigan, there are a ton of those. There are members of the Midland Orchestra and Flint and the Saginaw Bay orchestras that are paid a professional salary, but a lot of those folks are, they're paid a lower scale or in some orchestras, community orchestras in the state, not paid at all. So, there are opportunities to continue to play, but then as far as bringing music into your career, I guess depending on what that career is, my advice is just do it. Are people who go into public communication of any kind, look for stories about music in the community, look for which local kids are now performing at the highest levels in whatever part of the performing arts in the world, or play up the positive aspects of music in your community because by generating additional interest, you open the door for more kids to have the experience you've had and that keeps you involved in that way, but get together with friends and continue to play.

Adam: Well. And there's something also that's like, there's something about music too. There's this raw thing that I think keeps people coming back to it, and like you were mentioning, it is in your community, isn't in your job, just do it. People who are that we disagree, we don't necessarily talk that much. Music's something we can all kind of circle around. It's a bonfire to some extent, right? I mean, there's this kind of intangible spiritual value to it that exists.

Jim: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, getting together to play duets or trios or somebody plays guitar and let's get together and sing and harmonize whatever. The performing of music, it doesn't require an audience. I mean, it's all performing, and it transcends all social barriers. If we’re going to sing a song together, we're going to play off of one another, and we're going to get louder together. We're going to get softer together. We're going to speed up together and slow down together. We're going to, we're going make it musical together. I’m going to get philosophical on you here.

Adam: No, it's okay.

Jim: Dialogue as opposed to debate. Dialogue intended for you and me to understand one another and our points of view in order to maybe find consensus or compromise is different than I'm firmly ensconced in, I think, and vote and speak this way. And you speak completely contrary to, we're constantly fighting one another. I think you can't have that kind of experience singing a song together, playing a duet together, playing a larger ensemble. That's all dialogue.

Adam: And even for those that are observing it too, right? I mean, an audience is participating in a performance in some way, right?

Jim: Sure.

Adam: Almost always there's something sort of uncanny about music where we don't always all wrap our heads around it the same way, but we might still all come out of it feeling really, really good. Michael and I were talking today about the score for the movie Interstellar, and I'm sure the way you hear Hans Zimmer, the way I hear Hans Zimmer are probably different. You know what I mean?

Jim: Maybe.

Adam: But maybe, yeah. I think that's kind of one of those things too is music within our communities and by communities, I mean a lot of things could be workplace school here, people that going to the movies that creates some kind of community creates some similarities for people.

Jim: Sure. Well, and you mentioned Zimmer. Zimmer is a master of, and I think Interstellar is a great example. Music requires silence, as a backdrop and as connective tissue between certain musical moments. Zimmer's a master of creating a moment of complete silence in his music, which allows then for things to, allows the audience to connect with the visual moment, but also it really engages. That's the thing about performing together is that we stay engaged with the same thing at the same time, and we play off of one another. Marching band comparatively, few moments of complete silence, even in the performance of the Central fight song has nonstop big, loud, heavy accents, rah-rah beginning to end. But it has to balance. It has to be in tune. We have to be able to hear what's the primary voice? What are the secondary functions going on? If all you hear are the bass drums just, whomp-whomp-whomp, well, then it's not the total package. And if everybody just blows their brains out without regard for anybody else, well then nobody, including the people in the group can understand what's actually going on. Music in general and marching band in particular, are about finding consensus and cooperation amid potential chaos. And we get to go rah-rah and fight team fight.

Adam: Well, I mean, I think to some extent there, I mean, the philosophical thought about that is really interesting. Like everyone who comes and participates in creating a piece of music, they're not the same force of nature, right? It's trying to get something that feels like waves, but it's kind of coming out the floodgates. You got to control those pulses.

Jim: Well, and what makes it work is recognizing and then being able to manage the fact that they create the waves that they have to ride. The pulse, I tell our beginning conducting students, they're going to disabuse ourselves with the notion that the pulse resides in the guy with the stick at the front of the room, the pulse is in the ensemble or it’s not there. They respond to what they hear and then to a certain degree to what they see, but more about they respond to what they hear and what they feel from one another as they make choices together to, the trumpets are going to get louder at this point, but they're all going to get louder at the same time, at the same rate, and the tone color is going to brighten to the same degree, or it's just noise.

Adam: I'm taking a left turn. What makes somebody a good drum major? What puts somebody in that position? I truly don't know. I've met a lot of drum majors since I've been here. Obviously it's an elevated position and it seems to me like there's a little bit of a hockey goalie-ness about it. There are personality usually

Jim: I mean, well, any performer has to have a healthy ego, certainly. And there is flash to the performing aspect of the thing, for example, because of who the last 10 or 12 drum majors of the Michigan band have been and what they have done since about 10-12 drum majors ago. If you're going to be the drum major of the Michigan band, you have to have the ability to take off the big hat, set yourself up, bend back, and touch the top of your head to the turf. Because if you don't do it.

Adam: They're going to lose the hat.

Jim: Well, the crowd is waiting for that. That's specific to that drum major's job. Our drum majors have a certain sort of stylized strut that they do down the field. I tell every single one of them when they audition, I don't need to see you do that. What makes a good drum major? To do the job well, and to do the job that the band needs you to do. You have to have not just a willingness or the ability, but you have to have the drive to place your wants, desires, and so on, last. you are there to serve the needs of the other 279 people in the band. The term servant leadership can't be a slogan that gets painted on a wall. It has to be how leadership is practiced in the group, and it can't happen in the group if it doesn't happen at the top of the leadership team. So typically the best drum majors have, in addition to a pretty healthy ego, have a really, really healthy sense of humility.

Adam: It struck me as a certain type of student. I mean, I feel like the last handful of drum majors here, I see what their other involvements are here as well. And it just seems like there's a very similar, it's not the same, but there's a very similar path for the one since I've been here. These are kids who are heavily involved. There's some part of what they're doing here that has a lot of humanity to it, but I do think that's kind of a common observation I've had with them. So it seems like there's an appeal to a certain type of student there, and there's probably a benefit to having that type of leadership for the rest of those students too.

Jim: Oh, yeah. Because then it's not something we simply say about leadership. It's how leadership is practiced, which then encourages everyone to take a chance. Rehearsal can be the place you go. You can be having the worst week of your life, but from 4:00 to 5:20 every afternoon, you got a place you can go that's safe, allows you to take chances, allows you to just set your cares aside for a little while because you're surrounded by people who are there to work with you and who, by the way, at the end of rehearsal, you walk away from the field looking a little, like you got the weight of the world on your shoulders, somebody's going to show up next to you and say, what's up? How can I help? And that again, that flows from the idea that as leaders, and it isn't just the leadership structure. We have a fairly, we've got a hierarchy of drum major, assistant drum major, and section leaders and rank captains and squad leaders and ancillary stretch gurus, blah, blah, blah. But everybody's a leader. Everybody fits into the structure and the older they are, the longer they've been here, the more they make themselves available to help everybody else. And those first year members slide right into that ethos pretty quickly. And those that don't are easily spotted, not so that we can, why aren't you smiling? Get with the program, man! So that help can be offered in case it's wanted or needed.

Adam: It's so many students. I mean, just for you, compared to other faculty members. I have student employees here and I have other students that are kind of in my orbit as an administrator. I always feel like this sense of responsibility when they ask me for something or this or I see them struggling with something, I kind of go, every one of you is a little bit different. You need a different kind of voice. You need a different kind of encouragement, or you need a different kind of kick in the pants. How do you do that? How do you do that with that many students?

Jim: Well, and again, I do it by making sure that first of all, we start every spring-we're about to end of next week, we'll introduce the leadership team for the coming year, about 40 students who in various roles, we'll comprise the official leadership team. And then we will have conversations through the spring and then into the summer that start with some conceptual, we ask the same questions every year, start right from clean slate. Why do we do this? And if at the bottom line, the answer isn't to make the world a better place in some way, then we have to reevaluate what we do. We take a hard look at what we do, why we do it, and how we do it, and then ask questions. Okay, is there a better way to do this? What were our experiences last season? What were the things that, and we debrief at the end of every season with our sections. What were some of the comments you got about, “I wish we had done this differently?” How, without going into too much detail, what was the nature of your biggest failure as a leader last year? And you don't have to write it down, you don't even have to say it out loud, but let's confront that and think, “okay, what's the strategy to get around that and make things better for the next year?” So that the whole idea that every year is better than the previous, every show is better than previous isn't just, again, something to Concordia ad astra “together to the stars” It's not just something to paint on a wall or embroider around a sweater. It's central to what we have done for 102 years.

Adam: It's what you have to do to progress.

Jim: Well, absolutely. If you're not moving forward, you're falling behind. By doing it well and by finding ways for the student leaders to nurture one another and to create that and continue to grow that culture. We can have fun doing this. We're all working too hard to not have fun while we're doing it. Now we're going to have fun by working hard because it's the result that's the most fun. But by keeping it energized and positive, I can get them to tap into one another's best instincts and then there's no stopping them. And then I can start, okay, we're going to speed this up here. We're going to play this, trumpets are going to be a little louder here. I can make the musical adjustments, the visual adjustments and that sort of thing. But the energy to getting it done all comes from them.

Adam: What a good skill. What a good skill to take into life, right?

Jim: Oh yeah.

Adam: I mean, again, I go into these co-curriculars and I really just do think marching band is such a great visible, A, there's so many people. B, like you said, there's that continuity. If you do this for four or five years, hopefully four or be a GA and be involved too. But try to graduate them in four, Jim, that's what I have to say. Or they kicked me out this

Jim: Party line.

Adam: but you get through it in four, you don't get that chance to iterate your work necessarily as an undergrad looking, you go from class to class to class. It's a little bit different things. You'll have sometimes you'll see the same faculty, you'll have some researching might be involved and that carries on, but those co-curriculars are going to teach you-and marching band, I think is one of them, big time-is going to teach you how to be self-reflective. If you're here and you're here for four years, find a way to reflect on yourself.

Jim: Oh yeah.

Adam: It's the best adult skill. It sometimes sucks, but I think it's the best adult skill you can have at 22, 23 years old to leave here and go, I can do something really well. I could do something really poorly. And at the end of it, I can give the same effort to understanding how and why I did it the way I did it. And I know that sounds like too philosophical, too mushy-gushy, but I mean, I don't care what degree field you, I don't care what thing you're doing here. I feel like that's the thing to learn to do because then you get better at anything.

Jim: Oh yeah, absolutely. And the fact that we have 60% of the group from other disciplines, I don't believe it's, my impression is that there is no field of study in the university where you're an island. You're part of a research team, you're part of a process. We're really lucky because the cooperative endeavor that is the performing arts, and again, marching band, particularly with so many people working in the same space at the same time, well, we get feedback now. Every single time we do what we're doing. We get feedback from one another. But ways to think about how we do what we do are as informed by our biology students as they are by our philosophy students every now and then, certainly, but by the pre-med kids, certainly the kids who are in, there's athletic training and physical therapy and that sort of thing. They don't just inform our thoughts about how we warm up the bodies and how we treat ourselves physically, but also in just how to work together as a team. And so in addition to being able to benefit from the insight and the contributions from all of these students, I benefit from the instruction that they get from faculty all across this campus in a way that few other professors have that have the benefit of their colleagues' work the way I do. It's good to be in that position. All of that great work done by our great faculty all across campus has an effect on how I get to do my job.

Adam: So we talked a lot about just the core benefits that exist for the students and what they're going to get out of it while they're here. Talk a little bit about your alumni group, how staying involved with the band after graduation matters and how those folks support each other.

Jim: We have moving toward a more organized alumni group. We have the beginnings of one now forming, thank goodness, because there are some things we want to do with alumni, performance opportunities, trips, that kind of thing. But the thing that's been great throughout our history is that our alumni support us in any number of ways. First and foremost, when we get together on campus. The homecoming events, whether we got some who just do the parade, we've got some who just do the halftime show. We got some who just play in the stands at the game. We got some who don't actually play at all, but they're there sitting with us because honestly, at 65, I can't play an instrument and march at the same time anymore. I tried a couple of years ago in an event associated with the high school I graduated from and my best friend from high school, and I marched together in the Homecoming parade, and we got maybe a core of the way down the street and the two of us plus our friend, the buddy of ours who marched in the Michigan State Band. Who the hell came up with this? Whose idea is it to play and walk at the same time?

Adam: You guys heard it here first, walking and blowing a horn at the same time. Bad idea.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah.

Adam: Jim Batcheller

Jim: Well, it's bizarre. And yet for young people it can be just exhilarating. Well, and so we have that group that comes back together, and some of them every year and some of them every two or three years. But more than that, they give back to us. The young man who was in the band graduated in 2014, who's very successful program, particularly in his high school jazz band in the state of Washington, is back home visiting his folks who live in Mount Pleasant. He came in and spoke to one of our classes, and yesterday afternoon, last night, he spoke to music education group. The State Music Education meeting in Grand Rapids just a couple of weeks ago. And it's just wall to wall, CMU grads.

Adam: That's got to feel good.

Jim: Oh, it's absolutely fantastic. And everybody from the kids who are just out in their first couple of years teaching and coming back with questions to the guys who've been out for-Matt Shepherd, who's in his 25th year of teaching, was the first drum major of the band under my direction, and is just fourth time, I think, finalist for a Grammy Music Educator award. We have this wealth of success in our alumni, but also their shared experience when they were in the group brings them back together. There's a certain group of marching band alumni from the 1990s who call themselves the Camping Chips, and they do everything together. I just saw stuff on Facebook. They're down south somewhere with palm trees, a bunch of them, but most of them get together next to a lake or the campers together and bonfires. The friendships that are forged while they're students carry on for so many of them for so long. We have alumni giving back to the band in so many different ways all the time. But mostly, and for me, the most important is when they're able to come around, if not at Homecoming at other games and seeing them coming in and seeing them with their kids, and now grandkids, some of them, and getting them to come down and see what the band is continuing to do since they graduated.

Adam: So if you're a former marching band member at Central Michigan University and you're listening to this, get back over here.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. Come see us. Come to Homecoming or check us out on Facebook. Send us money.

Adam: Yeah, buy us something.

Jim: But mostly stay in touch with us because everything we do now is built on the things that our alumni established along the way as they were members of the group. They're going to be season ticket holders for football. There's a little box you can check to give a couple of bucks to the marching band up to including the donations to the Chippewa Athletic Fund in the name of the marching band. We have a marching band championship fund. A lot of people give money there. They give to other funds. There's the Jack Saunders Travel Fund, which pays for us to go to away games when that opportunity arises and other such things and people contribute to that. We have some spectacular support from our alumni and are always willing to accept more.

Adam: Well, I don't know if I'm willing to accept any more, Jim. I think we've kind of covered it all.

Jim: We really kind of have. I know we fixed the entire world, haven't we?

Adam: No. That's another podcast we're going to probably do. Thanks for coming in, Jim. It was a pleasure. Thank you, man. It's good to see you as always.

Jim: You too.

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