The Greatest Tuba Player in the Rio Grande Valley

A portion of a tale from my next nonfiction book ... The Perfect Tuba (out in September)

In his day, J.R. Treviño was the greatest high school tuba player in the Rio Grande Valley, on the Texas border with Mexico.

Today, he doesn’t know how he would have survived high school without the instrument.

J.R. Treviño was a poor kid born to Joe and Mary, a car-wash worker and his wife, who could in no way afford an instrument or music lessons for their boy.

But J.R. had made a noise on the tuba in third grade, when a musician brought one to class, and never forgot it when the musician said, “Hey, you did it. Good job!”

Of such encouragements lives are changed.

It helped that in the Rio Grande Valley, school districts own their tubas and offer them to kids for free while they are in school band.

Through his school years, J.R. was mightily bullied for his thick glasses, a stutter, and a few other things. For protection, he turned to his bass horn eagerly, playing it for hours a day. He found in it both a friend and proof of his own worth as he nurtured the powerful column of air that he sent vibrating through the tuba’s twisting tubes to produce that bone-shaking sound.

“I would play to make myself feel good,” he told me.

“When you’re playing the tuba, it feels like a body massage. Your whole body vibrates and it feels fantastic. You can feel it, literally, in your heart. It, like, was a form of self-soothing. It soothed the feeling of the bullying. I would block everything else out. It’s one of my favorite feelings, and it was right away.”

By high school, he was playing things none of his peers could hope to play on the horn.

I’d been told about this tuba phenom by others in the Rio Grande Valley, where I was doing reporting for my next book, The PERFECT TUBA: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work – a project that to me had become a reviving antidote after the grim realities I’d chronicled in my previous two books about drug addiction.

(The book comes out September 30. You can pre-order it right here.)

The people I talked to couldn’t remember the name of this great tuba player, nor his town or school. But they said that 20+ years ago he had played the big horn in an RGV high school better than anyone they had ever heard.

My curiosity piqued, and my reporter’s instincts firing, I dug around. And before too long, I found myself knocking on the door of a small wood-frame home in the valley town of Harlingen, Texas.

J.R. was now 42.

He told me his story, of finding in the tuba some solace from a difficult social life, and through it forging stunning abilities he never imagined he possessed.

I’ve written the stories of many people in my life. But during the reporting on J.R.’s tale, I remember feeling fulfilled in a sweet and powerful way. It confirmed why I was doing this book about tuba players and band directors after so many years of writing about drug addiction.

As a journalist, I learned long ago that if you focus on people who are doing something for the pure love of it you’re bound to come up with great stories. I’ve lived by that motto most of my career.

Tuba players learned what they were capable of through the horn, which seemed to return to them in some way the love and hard work they put in. Band directors fostered that illumination in their kids.

In either case, these are exciting things to hear a human being talk about. I relished doing so.

Particularly now.

I’ve felt for some time that our culture has turned away from devotion and focus, away from achievement through putting in hard work toward a goal.

We want stuff to come easy, quick, with as reliable a blast of (fleeting) pleasure as we get from fast food. But that’s drugs’ message. That’s corporate consumer marketing talking. That’s not real life.

As an antidote to that, I began to write about tuba players and band directors, though I don’t play a horn and never marched in my school band.

I came to see that tuba players and band directors have something healthy to impart to a culture of immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness through something we buy.

They devote their lives to the proposition that we find fulfillment from hard work, from focus, persisting through failure, and from collaborating with others toward a larger goal.

These are powerful ideas, I believe, and especially so to young people, for whom they can be transformative – as they were for J.R. Treviño.

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