Shaffer: Athens Drive tuba player turns low notes into high honor

RALEIGH -- Every day, Cesar Bernal gets to band class 30 minutes early, practicing lip slurs and scales on his beloved tuba, filling the halls of Athens Drive High School with a golden warble.

He skips lunch hour to practice longer, eating in third-period psychology class instead.

Anyone who knows Bernal calls him the anchor of the marching Jaguars, so vital that he played a rare tuba solo in the middle of "Cool" from "West Side Story."

And now, after the thumb calluses, the back aches and the lips turned to jelly, glory shines on Bernal and his brass companion.

In January, he will pack his Jupiter sousaphone aboard an airplane bound for San Antonio, where he will thunder and honk to fans inside the 65,000-seat Alamodome - part of the U.S. Army All-American Marching Band.

Only 125 high school students nationwide can march across this turf, winnowed from 1,300 applicants.

It's a rare fanfare for a high school musician, let alone a tubist - the orchestral equivalent of a St. Bernard. But watching Bernal wrap himself inside all that tubing, his grin as wide as a sideways bass clef, you know his reward comes just from blowing into that soup-bowl-sized mouthpiece.

"People make fun of you because you play an obnoxiously shaped instrument," said Bernal, 17. "People think it's just an oom-pah thing. But you can really play some beautiful melodies. It looks weird, but I love it."

To most minds, the tuba ranks poorly in the family of instruments - an oafish cousin with a hunchback.

It lacks the flash of the saxophone, the brashness of the trumpet or the look-at-me showiness of the piccolo. Hardly anyone writes solo material for tuba, and when they do, the result can sound like a ballad sung by a bullfrog.

It looks like a brass intestine, 16 feet long when uncurled.

But in seventh-grade, Bernal got his first tuba glance and kicked his clarinet to the curb. The tuba sounded so low, so powerful. Jerry "Doc" Markoch, his band teacher at Athens Drive, knows the tuba's pull. He once jilted a trumpet to get at one.

"The first time I blew in it, I felt my face rattle," Markoch said. "But I knew, playing the tuba, I was laying down a rug for the whole band."

Twenty years ago, I dragged a trombone back and forth to high school, wrestling it all the way to the back seat of the bus. So I am naturally drawn to the brotherhood of big brass.

On Friday, I met Bernal in the Athens Drive auditorium, where 200 of his classmates stood and cheered, and he stood smiling shyly with a yellow tie knotted at his neck, three photographers snapping pictures.

When Bernal was a sophomore, he told me, his family decided to move to California. He didn't want to go, he explained, because the move would mean giving up Athens Drive band and his tuba. So at the last minute, he stayed in Raleigh with a guest family.

I asked him, "You had to choose between your family and your tuba, and you chose the tuba? Is that the right way to say it?"

He nodded. "They didn't want me to stay."

Then Bernal shook my hand and wrapped the sousaphone back around his shoulders. There were more pictures to take, and more lip slurs to practice.