Word: tubas
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...battle of the bass drum began . . . . but it ended with a three-wheeled drum carriage and a bruised Blue . . . . quick action saved the day for the drum, and it rolled on the field again just in time to join the half-time serenade of the Elis . . . a slightly besotted tuba player performed on his instrument and around it . . . . and the Wintergreen medley once again brought down the house...
...Kings with Crosby and Dorsey if you doubt it. The older numbers were almost always played in a hell-for-leather tempo with a lot of those pogo stick ragtime mannerisms. The trumpet was considerably more limited in function, the rhythm less obviously two-beat, and the trombone quite tuba-like. The amount of electrical excitement generated by the old timers was considerable, however, a quality with which their successors do not seem much concerned...
...gentleman whose card was inscribed: "Professor Waldo Quigley, Traveling Representative, Payson and Clarke. The World's Finest Organs. Also Sheet Music and Song Books." "How many reeds in a Payson and Clarke [organ]?" Jess asked him. "Forty-eight, Brother Birdwell," replied Professor Quigley, "not counting the tuba mirabilis. . . . Those reeds duplicate the human throat. They got timbre," he added ("landing on the French word the way a hen lands on the water"). "How many stops?" asked Jess. "Eight," said the professor. "And that vox humana! . . . You can hear the voice of your lost child in it. Did you ever...
...Tuba was not much help to U.S. day bombers, whose tight formations, necessary for protection against day fighters, made them extremely vulnerable to radar-pointed ground guns deep in Germany. So U.S. bombers carried "Carpet"-small transmitters sending out continuous waves to confuse the Wurzburgs. Carpet cut U.S. daylight bomber losses in half...
With counter-radar in full swing, a major raid on Europe became a complex business. Decoy planes dropped streamers of Window, filling the scopes of the Nazis' early-warning radars with swarms of imaginary bombers. From the cliffs of England, Tuba boomed its blasts, adding to the confusion. As the column of bombers swept toward Germany, Carpet cheeped from every plane, dazzling the Wurzburgs, while more puffs of glittering Window covered the sky with phantoms...