Interview with Roger Bobo at Domaine Forget

Move my chair closer. Because I want to look at your embouchure. Sometimes if you're sounding good, one doesn't want to fix an embouchure. And I don't like to fix embouchures anyway. And right now, in this position, in this room, it sounds fine. But start over again. Just for the first phrase or two. Can you play that on the mouthpiece? Here we go. Okay, that's a pretty perfect embouchure. Put the mouthpiece in the tuba and play with the same embouchure. Let's start at a different place. Because that's medium-high register. Let's start right there. I know you knew legendary pedagogue and another tuba player, Arnold Jacobs. Tell me a little about the influence you've had on each other and your friendship. Well, he was my tuba father in a way. I met him the first time when I was 17 years old, taking the train back from Interlochen, Michigan to Los Angeles. I had eight or nine hours to kill in Chicago. So I got in a taxi and went to his house and met him and played for him. And we hit it off big time. That was a good contact to meet you. He says, this sounds like boasting, but I got to tell you, he says, I can't teach you anything. You know, you're the first person I've heard that I don't have anything to teach. You're doing fine. Of course, that changed. Things change like that. There's also a very, very, very interesting difference. Sometimes in western conservatories, you have what we call an attitude. Somebody with an attitude, somebody with a chip on their shoulder, or somebody who has a stylistic agenda that they don't want to depart from. Nothing like that. Nobody has an attitude. Yeah, I think if I told them that, you know, they should stand on their head and finger with their toes, they probably would try it before they thought I was crazy. What are good sounds? Well, there's many, many, many, many, many sounds. And the sound in a symphony orchestra depends on which piece, you know. Berlioz and Bruckner don't require the same sound. And so is it with many different composers. It requires different sounds. And what you do in the symphony orchestra isn't the same that you do as a soloist. And so we are required, brass players, and I guess woodwind players too, to take on many identities. Adjust to acoustics, different situations. But also, not to just have one voice, but to have several voices that fit in the context of the music.