Spotlight of the Week: 1991 Crossmen

With Star of Indiana taking the title, followed by the Cavaliers and Phantom Regiment, the 1991 Drum Corps International World Championship at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas was the only time in DCI's history that all of the top-three corps hailed from the same geographical region.

1991 also marked the very first year that the Blue Knights earned a spot in the Finals competition and also the last year that the Sky Ryders found themselves among the Top 12 drum corps.

Crossmen's eighth-place "Pat Metheny Suite" was the first time the corps explored the music of the popular American jazz guitarist and composer, enjoying the experience enough to return to his pen for entire shows in 1998 and 2010 and partial shows in 2002, 2006 and 2007.

 

Metheny has won 20 Grammy Awards and is the only musician to have won in as many as 10 different categories. His earliest albums were distinctively influenced by Latin music, with later albums exploring rock idioms by mixing in jazz fusion. The 1977 formation of the Pat Metheny Group, with composer and jazz pianist Lyle Mays on keyboards, eventually brought Metheny 10 of his Grammys. That collaboration continued for more than a quarter century.

"Minuano" (subtitled "Six Eight") opened the Crossmen show with a brief, brassy fanfare prior to the statement of the actual melody. The piece, co-composed with Mays, was one of two works in the show from the band's 1987 "Still Life (Talking)" album. Like the rest of the album, this composition blended jazz with folk, rock, new-age, and Brazilian jazz world music. The album won the 1988 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance. The title comes from the cold wind that blows in from the south into southern Brazil and Uruguay.

The treatment of the piece by the Crossmen was equally cool, smoothly staying mostly under the boiling point until after a front ensemble interlude. In recognition of the 6/8 time signature of the piece, the corps marched both two counts to each measure of music and also occasionally two counts driven by whatever the Brazilian rhythmic percussion was playing at the time.

 

The next piece in the show was the lush ballad, "Dream of the Return," off Metheny's 1989 "Letter from Home" album. During this piece, the color guard members let large, flowing deep blue or green colored scarves take the place of their regular equipment. The piece ended with a drill formation of the corps' Maltese Cross emblem.

The final production was "Third Wind" from the "Still Life (Talking)" album, co-written by Metheny and Mays. In the original, Metheny utilized wordless vocals and a guitar synthesizer that gave the impression of a brass instrument. The drum line exploited the drumming style that was generally referred to as the "Crossmen Groove Machine," with several layers of rhythmic flavors occurring concurrently.

 

When the mallet percussionists took off on the tune's percolating Afro-Brazilian musical "hook," the color guard section highlighted that sudden geographic musical jump with black and white zebra-like flags. The horns then took over that theme by themselves at the front of the field, featuring lots of heavily exposed crisp passages.

A brief snippet from the "Minuano" theme returned from earlier at the end. That led into a company front push and the final blast of powerful chords that were definitely much hotter than the burst of cold winds that earlier blew up from the Antarctic Circle.

1991 Overview

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Michael Boo was a member of the Cavaliers from 1975-1977. He wrote about the drum corps activity for more than 35 years while serving as a staff writer for various Drum Corps International projects. During his lifetime Boo wrote for numerous other publications including an honors-winning book on the history of figure skating. He also was an accomplished composer. Boo passed away in 2020 and was inducted into the DCI Hall of Fame posthumously in 2021.