[Dixielandjazz] Edward Scott McMichael - Tuba Man

[Stephen G Barbone]

November 14, 2008 - NY TIMES - by William Yardley
Seattle Bids Tuba Man a Sad Goodbye

SEATTLE — He played “Itsy Bitsy Spider” when it rained and the theme  
from “Chariots of Fire” even when the home team lost. “Thumbs up!” he  
insisted when you were not so sure. “Want to be a part of it tonight?”  
he beseeched, a call for coins and maybe transformation.

Edward Scott McMichael was a busker with perfect pitch and an  
improbable horn whom most people in this city knew by another name,  
Tuba Man. He wore funny hats and said funny things, but his mission  
was to make money by making music in the streets. Outside the stadium.  
Outside the opera. Wagner? Iron Maiden? Sure, and it could cost you.

“I was like ‘Five bucks?’ ” Lorin Sandretzky recalled of the time he  
ordered up Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.” “But it was worth it.”

Mr. Sandretzky has his own outsized alter ego, Big Lo, Seattle’s  
Biggest Sports Fan. For now, he said, he is “Seattle’s saddest sports  
fan.”

Last month, Mr. McMichael, 53, was bludgeoned late one night near  
downtown. He died several days later. He was not carrying his tuba at  
the time, and it appears that the three teenagers who have been  
arrested in the case did not know Mr. McMichael. Most of the rest of  
Seattle surely did.

More than 1,000 people turned out for a memorial service on Wednesday  
night near Qwest Field. Large men wore their favorite team’s jersey —  
the Seahawks, the Mariners, the departed Sonics or the Washington  
Huskies — and many held their wives’ hands and cried. The president of  
the Seattle Mariners, Chuck Armstrong, spoke through tears when he  
read a line he said his son had written: “It was just impossible to be  
sad while he was playing that tuba.”

An impromptu tuba ensemble played “Salvation is Created,” followed by  
“When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Some people say losing Tuba Man puts losing seasons in painful  
perspective. Some say he was a martyr, a victim of urban violence that  
must be stopped. And some say Tuba Man represented the increasingly  
smothered soul of this city, more substantial and strange than its  
clichéd sheen of coffee and computers. He was an analog mystery, they  
say, basso profundo.

Others say Tuba Man was just being Ed.

“He was quite proficient on the piano, and I think to get back at my  
mother he took up the tuba because she didn’t like it particularly,”  
Mr. McMichael’s sister, Joyce Baker, said in an interview. “He was 14  
or 15, the rebellious years. When he got into the tuba, he never went  
back to the piano.”

When he practiced in the basement, she added, “the house shook.”

Mr. McMichael grew up in the Wallingford neighborhood, the son of a  
beautician and a city health inspector. Ms. Baker said her brother was  
born when she and her other brother, Kelsey McMichael, were in high  
school, that he was slow to talk but took quickly to music. He played  
in the Seattle Youth Symphony and for many years for local orchestras  
that did not pay. A friend in the 1980s suggested busking, and Mr.  
McMichael never looked back. He might play downtown all evening and  
then go home and stay up late, transposing pieces for a wide range of  
instruments, surrounded by a clutter of videos and recordings of  
musical performances, including some of his own. Sheet music, written  
in his hand, was everywhere.

“We didn’t know what to do with it,” Ms. Baker said. “We didn’t know  
who to refer him to or what.”

Mr. McMichael never married and rarely worked a regular job. When his  
sister and brother moved to Florida in 2002, he refused to leave  
Seattle but he had to move out of their basement. The family arranged  
for him to live in a small studio apartment near downtown. He paid his  
own way on his annual train trip to California, to Disneyland.

“I think he liked the rides,” Ms. Baker said. “He didn’t like change.  
He went to the same hotel and ate in the same restaurants because he  
was sure the girls that worked in those restaurants were waiting to  
see him when he went back. He gave them good tips.”

He did not take his instruments on those trips. Tuba Man’s stage was  
Seattle.

John Tangeman, manager of audience services for Pacific Northwest  
Ballet, said he and others would slip Mr. McMichael a spare ticket for  
a performance on the condition that he remove his Dr. Seuss hat or  
whatever headwear he favored that day. He said he would see Mr.  
McMichael watching “on the edge of his seat.”

Afterward, Tuba Man would be back outside with his horn in the rain,  
long after the rest of the audience had gone home.

“Ed would ask in his unmistakable baritone, ‘John, do you want to be a  
part of it tonight?’ ” Mr. Tangeman recalled. “This statement was part  
of the genius of Ed, as if contributing to Ed’s efforts, one was not  
only being a part of Ed’s life but being a part of something much  
larger, something almost unobtainable.”