kampers.net

Let’s see.

DCI was fun. It rained most of the time, but that’s OK. If those guys can march around a field with their expensive instruments in the rain, the least I can do is put on a poncho and watch.

The Blue Devils clinic was rained out. We ended up walking around the Citrus Bowl in the rain for a while before the show.

Carolina Crown’s show was “Greek Mythology, Stories of Gods and Heroes.” Meh. They weren’t too bad, but the show lacked luster. The crowd had trouble getting into the music.

Next, the Cavaliers. Their show “Frameworks” moved through melody, harmony, and rhythm. The colorguard was wearing these tight uniforms that were supposed to remind us of the title of the show or something — but they looked more like characters from Tron! Dark suits with outlines in blue and green, etc. Anyway, the melody and harmony parts were OK, standard drum corps stuff. But the rhythm section was awesome! All the brass put their instruments down, and started dancing to the heavy groove. They had some extra big drums on the sideline to enhance the bass line. It was great. The crowd went wild.

The Cadets. I wasn’t really looking forward to their show, “An American Revival,” because I thought it would just be another heartless post-9/11 tribute or something. It would’ve been, except that they pulled it off really well. The colorguard were all dressed as 40’s people. A good jazz feel… the tenors took their drums off to sit down at six identical drumsets for one number. It was well done. Pretty close to the Cavaliers as far as crowd approval.

Blue Devils. I had heard before the show that some major changes were in store for the BD show, and I can see why. “Jazz — Music Made in America” was technically excellent, but not very entertaining. I was excited to read in the program that they would close with Channel One Suite, but it wasn’t that exciting after all.

Then a DCI guy announced that the 2003 championships will be back in Orlando. Yay!

Big finale with all the corps at the end. They played some mix of our national anthem and Canada’s (which only had about five bars of the latter).

Then the scores.

Then a Cavaliers encore. Make that encorps. It was good. They played their show again in a concert arc. The rhythm section of the show wasn’t as exciting the second time. The drill really makes it awesome. I figure I must be missing a lot of action when I listen to old DCI recordings. Time to buy expensive DVD’s. #