September 7, 2005
Karl Stein steps up to lead band
Traverse City West High graduate spends summer with Southwind Drum Corps
By Garret Ellsion
Record-Eagle staff writer
When Karl Stein hit the road this summer, he left with four charter busses, a semi truck, a motor home and a food truck towing a portable kitchen.
"It's a caravan to be sure," he said.
The entourage carried the Southwind Drum Corps, of which Stein - a 2002 graduate of Traverse City West - was the drum major.
Based in Kentucky, Southwind's 34 stop summer tour ended at the World Championships in Foxboro, Mass., Aug. 13.
Stein won a 3rd place scholarship for Drum Major of the Year, and Southwind took 16th place out of a hundred or so drum corps in attendance.
2005 was Stein's last year with Southwind. He will be too old next season. He'll miss the corps, which he said has become an extended family.
"It's a hard life on the road with a drum corps like this. You eat on the ground in parking lots and sleep on the bus," he said. "We all enjoy the small nuances of camaraderie between us."
As drum major, Stein was responsible for leading the corps in competition. He's the one in front with a baton.
"As a drum major, you're the most visible member of the corps," Stein said, likening it to an acting job. "You've got to embody what that organization wants to portray."
Drum majors usually go through extended interviews, often asked to demonstrate teaching skills to a band member, "just to see how you deal with and communicate with that person," Stein said.
He said much is learned about self-confidence and communication.
"You learn skills that can apply a lot of places outside of music," Stein said about "approaching problems with a solution in mind."
Stein acknowledged his high school band teacher , Patricia Brumbaugh, with moving his future towards music.
"She's done the most to put me on the path I'm on now," he said. "The way she presented things - class was more fun than a chore."
Stein's musical career started in sixth grade at Glen Loomis.
"At that time he wanted to play the saxophone but the teacher said no," his mother Mary Beth said. "But, he stuck with it and now here he is."
Stein said a love of jazz as a kid led him to band.
"I picked up a saxophone and just continued on with it," he said.
At Traverse City West he marched baritone sax and was drum major as a senior.
"He loves the ceremony of the whole thing - the precision," his mother said.
Mary Beth said her son's musical tastes have run a wide spectrum.
"He's introduced me to musical styles I've never experienced before."
Stein said his tastes have moved towards contemporary classical.
"It's impactful but not cheesed up like some jazz can be," he said.
This April, Stein was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel, a generic honor awarded by the governor of Kentucky. Stein wears the badge on his band uniform
"That was kind of a surprise," he said. Apparently the drum major for Southwind is commissioned each year, he learned.
"I don't really throw that title around much because I don't think I've done much to get it," he said.
Stein plans to finish school at Eastern Michigan University where he is currently majoring in instrumental music education and minoring in religious studies.