James Christian 2005 DCA tenor solo

Highlights from James Christian's winning performance at DCA 2005 The solo is entitled "Five". I personally do not like this solo. I have only posted it for the sake of completeness, since my 2004 and 2006 solos are already posted. Here's some background information: I had started writing this solo over the summer, and I got carried away and ended up with a 7-minute solo. IMO, it was constructed beautifully and had all sorts of recurring themes, great variety, etc., but it was just too long. As I was working on it, I kept thinking of more and more things to add, and it just got to be way too long. I got married in August of 2005, and my wife and I took out the scissors and chopped a bunch of sections out of the solo over our honeymoon (about four weeks before the contest). I realized that a couple of minutes needed to be chopped out, but then the solo just sounded too choppy. Over the next several weeks, I tried adding back in some good transitions to make the new version flow better, but it didn't come anywhere close to the quality of the original 7-minute version. Well, the DCA contest was on the first weekend of September (the weekend after Hurricane Katrina hit the coast) in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I&E was Friday night. We had intended to get to Scranton late Thursday night, get a good night's sleep, and do the contest the next day. Unfortunately, we had major traffic problems on the drive there, and we didn't get there until Friday afternoon. We were able to get about an hour of sleep. So I felt terrible. Furthermore, one of my heads broke as soon as I began to warm-up at the contest. The sun made things a bit warm that day, and I had a hard time getting the new head to hold its pitch. The contest director also made all of the drummers move to a different area to warm-up. So after finally getting the drumhead to sound semi-decent, I had about 15 minutes to warm-up. Even worse, they were AHEAD of schedule, so I had to go on a littler earlier than I anticipated. I couldn't find anyone to help me carry my drums, so I had to run from the parking lot, carrying my tenors, all the way to the stadium. I was out of breath, and my arms were fried. I had barely warmed up, and my arms were really tight after carrying my drums all that way. So I took the tempos much slower than I had practiced them to keep from totally falling apart. You may notice that a lot of the rolls sound very poor, and there are a fair number of rim clicks. The slower tempos also make the solo seem to drag on and on. As I mentioned above, I had added in several transitions after shortening the solo. That, along with taking slower tempos, resulted in a 6-minute performance. (I got a two point penalty for going overtime.) In my opinion, the solo really drags on and on, so I have only included the main highlights here to save you from the tedium. If you really want to see the whole thing, you can see it here: http://www.rudimentaldrumming.com/tenor_solo_videos.htm Well, I got lucky this year and still managed to win, so I certainly can't complain. All things considered, I guess this is a decent performance. I just feel bad that it was merely an "adequate" solo. Thanks for reading my ramblings. I hope you enjoy the highlights.