Before you complain about walking to your car in 100-degree heat, think about the participants in Drums Across Cajun Field. These musicians have spent weeks of 14-hour days marching and playing under the summer sun.
They sleep on high school gym floors in the cities they visit. These challenges are part of their efforts to be known as the best of the best.
Eric Melley, director of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Pride of Acadiana Marching Band, is among their admirers.
“Those instruments aren’t light,” said Melley. “They’re basically running around the field doing these formations. It’s like marching band, but it’s highly accelerated. The music’s more difficult, more challenging, more sophisticated. The marching is much more sophisticated.
“They are very well conditioned. They lose a lot of weight. It’s intense.”
Some of world’s elite marching bands bring their musical heat to Lafayette Monday at the ninth annual Drums Across Cajun Field. Tickets are on sale through Ticketmaster and the Cajundome box office.
Nine, all-star marching units from across the country perform in the event, a stop on their Summer Music Games Tour. These brass, percussion and color guard groups compete before eight judges, who review them on execution, creativity, show design and more.
The bands receive composite scores which count toward their quest for the world championship of Drum Corps International. Billed as “Marching Music’s Major League,” DCI presents this annual tour of 100 events scattered throughout North America.
William Hochkeppel, UL’s director of bands, refers to the event as the “Olympics of marching band.”
“They just work so hard,” said Hochkeppel. “it’s like the best kind of team where you don’t necessarily have individual star players. But when you put it together, these things can really be more than the sum of their parts.
“Just like an athlete might be trying to shave one-tenth of a second off their points. They’re trying to get one-tenth of a better score. They work down to the hundreds of a point to try to get a little bit better.
“It’s kind of like gymnastics or figure skating. They’re working on every single little aspect, just to squeeze one more thing out of it.”
Monday’s event serves as a season finale for the Louisiana Stars, a UL-based band. In their second year of competition, the Stars compete in the open class and have an abbreviated tour.
The more experienced, high level teams clash in the world class and continue on the world championships.
They’re actually making a lot of waves,” said Melley on the Stars. “It’s not typical, the amount of success they’re having.
“We probably have three or four that are really outstanding. These are the Blue Coats, they a big one this year. Carolina Crown, out of Ft. Mills, South Carolina, they won the world championship two years ago. Blue Coats came in second. Phantom Regimen has a strong La. connection. There’s a lot of teachers in the area who marched in Phantom Regimen.
“One of the great things is year after year, we get some of the strong corps to come through here. It’s going to be a great show.”Want to go?
Drums Across Cajun Field
7 p.m. Monday
Cajun Field
Tickets: $25, $28 at the gate, $18 for group discount
Information: cajundome.com
