Posts tagged dci

It was a summery July day in my piece of New Jersey, in a portion of Clifton where a spacious green area lies at the foot of Garrett Mountain. When my cousins and I were young, we would head to the area in question, Albion Memorial Park, for a rendezvous with my uncle, and I saw what I thought it was a marching band. Little did I know (or I didn’t know) at those tender ages of seven to ten (the age when I moved in my current residence near Tampa, Florida) that the “band” turned out to be the Connecticut Hurricanes, a Drum Corps Associates (DCA) affiliated drum and bugle corps. At that age, I was unaware of the all–marching-brass-and-percussion (for the former, it refers to mellophones and bell-front baritones, euphoniums, and tubas, with the exception of the sousaphone, in the case of such mobile ensembles). Perched on the jungle gym on one of the playgrounds, I watched them rehearse. The sound was really a delight to my pre-teen ears and it’s pretty uncanny as a child to have seen and heard a drum corps rehearse live before my eyes. Those memories made me hold in high esteem to those summer days that my favorite DCA corps is the Connecticut Hurricanes.

But what about the favored corps of Drum Corps Internatonal (DCI), referring to the world-class ones? Well, I’d really go with Jersey Surf, because I long for the day that I’d return to New Jersey to see them play as well as relive my childhood memories of watching the Hurricanes at Albion Park. With the DCI quarterfinals on hand the day I wrote my memories on this blog, I have high hopes and dreams of seeing the corps of my home state make it to the semifinals, even the finals, if I’m extra wistful.

For the sake of Garden State childhood nostalgia, the Surf is my DCI corps closest to my heart and memories.