Photos by Ralph Freso
He has performed all over the world with some of the finest conductors and played with the Detroit, Phoenix and Boston symphony orchestras.
But on a recent game day on Grand Canyon University’s campus, he’s leading morning rehearsal with the Thundering Heard Pep Band.
He calls for the band to read Green Day rock hit “Holiday.” The band is thrilled and plays with the energy you see at GCU sporting events.
“At measure nine – horns, bones and baritone – don’t be afraid. It’s just G minor guys,” said Interim Director Kevin Bock, who took the reins of the band this year. “Trumpets, what I am starting to hear is you pushing your mouthpiece. ‘I’ll get those high notes out!’ Don’t do that. Air pressure. Let the air do the work. Don’t force it because it’s going flat.”
This acclaimed musician gives off not a whiff of arrogance that he’s musically slumming it. Quite the opposite.
“The skills are the same. It works because of mastery of the instrument,” he said of the pep band, which played the Green Day song as part of GCU winning the national title in the game day competition at the UCA/UDA championships in Orlando last weekend. “I’m not thinking about mechanics, I’m thinking about what sound I want.”
He is introduced at sporting events as “maestro,” and although Bock is a distinguished musician, he views it as a tongue-in-cheek title. He doesn’t take himself too seriously but takes the music seriously, whatever the genre.
“I’ve done bar gigs playing sousaphone, and I even had a red sousaphone that I played for Boston Red Sox games – jazz Dixieland stuff. It’s learning different styles and asking, ‘What’s the flavor I want?’
“You have to play to the crowd, even classical musicians. You have to strike a balance, where there are opportunities for art while fulfilling our job as entertainment.”
Case in point: When the pep band first played “Chicken Dance” for him, he waved it all to a quick halt. “You have to smaltz this up, otherwise it sounds cheesy. Trumpets have to use so much vibrato it sounds like a Victrola. It’s learning all these languages so you are able to pick and choose.”
Long before he took over the GCU band, which helps lead the raucous “Biggest Party in College Basketball,” and long before wearing purple-and-white striped overalls and dancing, he was watching his older brother in New Jersey pick up the tuba because he saw a tuba player on “Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.” He wanted to be like his brother.
Turns out, Bock was like him by fourth grade.
He was so good, he ended up going to the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, among the nation’s elite high school musicians, and then attending Arizona State only because his parents wouldn’t pay for a music conservancy. At ASU, he became the student of the man who was in that Mr. Rogers' bit on TV – Sam Pilafian – and met his wife, Tessa Gotman.
It seemed like destiny. Bock went back to the East Coast as a top-tier freelancer, playing the Boston Pops or symphonies, at the top of his game.
“There is no better feeling than being nervous and nailing a performance,” he said. “The tuba is a solo instrument in orchestra. If you mess up, it’s on you.”
But he also learned it was more than about those mechanics, the idea that music is more than doing just what you enjoy. A quote from a professor he keeps handy: “If we were a medical school and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you imagine that some night, at 2 a.m., someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you are going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 p.m., someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.”
“That’s really stuck with me – a lot.”
“It’s what we do here, too. Here, how we approach, how we pick out music, is different: It’s not for me … We are entertainers, not just musicians.”
Which led him to GCU. He came back to Phoenix reluctantly at first more than 10 years ago, after his parents and brother moved here and his wife landed the gig as a violinist in the Phoenix Symphony. He had to reset, drag about town giving lessons, but soon began to get work at community colleges and at GCU, teaching tuba and euphonium lessons as an adjunct.
He eventually became the associate director of the pep band, aside from taking a year out to be the principal at the Phoenix Symphony during COVID before returning to GCU and, this year, taking over for Paul Koch.
He quickly learned how to be a better teacher. When he was learning, he was so driven that he longed for instruction that pushed him, rode him hard, and that’s what he tried at first. But not all students want a future as a musician; they have parttime jobs and other goals.
“When you get good at teaching, you teach how a student needs to be taught. When you get great is when you teach them to teach themselves,” he said.
“The respect from them is – I hate to say it – you are working with an elite musician, so they listen to me in a different way. I always ask them, ‘Do you hear the difference?’”
Like in the recent rehearsal. He added some accents, took out some bars, asked for some flares and swoops, sometimes singing it to the band. Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” never sounded so bold and brassy.
“He’s amazing with music. He will hear it once and say, ‘Take out this’ or maybe ‘Drums don’t play here,’ and it’s crazy how he just makes music sound so much better by changing a few things,” said trombone section leader Trevor Twining.
To senior baritone Grant Fuchs, the band has never sounded better. They tackle fewer songs but get into the nitty gritty of mastering them, he said. “We prioritize being good at few rather OK at many.”
It’s a different way of doing music for Bock.
“I’m essentially a record producer out front. I’m mixing, doing all that stuff, to try to get the best possible product,” he said. “A lot of that comes from playing the tuba, which plays one of the least of any instrument in the orchestra. So I sit and listen.”
He tells the 110 members of the band that this is a short period of their life. It should be fun, or the audience won’t enjoy it, but you also need to work at it like a professional, which is how he treats them. Each is required to take lessons from an acclaimed adjunct team in the College of Arts and Media, more than a half dozen who hold doctorates.
“I would say everyone is showing up more prepared and ready to work. Knowing if we work hard, it will be fun,” he said.
Bock said when the band played earlier this season at the Footprint Center, it was clear to him who sounded better, even though the other band was bigger. GCU was louder and more creative, playing less of the football-game marches and more of what people want to hear. It fits GCU’s style, a game party atmosphere.
And it’s all carefully curated. He picks songs that students and alumni want to hear – and those can be vastly different things – and play them at just the right time, trading off with the game’s DJ. If the team is down and needs a lift, the DJ might crank up the student section with some hip hop. If GCU is up, the band kicks in a fun song.
It’s all done with precise timing. He never felt so good as when the song the band was playing at Midnight Madness ended exactly when the lights dimmed for the start. When a game begins, they better just be hitting the last note of “Crazy Train.”
“That’s the fun part for me. Playing with time using sound,” he said, again emphasizing that it’s not so different than his time in a tuxedo in the orchestra.
“For instance, in Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony,’ the tuba plays 14 notes in the second movement. You are sitting there hanging out for seven notes at the beginning and seven notes at the end,” he said. “All of those reps playing for the symphony made it so I could be calm.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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