PANDEMIC TRADITION: MUSIC PRACTICE IN PARKING GARAGES
Northwestern students still using spaces for rehearsal
Somewhere above an Evanston parking garage, there’s the steady bzzzzzz
of a drone. Below, on the basement level, a car rattles with every Bad Bunny bass blast. An old Jeep splashes through standing water and creaks its way into a space. The hollow thump-thump of its doors. In bushes outside, birds squawk ch-cH-CH.
Construction trucks rumble DAA-DAA-DAA-DAA . Joggers slap slap slap on past.
Until, after a few minutes of overture, at last, silence.
The parking garage goes still.
A moment later, the sound of trombone fills the space. Followed by tuba. Together, they reverberate, leisurely, deep, lumbering, like Godzilla emerging out of the nearby lake. Timothy Maines on tenor trumpet. Alec Rich on tuba. They stand beside their cars in the basement of the parking garage, their music carrying out of the structure, across the jogging trail circling the campus, across the sailing center, across an inlet of water, onto the beaches. Heads lift off blankets. Necks crane. Is that brass?
A jogger stops outside the garage and crouches down to peek into the dim basement level. He spots the small horn section and yelps: “You sound great!” “Thanks!” shouts Maines. Rich puts his tuba down on the towel that he spread on the garage floor and swigs at his water bottle. Maines cradles his trombone and flips the sheet music on the stand before him. They play down here from time to time, sometimes solo, sometimes in duos or trios. You know, Rich says to Maines, nodding at the sheet music, the guy who wrote this, in the 1970s, he wrote music for a lot of porn films. “You would always see his name in the credits.”
I’m sitting nearby on a curb and I can’t let this pass without comment. “Who watches the credits of old porn films?” I ask. “Tuba players,” Rich says. “OK, now a medium bounce?” Maines asks, eager to continue.
“OK,” Rich says, and they begin again.
A stone’s throw away, the imposing building for the Northwestern Bienen School of Music stands cold and jutting, like a glass-windowed cruise ship taking up too much space in a quaint harbor. It holds studios, practice rooms, concert halls. And yet, since the pandemic, for many of the music students here, the real place to practice has been outside, in the nearby parking garages on campus.
The first time I heard music from a garage was just after lockdown, March
2020. I was walking in early morning and heard the moan of a bow on strings. It was coming from the South Garage. For much of last year, its gates were up. You could drive in and out freely, so I drove in and wound up, and up, and up, and somewhere around the third level, in the otherwise empty garage, I saw the source: a student on a stool beside her car, playing a cello. I continued upward, and on the next floor, a trumpet player. They were playing on different floors to avoiding stepping on each other’s toes.
Once I heard them coming from the garages, it seemed I heard it every day.
As weather got colder, their scales, flourishes, strings and sudden blasts of French horn came less frequently. And yet it also never quite ended. On and off, if you hit it right, practices continued, coming out of the parking garage beside the visitor’s center and the basement garage alongside the journalism school. It was far from unique, of course: Last year, across the country, as concert halls and indoor
spaces closed, school choirs and garage bands and city symphonies met inside parking garages. (Not to mention, musicians have never needed a pandemic as an excuse to play outdoors.)
Still, finding yourself an impromptu audience to an impromptu concert is a little like seeing a buck standing beside the road: It’s not remarkable, but you can’t help but slow down and admire. Here, indeed, is one of the lovelier byproducts of the pandemic. Even better, even as the health crisis in this country winds down, even with universities on break, garage practicing is a modest gift that keeps giving.
Jemma Goddard, a Northwestern graduate student in music education, uses Northwestern garages to practice euphonium (a kind of cross between a French horn and a tuba). “Being a brass player, it’s fun to play in a space that covers up mistakes. I’m also someone who gets nervous performing and here I would have people walking up to me while I play. I’ve had people
pull their cars up alongside me and just sit and listen a while. And the more I realized people were listening, the better I play. It seems like everyone practices in here. So many that when I first heard people playing here I was kind of intimidated because they sounded so good. But we had a teacher who encouraged us to go outside — to think of the person just walking their dog as your audience for that afternoon.”
The weirdest thing about practicing in a garage, she said, is your showbiz instincts still kick in. Just playing casually or practicing the same tune again and again, you become aware of how you present yourself. You find yourself hoping you don’t bore the joggers, dog walkers and construction workers.
Selin Ozcelik, who recently finished a master’s program in musical education, still uses the garage to practice her French horn. She meets with friends there to jam. “When the pandemic started, you couldn’t get into anywhere (to practice). Big halls were booked. You had to share the practice rooms or couldn’t use a room that wasn’t designated your own. Ensembles were not allowed to meet. It got restrictive. But outside, in a garage, it was safer, there was the distance, there was air, and a lot of us just realized that the sound here was way better than in university practice rooms, which can be dry.”
Depending when you listen, the garage band selections are eclectic. “Fly Me To the Moon,” “Ride of the Valkyries,” William Tell Overture, Bruckner’s
Symphony No. 4. Perhaps the Beatles.
One early Sunday morning in June, I drove into the basement garage and found Maines playing from memory, running the same melody over and over, tweaking slightly each time. Sun came through the garage skylight and framed him in a natural spotlight. “The acoustics are great here,” he said. “The intonation alone is a perfect way to train yourself to hear yourself. You hear your feedback just after a sound is produced. You play a chord and know if it’s in tune. It’s also relaxing — just sort of beautiful.”
Later this summer, he’s moving to Austin, Texas, to find work; at the moment, post-graduation, he pays rent through proceeds from the clicks on his YouTube channel (“Trombone Timo”), which has produced unlikely trombone-centered viral smashes. In the meantime, an Evanston apartment building is also not the ideal place to practice your trombone on Sunday morning. He’s tried playing on the local beaches, but it often means playing louder to hear yourself. That said, the basement garage level in particular has become so popular, he was once kicked out by a double bass player. Duets help.
A week later, he’s alongside Rich, a current grad student at Northwestern. Their voices echo in the empty garage. “What are we playing?” Rich asks Maines, who points to the sheet music and scats out a roadmap: “Bum bum ba da da de tcha tcha ...” Then Maines counts down and they blast
off.
A pair of skateboarders sail past, brothers Zach and Christophe Smith. Zach stops, kicks his board into his hand and listens a monument. “This music, it’s nice. You might say, it completes the ambience. It feels like Evanston should, like a crossroads of all sorts of walks of life. I play violin. I get it. Share the music. Share the talent. These guys down here, that’s freedom. You’re reminded music is not just a job when you see them here.” The Smiths leave and a gaggle of teenagers — shirtless, backpacks, fresh off the beach — stroll past, singing along loudly. BUM! BUM! BUM! BUM!
“I like a good tuba,” one says blankly, like the comic relief in a John Hughes flick. Rich smiles weakly. Twenty minutes later, they wrap for the day. An older jogger was listening shouts: “Garage band!” It’s a dad joke. Maines and Rich laugh with the appropriate politeness, as if they haven’t heard it often, then Rich turns to Maines and talks shop: “Sorry I’ve been giving you a workout on the lower ends.”
“It’s all good,” Maines says.
Rich loads his tuba into his Subaru and drives away, then Maines climbs into his own car, and though windows are closed, his radio is loud in the now-silent garage: “Ride of the Valkyries,” bombastic, galloping and yet, unlike the live version they played a moment earlier, it doesn’t carry to the beach.