VERO BEACH — When percussion instructor Mike Sammons told his parents he wanted to play drums, they weren’t happy about it – and they were both high school band directors.
“If you’re going to play, you’d better be good,” they told him, bracing for the din of the interim.
“About the last thing they wanted was a drummer,” Sammons says.
Not so with the parents of Brandon Putzke. Theater producers, they were delighted to have a percussionist in the family.
“I knew how hard it was to find a percussionist for my shows,” says his father Jon Putzke. “Now I was raising one of my own.”
Happy or not, the parents of 60 student percussionists will get to ship their drummers off to camp this summer, thanks to Mike Sammons and Brandon Putzke, who nine years ago co-founded the Treasure Coast Percussion Camp.
The series of clinics will be held at Vero Beach High School next month.
The camp is drawing more students than ever from outside of Vero as its reputation for top instructors gets around.
From as far away as Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, kids will jam the high school band rooms June 17 – 20 to learn everything from playing timpani in a classical concert to the moves and music of the drumline at football games.
Instructors include university professors of percussion as well as performers.
The camp has grown from some 20 students in 2005, when Sammons and Putzke came up with the idea to supplement the already excellent secondary school music programs around the county.
“I wanted to give back to my community and my high school,” says Sammons, 33, now with a doctoral degree in music and an instructor at the University of Utah.
Both men grew up in Vero, drumming at Vero Beach High School and then the University of Florida.
Putzke remembers he was a high school sophomore the first time he saw Sammons: at a Superman-themed halftime show, Sammons, then 7, burst out of a telephone booth in a Superman costume.
Sammons is the son of long-time VBHS band leader Jim Sammons and his late wife Sheila Sammons, the band’s co-director. Now, with a doctoral degree in musical arts, Sammons directs the drumline at the University of Utah.
Putzke’s parents were stalwarts of the Vero music scene too: for years, Jon and Marg Putzke ran the Musicana dinner theater on the beach in the 1970s and later Encore Alley, a dinner theater on Miracle Mile.
Marg Putzke is the organist for Holy Cross Catholic Church; Jon now directs the Theatre-Go-Round revues at the 14th Avenue Steakhouse.
Putzke, a graduate of the University of South Florida in music education (he studied biology at UF before transferring), has taught percussion at VBHS from the time he graduated.
He also teaches music at Liberty Magnet School. On the side, he is a founding member of the five-piece band, Old Barber Bridge.
The camp’s roster of visiting teachers reads like a Who’s Who of Florida percussion, say the directors.
“We’ve had professors from every university in the state except Miami,” Putzke says.
Sammons’ percussion professor at UF, Ken Broadway, was one of the camp’s clinicians in 2009. The summer before, the camp featured Anthony Parrulli, captain of Orlando’s Blue Man Group. Putzke scored that connection: he went to University of South Florida with Parrulli’s brother.
“If you’re a teacher and you love percussion, there’s no better gig” than teaching the summer camp, says Putzke.
This year features John Parks, professor of percussion at Florida State University; he will teach concert percussion.
Bret Kuhn is a nationally known drumline arranger and director based in Illinois. His renown is drawing busloads of students from various high school bands around the state for one of the four days in the camp.
Kuhn advertises that he will tailor the curriculum to individual schools.
Vero’s camp “is just perfect,” says Dino Riccio of Yamaha, one of the camp’s sponsors. “We don’t want to spend our money to have kids just sit around. We want them to learn. And they do.”
The camp, limited to middle and high school kids this year, costs $130 for 4 days, or $40 a day. A one-day drumline intensive with Kuhn costs $150.
“The registration fee goes right back into the camp,” says Putzke.
The tuition pays for 85 percent of the clinicians’ fees; sponsors like the VBHS Band Boosters, national instrument manufacturers and the local music store Melody Music cover the rest.
Both Sammons and Putzke are endorsed artists for those music companies, which donate “hundreds of dollars of equipment” to participants in the camp, Putzke says.
Putzke’s seven years’ experience in Old Barber Bridge (the band plays June 1 at The Grove on 14th Avenue) uniquely prepares to teach the class on rock and jazz drumming.
There are also classes in hand-drumming, like bongos and conga.
In Putzke’s time at USF in Tampa, with its strong Cuban-American community, he gained firsthand exposure to masters of the myriad percussive instruments in Cuban music. And Sammons studied indigenous drumming in Brazil, Ghana and Trinidad, leading study abroad programs with student groups.
In Ghana, Sammons himself studied with the world-famous master drummer and xylophonist Bernard Woma, who played for President Obama on his visit there.
“Outside the U.S., you sit down with a master musician and you play along and you learn. In the states, though, we tend to learn from taking notes and studying,” says Sammons.
The camp provides that master musician scenario, he says.
“I tell my students, if you went to Ghana, they would talk about drums in a social and cultural context, that drums carry the lineage in the social order. Well, in the U.S. the drumline is carrying the lineage of our school. I tell the students, don’t just hit it intellectually. Hit it with your body and your soul, with a lot of passion and all of your might.”
Sammons points to numbers that show that as interest in learning classical instruments appears to wane, drumming has never been more popular.
“More kids are playing percussion inside and outside school than at any other time in the history of music,” he says. “The activity of percussion is more alive than ever.
“We’re all drummers,” says Sammons. “It’s innate in our nature as kids. They see a percussion group and they’re naturally drawn to it. You’re creating a powerful vibration when you hit a drum. Why do people want to dance to a drum beat? Because it feels good. In a very real scientific way, those vibrations are coming through you in a way that very few other instruments do.”
It is a rare opportunity to have such a camp in Vero, he says.
“There are camps like this in Miami or Orlando, but there’s really nothing like it close by. That’s why we founded it, to bring these world-class clinicians here.”
