The Drum Line Renaissance

There is a sound that has been coming from the Compton High School practice field, every weekday afternoon, that the city has not stopped talking about for ten years. It is the sound of a snare line that has been retraining itself, year after year, by ear and by hand, into one of the best high-school drum lines on the West Coast. The story of how that happened starts with a band director nobody outside of the building knew about, an instrument closet that had been padlocked for four straight years during the financial crisis, and one trumpet player named Marcus who refused to graduate without a band. When the band program at Compton High came back online in 2014, after almost a decade of being shuttered for budget reasons, it had no instruments, no uniforms, and exactly six students. The first drum line meeting happened on the basketball court, with two sticks and a trash can. By the second year there were eighteen kids. By the third year, the line was being invited to march in two different parades. By the fifth year, the program was a feeder for collegiate marching bands at Grambling, Southern, and Hampton. What made the line different was not just the music — though the music was always good. It was the rule the kids set for themselves: every cadence we play, we name after a block. There is a cadence for Wilmington Avenue. There is a cadence for the corner of Greenleaf and Long Beach. There is one for the parking lot of the museum we are standing in right now. The kids did not write these cadences to be famous. They wrote them because they wanted to memorize their own city in 4/4. This exhibit pulls together the snare drum that the program rebuilt itself around in 2014 — the one with three different students' names sharpied on the inside of the hoop — alongside a stack of hand-written cadences donated by the line's section leaders, and a 6-minute audio loop of practice recordings from the last decade. Press the button. Stand still. Let the city show up.