LCBS players toot their own horns for Tuba Christmas

By Lethbridge Herald on December 23, 2025.

Joe Manio
Lethbridge Herald
Local Journalism Initiative

The sound of a tuba arrives like a broad, bronze wave—deep, round, and impossibly solid. It hums with a weight you can feel in your chest, each note rolling out slowly, rich with warmth and authority. There’s a gentle wobble in its sound, a playful gravity that can feel both majestic and mischievous, grounding the music while quietly daring it to smile.

The Lethbridge Community Band Society (LCBS) has been making audiences smile with its free  annual Tuba Christmas concert for 13 years, and more than 30 tuba players of all ages and abilities gathered at Southminster United Church Saturday afternoon, many dressed in whimsical holiday attire and decked-out tubas for the occasion.

“The best thing about playing tuba is when you play it: you feel the resonance of the instrument and it bounces around the room, you can play melody, you can play low notes and it all you feel everything,” says tuba player and conductor Josh Davies.

Participating in his 10th Christmas Tubas concert, Davies says that if he wasn’t conducting he’d be playing. 

“It’s a very powerful instrument, but it’s not a piercing instrument like the trumpet (which Davies also plays) or some of the higher instruments. It can be just very powerful and full and thick sounding; so sometimes it brings some really heavy emotions and good ways.”

The tuba is a crucial instrument in modern bands and orchestras as the primary bass instrument of the brass family, providing the foundational low notes that anchor the harmony, add depth and warmth to the overall sound, and reinforce the lower voices of other instrument sections.

“The best thing about playing the tuba is it’s like the support for the chord of most music played in ensemble music,” says Jim Huber. “So when the orchestra or the band builds the piece, we have the base and have to really hold it strong and steady so everything beyond gets built above it.”

Serious role of the tuba aside, Huber and his tuba were decked out as the Grinch from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (his tuba much more accessorized than he was). 

The show itself was replete with familiar Christmas songs, all of them with reworked titles such as “Joy to the Tubas” and “Jingle Tubas” plus the paradoxically titled “Silent Tubas.”

Between songs, there were contests for categories including which tuba player had the best seasonal attire, costume and best accessorized tuba.

Toward the end of the concert there were two “technique” contests, the first being to determine who could play the highest note on a tuba (which can almost be seen as a paradox considering the nature of the instrument).

This contest was immediately followed by a contest to determine who could play the lowest note on a tuba. Both are a lot harder to do than they sound.

“Well, a lot of it comes down to the individual technique and I mean, you can’t, you don’t just press the buttons and notes come out,” says tuba player Locke Spencer who also served as the show’s MC. 

“You’re actually connecting the instrument to your face, and a lot of stuff is happening in your mouth, to make the music that it makes, and it’s almost that the instrument’s an extension of you. And getting the high notes you really need a lot of pressure with your lips and air flowing and its technique.”

In case you missed Tuba Christmas 2025, don’t fret. It will be back for its 14th year in December 2026. Meanwhile the LCBS Gold and Silver Bands (featuring the tuba players) will be having more concerts starting in January 2026 with more performances to follow throughout 2026.