The JCM team is thrilled to be closing out another fantastic season, delivering more shows to more clients than ever before while growing our team and internal systems to create a sustainable future for our clients and the marching arts community. We pride ourselves on adapting our work to fit the needs of an ever-changing activity, and this year we’ve taken big strides to ensure we can continue our growth while providing the same quality to our new and existing clients.
While all of these behind the scenes changes have been occurring, we have also continued to provide for our clients and have some fantastic highlights to share with you:
This year we worked with a record number of schools. 148 schools purchased shows from our website and 19 schools commissioned new shows from our team. Our shows were performed across 38 states and also included our new friends at Chien Kuo High School in Taipei, Taiwan.
Chien Kuo had an extraordinary opportunity to travel to West Virginia in August and compete at the World Association of Marching Band Shows, taking home the silver medal. They also performed in Taipei on October 10th at the ceremony of Taiwan’s National Day. We are so humbled to be working with an international client that’s performing on the world stage!
Another one of our clients performed our arrangements at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade last month! Greendale High School from Greendale, Wisconsin did an outstanding job and provided such a special opportunity for their students! Greendale has been a client with us for two years and we love working with them.
As many of you know, the majority of our team is involved with the Columbians Drum and Bugle Corps. In 2022 the Columbians went on their longest tour yet, going to California for the first time ever in their organization’s history. This summer, the Columbians went east for the first time, performing in front of audiences who have never seen or even heard of the Columbians before. After performing five shows in the Midwest, they finished off at Lucas Oil Stadium, placing 24th overall in semifinals performance! This was a huge accomplishment for the organization, its members, and staff. We had the privilege of having several JCM team members in Indianapolis during finals week including Dillon Miller (corps director), Tyler Jones and Dane Holmes (visual caption heads), Jeff Chambers (co-music arranger), Tim Mitchell (sound designer and audio team with the Blue Devils), Zach Ohara (audio team) and Luke DeDominces (front ensemble caption head). We love the drum corps community, and it was such a blast representing the Pacific Northwest at finals with the Columbians!
Additionally, Jeff and Tim had the opportunity to design for the Seattle Cascades this year as they made a return to the DCI tour for the first time since 2019. Jeff was brought on as the brass arranger and Tim was brought on as the sound designer. Against all odds, the group managed to field a corps of 110 members from all over the United States! They had four performances in the Pacific Northwest, 17 shows across the country and finished off at Lucas Oil Stadium, ending in 25th overall in semifinals performance.
Jeff also co-arranged the brass book for the Caballeros Drum and Bugle Corps for the second consecutive year. The group competed in the DCA circuit and finished 2nd overall in world class at the DCA finals in Rochester, New York. Jeff will be returning to the Caballeros with the same role for his third year. With DCA and DCI merging for 2024, Jeff’s work with the group will be featured on Saturday morning of DCI finals week in Indianapolis in 2024.
Our Team
While JCM as a whole has made huge investments internally, I (Jeff) have been able to take some time away from work and focus on my growing family! On March 30, we were thrilled to welcome our son Ryker Daniel Chambers to the world. His birth came with quite a few complications and we ended up having to take multiple trips to the hospital for both Ryker and my wife Karissa. And of course, this all happened during the absolute busiest time of the year for our team! I am beyond grateful for the entire JCM team stepping up, being flexible and covering all of my responsibilities for the entire month of April in addition to their own workloads so that I could take care of my family.
Besides Jeff, the longest standing member of our team is Tim Mitchell, and he has had an outstanding year! In addition to his incredible sound design work, Tim has also been increasing his work in the world of wind and percussion arranging! He now has four of his winds shows featured on our website as well as a couple of new shows with his battery arrangements in them. Additionally the majority of our 150+ shows on the website feature Tim’s sound design. Tim has also continued his involvement with several drum corps, spending most of his time with the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps. The Blue Devils won the gold medal this year at Drum Corps International finals, making it their 21st title and their third title in a row, their first ever three-peat! He also was the sound designer for the Columbians and Seattle Cascades and will be joining the Madison Scouts design team for 2024! In the world of indoor percussion, Tim has dozens of clients including Impact Percussion from Tri-Cities, Washington, who are regular competitors at WGI world championships as an independent open ensemble. We are so honored to have Tim on the JCM team as truly one of the best in the business!
A year ago, Tyler Jones joined the JCM team and has done an outstanding job wearing many hats! As a program coordinator, Tyler served more schools than we could even begin to count. Some of these projects included in depth coordination of all design elements, and some were smaller and involved managing the design and delivery of music. In all cases, his work was so valuable in providing our clients a top-notch experience. As a visual designer, Tyler designed for 14 schools this year. His drill design and winds choreography drew rave reviews from our clients and we are so excited to be able to offer his services and provide such an exciting and educational experience in the visual department! Tyler also did program coordination, visual design, and was the visual caption head for the Columbians Drum and Bugle Corps’ inaugural trip to DCI World Finals this past year. He also served on the visual staff of Impact Percussion last winter as they returned to WGI World Championships. We love having Tyler on our team! If you have worked with us over the last year, you’ve probably been in touch with Tyler. In addition to all of his design work, he has taken over as director of sales for our entire catalog. This has been a huge improvement to our team’s workflow and we are so thankful for all of his work in this department!
We are so thankful for Zach Ohara, another new team member as of a year ago. Some of his work is visible, some of it is unseen, but all of it is outstanding. Zach made major improvements to our website over the last year including our new instant score viewing feature. He is currently at work designing a new filter system on our catalog to help make searching through our music much easier and more streamlined! Our internal infrastructure has taken great strides forward in so many ways because of Zach’s skills in programming and automation. Zach was also our lead music editor this past year doing edits and customizations on dozens of shows. He also took on three new commissions this year doing two full shows and a percussion book for a third show! Zach was also on the audio team for both the Columbians Drum and Bugle Corps and Impact Percussion this past year.
Alice Koreski just completed her second year on the team! I will forever be grateful to Alice because she jumped onto our team right as JCM began to expand and explode. We have asked her to do so many different things and learn so many new skills over the past year, and she has always done it with a smile and a great attitude! Lately, Alice has really found her groove with music engraving which is a huge need for our team. Every time we make a modification to a show for a client, the scores and parts have to be reformatted, cleaned up, and distributed to our client in a timely manner, and Alice is all over it! Alice also performed as a member with Impact Percussion this past year and will do so again this coming year.
As mentioned above, our team grew this year in some big ways! Ironically, a year ago we were blogging about how our team had grown from 3 to 5 members and what a big move that was. A year later, we have grown from 5 to 9 members! We formalized Jeff Chambers Music into an official LLC a year ago, and with that came a lot of growth and new responsibilities. Accordingly, we realized that our existing team was wearing too many hats, and we had to spread the workload out to new members of our team.
The first person we welcomed was Dane Holmes! Dane has been a friend of JCM for a long time having worked with many of our shows at the high school level and of course with the Columbians Drum and Bugle Corps as well. We brought him onto the team to become our marketing and communications director, and he has already gone above and beyond! Thanks to Dane, our whole catalog is now on YouTube and looks outstanding. He has also boosted our social media presence with daily posts on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. In November, members of our team traveled to BOA Grand Nationals, and Dane designed and created an entire booth for us to have at Lucas Oil Stadium! He also manned the booth for 12 hours all three days of finals. We are reaching more people than ever before and that is largely because of Dane’s efforts.
The next person we added was Dillon Miller. Dillon has been a long time friend and collaborator with our team, and when all the details came together, it felt like something that should have happened a long time ago! When we initially brought Dillon on, Jeff was about to head to the hospital for the delivery of his son. The additional hospital visits in the following weeks made Dillon’s presence on the team invaluable. For the first couple months, Dillon was a fire extinguisher. Problems would arise, and Dillon would figure out how to solve them. We threw so much at him asking him to quickly learn our systems and essentially drink from a fire hose. But he caught on quickly and since then has been improving and overhauling a lot of our systems in big ways! When we started our new season this fall, we gave Dillon the title of “Director of Operations”. He is still wearing many hats including human resources, administrative work, legal documents, contracts, payroll, and more. But one of the biggest things he has done is take all of that off of Jeff’s plate so that Jeff can focus on writing shows. In addition to operations, Dillon is also an outstanding visual designer and program coordinator! He took on a few shows this past summer and will be taking on many more this coming year. Outside of JCM, Dillon is the executive director of the Columbians Drum and Bugle Corps, a hugely important role that all of us benefit from.
The last two people we brought on to the team this year were Sascha Beamer and Luke DeDominces. We were introduced to Sascha by Zach, from their time together as students at Central Washington University. We’ve known Luke for a number of years through his work with the Columbians Drum and Bugle Corps and Impact Percussion. Sascha was brought on to help us with engraving! Since then, she has also taken on editing work, and we anticipate this to be something that continues to grow. Luke was brought on to help with percussion arranging and show edits, which is also something we anticipate will grow in the future. Both have been fantastic additions to the team!
Our New for 2024 Catalog
Last year's new shows were our greatest addition to our catalog yet, including our top sold shows All the Lonely People, Catch Me If You Can, and Behind the Smile. Continuing this momentum, much of this year has been focused on our 2024 Marching Band Catalog with 21 newly commissioned shows, featuring over 30 classical and contemporary artists. There will be several more revamped and updated shows (including three soon to be released 2024 shows) that will be released in the near future. You can listen to these shows on our website, SoundCloud, and YouTube; we also have show previews every week that are featured on our Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Looking Forward
So what’s next? We feel like we have finally built an infrastructure for our company that allows all of us to thrive in our own unique areas, without feeling like we have to wear a million hats. This structure is set up to handle our current capacity, but also grow in future years. This is such a special place to be and in some ways, it’s actually a little bit weird! I (Jeff) have had a very peaceful last few weeks enjoying time with family, working on new drum corps shows, and best of all, being able to trust that our team of talented people will keep everything running smoothly!
Our plans for now are to continue what we have been doing, and also expand into new worlds. We are investing heavily into our visual design team with regards to drill design as well as winds and guard choreography. We want to offer these services to our clients so that they can get the best and most cohesive show possible when they work with us.
Our long term goal has been to meet every program at their level and be equipped to help them out no matter how big or small the task. We are regularly bringing new people into our network of collaborators, including Taylor Heath and Reese Maultsby who have been doing work with us for the past couple of years and have been doing a fantastic job providing for our clients. After 10 years since JCM's inception, I think we are the closest we’ve ever been to that reality! And we are very excited about that. The best is yet to come!
Lastly, THANK YOU. We value all of our clients and supporters more than you’ll ever know! The world of marching arts design can be vast and overwhelming, but having strong supporters and people who root us on helps us through all of the challenging times. We hope you all have an amazing holiday season, and we look forward to talking with you soon about your 2024 shows!
-Jeff Chambers
