The year 2004 saw the DCI World Championships return to Denver for the first time since 1978, at a three-year-old venue next to where the old Mile High stadium had sat. The Cavaliers’ “007” show nudged Blue Devils’ riding-the-rails show for the title by a scant 0.175, the three decimal places due to the addition that year of a second percussion judge. The two top corps hadn’t even met until one week before the Semifinals. The Cadets, in 4th place, brought out a Jethro Tull show that prominently featured a baton twirler, while Phantom Regiment exclusively featured the music of tango master Astor Piazzolla. Bluecoats experienced “Mood Swings” and seventh-place Carolina Crown made waves with an enthusiastic use of amplification and some beatnik poetry. Madison Scouts’ “Madisonic” brought back a work from the corps’ show 10 and 9 years prior, and the ninth-place Boston Crusaders celebrated an explosion of color that provided the theme for their show. After slipping out of Finals for three years, Blue Knights popped into 10th place in front of their hometown fans and Crossmen placed in Finals for the last time until 2012. Glassmen slipped past Spirit by just 0.075 to capture the last spot in Finals. Because of Finals being a week earlier than normal, a post-season Tour of Champions took six prior DCI Champions to California, setting the stage for the 2007 World Championships in Pasadena. A spectacularly popular “Attraction: The Music of Scheherazade” propelled Santa Clara Vanguard and its Fred Sanford Best Percussion Performance-winning drum line to third place, featuring Russian composer’s Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular 1888 interpretation of “The Arabian Nights,” a series of centuries-old stories set in the Middle East. This particular story was brought to life with multiple scimitar-bearing Sultans, multiple sabre-bearing Scheherazades and flag-bearing Dunyazades, representing the title character’s sisters who tried to save her from the Sultan’s death penalty. In the original story, the Sultan was grumpy due to discovering his wife had been unfaithful to him, and so he handed her over to his vizier (sort of like an ancient prime minister) to have her put to death by the sword. After his wife’s death, he married a new woman every day and had each executed at sunrise, convinced each was unfaithful. Scheherazade was the vizier’s brave daughter; she begged her father to present her to his boss. On her wedding night, she started to tell the Sultan a story, but by dawn, she was not yet finished. The Sultan, now engrossed in how the story would end, spared her every day as she continued the story. With this story, SCV created one of the greatest narrative productions in DCI’s history.
Michael Boo was a member of the Cavaliers from 1975-1977. He has written about the drum corps activity for more than a quarter century and serves as a staff writer for various Drum Corps International projects. Boo has written for numerous other publications and has published an honors-winning book on the history of figure skating. As an accomplished composer, Boo holds a bachelor's degree in music education and a master's degree in music theory and composition. He resides in Chesterton, Ind.
