While pro drummer and music educator Gary Hobbs is an expert at keeping time in the present, the longtime Vancouver resident is also steeped in the past. He’s a big fan of the Clark County Historical Museum and an energetic administrator of the nostalgic Facebook page “Growing Up in Clark County, Washington,” a repository of stories and photographs about the good old days. “Dairy Queen was the big hang,” Hobbs enthused about the 1960s, when he attended Shumway Junior High on Main Street and then Fort Vancouver High School when it was still on Fourth Plain Boulevard. High school was when Hobbs, reluctant inheritor of his grandfather’s and father’s drumming legacy, finally took up the family sticks. That led to a career in jazz and world travels to perform and to teach. “It was a great way to avoid responsibility,” Hobbs said with a chuckle. When on tour, he said, he often had little idea what town he’d just come from or what town was next. Now 74, Hobbs has settled into a quieter routine in the hometown he knows well. He and his wife, Marcia, have lived for 37 years in a house not far from the one where he grew up near downtown Vancouver. When weather is good, Hobbs can often be spotted pedaling his bike around the west side of town.

The Hobbs family musical legacy has not quieted down. Hobbs keeps busy performing, recording and teaching locally. His daughter, Britta Hobbs Vrosh, attended the same school as her father — Shumway, which was first a junior high, then a middle school and later the magnet Vancouver School of Arts and Academics. A gifted singer, Britta is now the choir director at Covington Middle School and music director at Trinity Lutheran Church. “There’s music everywhere in this family,” said Britta’s son and Gary’s grandson, 13-year-old Soren Vrosh. A multi-instrumentalist whose current passion is the trombone, Soren is also extending the Hobbs legacy by studying music in the same building. Why trombone? “It’s so much fun to bend the notes,” Soren said between tunes in VSAA music teacher Luke Brockman’s band room. Having pro drummer Gary Hobbs as his grandfather bestows him “bragging rights” with his band peers, Soren added. Delighted by his descendants’ pursuit of music in the same town and even the same school, Hobbs occasionally volunteers as an expert assistant to Brockman.

The Harry Hobbs Orchestra at The Bungalow in Seaside, Ore. (The Columbian files) Photo “My daughter went to the same school I went to, and my grandson is going there now,” Gary Hobbs marveled. “I find that amazing. There’s not much of that small-town lifestyle to be found anymore.” Harry and Larry Gary Hobbs’ grandparents, based near Grant High School in Portland, were both performers. His grandmother was a theater organist and actress. His grandfather, Harry Hobbs, was a drummer and bandleader who brought a certain business acumen from his other line of work, selling used cars at Portland’s first Ford dealership. Harry Hobbs used to cash in on his musical brand — the popular Harry Hobbs Orchestra — by issuing “cattle calls” at the Portland musicians’ union hall for simultaneous gigs. He was known to deploy three different Harry Hobbs Orchestras to perform at three different venues on the same night, his grandson said. Harry often brought along his son, Larry, who also learned the drums. Larry Hobbs eventually added a little of his own razzle-dazzle, becoming the kind of drummer who twirled his sticks, his son recalled. But in Vancouver, Larry Hobbs was probably best known as a civic and business booster: leader of the chamber of commerce, member of all the right clubs, emcee of the Miss Washington pageant. He was named Vancouver First Citizen in 1967.

The Harry Hobbs Orchestra played area venues like Jantzen Beach, Council Crest Amusement Park and The Bungalow in Seaside. (The Columbian files) Photo “People thought of him as Mr. Vancouver,” Hobbs said. “He used to say, ‘Have mouth, will travel.’ He was that kind of guy.” Burst of creativity The young Gary Hobbs was an athlete, not a musician. His grandfather’s drums and his father’s big-band records languished in the basement. Nobody pushed him toward music until a sax-playing friend who needed a drummer supplied just the right incentive. “You get to go on trips and meet girls,” he told Gary Hobbs. Down in the basement, Hobbs started to teach himself. He said he developed drumming fever the summer before his senior year. All day for months, he played along with records, lifting and dropping the needle to repeat the tricky passages. “The equipment gets your attention because it’s so beautiful,” Hobbs said. “You can sit right down and start pounding. Drummers rule the musical universe because you control tempo, dynamics, color, feel. You control everything.” His dad kept an eye on his progress but never pushed, he said. His mother locked her ears away in the bathroom but never complained.

The grinning Larry Hobbs, aka "Mr. Vancouver," on drums with a small group. (Contributed by Gary Hobbs) Photo Hobbs enjoyed quick success with a local rock band called Little Curtis and the Blues, which drew big, dancing crowds. He went on to play in myriad rock, funk and ambitious jazz-fusion bands throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. “Music was going through a burst of creativity and a metamorphosis,” Hobbs said. Jazz adopted the electronics and sheer power of rock. A lot of older musicians didn’t like it, he added, but he found it exciting. “I missed being an old fart by a year or two,” he said. Hobbs learned by ear, he said. Memorizing songs and playing by feel came so easily that he managed to fake his way through numerous auditions, pretending to read sheet music for pieces he already knew. But that stopped when Hobbs applied to Central Washington University in Ellensburg. Staying in school was the only way to stay out of the Vietnam War, so Hobbs submitted to a crash course in music reading with a tough but sympathetic instructor. Shortly afterward, he attended a music clinic with the Stan Kenton Big Band, which changed his life as Kenton marked him as a future band member. Hobbs went on the road with Kenton for several years in the late 1970s. “There were no rehearsals,” Hobbs said. So that high-pressure tutorial in reading music really paid off. “A thousand times, I thanked my music director at Central,” Hobbs said. “Others let me slide, but he didn’t.”

Larry Hobbs, Gary's father, was the flashy sort of drummer who twirled his sticks to get a wow from the crowd. (Contributed by Gary Hobbs) Photo Kenton, offering just as many student clinics as concerts, became the father of jazz education in schools as we know it today, Hobbs said. “I learned to teach and realized I enjoyed it,” he said. “You’re training the future. At very least you’re training an audience. That’s required for sophisticated music.” Hobbs eventually returned to Vancouver and settled down with his new wife, Marcia, whom he’d met at Central. “I was working all the time. I just loved it,” Hobbs said. “It was an incredibly hip scene in Portland at the time. For about 15 years it was the best place in the world for music — until the bubble burst.” As jazz grew in sophistication, its audience dwindled. “The music got intellectual,” Hobbs said. “You lose fans that way. We lost about half our audience. You could say we killed ourselves.”

‘Vital music’ Jazz may seem like a fading form, but the student musicians in Luke Brockman’s band room at VSAA on a recent Wednesday sounded tight-but-loose in the best possible way. “The vibe here is so healthy, and they are such talented kids,” said Hobbs, who spent the class time tutoring and trading licks with several different drummers. He said their technical skills and familiarity with the music all seemed uniformly excellent — maybe too excellent. Paradoxically, Hobbs said, what they needed now was to forget all that training and return to the present moment, listening carefully to one another and feeling the music in real time. The band launched into a rendition of the Duke Ellington classic “In A Mellow Tone.” Hobbs retreated to the back of the room and took it all in with a grin. “It is incredibly vital music,” he said.