This music student cleans up with new instrument: Gaerlan adds washboard to jazz line-up
Published 7:21 am Wednesday, May 15, 2024
- Ilwaco High School senior Andrew Gaerlan plays the washboard in the school’s jazz band. He is pictured with his instrument after a performance at a mall in Hawaii. The group also performed at the Pearl Harbor Memorial. Originally a trumpet player then a drummer, he watched a professional musician playing the odd instrument at a jazz camp last year and obtained permission to create his own version. The band will perform May 29.
When the Ilwaco High School Jazz Band performs its last show of the year, its sound will be augmented by an unusual percussion instrument.
Senior Andrew Gaerlan will play the washboard.
If You Go
Ilwaco High School
Jazz Band performance
7 p.m. Wednesday May 29
Hilltop Middle School
auditorium, Ilwaco
His unusual choice has delighted the school’s music director, Rachel Lake.
“It has been a fun addition to the Jazz Band this year, “ said Lake. “It has added a new layer of sound to our group.”
Gaerlan will graduate this year and head to Clatsop Community College; he already has passed fire academy classes for his chosen career as a firefighter. As well as playing football during his high school career, Gaerlan has been a keen member of the music department.
He started out as a trumpet player, then switched to playing drums. When his student group traveled to attend a music event in Blaine, something attracted his attention.
“We went to jazz camp in Blaine and there was a traditional jazz group there and one of them was playing the washboard,” he recalled. “I asked Mrs. Lake, ‘If I can find a washboard, can I try it?’”
On getting approval, his family’s real estate agent managed to find him an old one.
During the final months of the school year, Gaerlan has added extras including a cymbal and a bell. “I have been playing it and have been ‘upgrading.’ I painted it and added some other percussion,” he said.
Gaerlan wasn’t surprised to learn that the washboard has a pedigree in the music world. In England, 1950s’ “skiffle” bands like those of Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber employed a washboard. In the United States, the Memphis Jug Band, which began in the 1920s, and Gus Cannon, a folk blues musician who died in 1979, included a washboard in their lineup, as well as a group in the early 1960s called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, whose members became The Warlocks and eventually formed the Grateful Dead.
“I like to have some fun and move around with it,” Gaerlan said. “Lots of people have commented that they like it.”
• The final performance of the jazz band this year will be 7 p.m. Wednesday May 29 at the Hilltop Middle School auditorium in Ilwaco.
