Columbia University Marching Band

Columbia University Marching Band

The Columbia University Marching Band (CUMB) has performed for Columbia University since 1904. In the early 1960s, the CUMB became the first college or university marching band in the United States to convert to a scramble band format. Most of the United States' best universities now feature scramble bands, including all of the Ivy League (except Cornell) and Stanford. More concerned with outrageous halftime shows than marching patterns and musicianship, the CUMB has a reputation for edgy humor, and is often thought to be the most controversial and irreverent of the scramble bands. Since the 1960s, national news outlets have covered the band's most infamous pranks. CUMB bills itself as "The Cleverest Band in the World."

One innovation of the CUMB has been the introduction of the "miscie," which rhymes with "whiskey" and is short for miscellaneous. While many of the band members carry a musical instrument onto the field, the band's miscies carry whatever they choose. Some miscie instruments of the past have included a washboard, spoons, juggled balls/pins, the Game Boy Advance, the ROLM phone, beer bottles, spare tires, steel mailboxes, condom harp, football stadium bench (no longer attached to the stadium), passenger handle from the interior of an MTA Redbird subway car, unicycle, and kitchen sink. Other, slightly more melodious, instruments have included the shofar, the E♭ contrabass sarrusophone, a didgeridoo (the didge), and the B♭ lenthopipe (an 8-foot length of electrical conduit, with rubber hose and horn mouthpiece at the bottom end, and funnel at the extreme end).

In addition to playing at every Columbia football game, the band also plays in the stands at Levien Gym for Columbia basketball games, and at various other events. These have included the New York City Marathon, the Walk Against AIDS, and at New York City's 34th Street post office on Tax Day.

The CUMB has appeared on many television programs including an early episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, the Late Show with David Letterman, The CBS Morning Show, MTV's Total Request Live, The Howard Stern TV Show (on WWOR), a Japanese morning news program, and Columbia's student run television station CTV. CUMB has also been featured in the films Turk 182! and Game Day.

Band members have a long history of raiding competitive Ivy League schools and other institutions for memorabilia, including flags of Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Berkeley and the outsized stick used to beat the Harvard University Band's iconic giant bass drum. In a guerrilla action, the band once surreptitiously switched its regular dress for the dark blue of Yale University and appeared in the Yale Bowl as the Yale Precision Marching Band.