WHATEVER HAPPENED TO . . . PHIL DEBAR, '78

Barbershop Booster

PHIL'S HARMONIC: DeBar, shown at far right with barbershop quartet The Usual Suspects, hosts a monthly radio show featuring a cappella music.

Rod Searcey

POLI SCI MAJOR AND TENOR Phil DeBar took only one music course at Stanford, because he was too busy singing. “I didn’t want to spend all four years in practice rooms; I was having so much fun in shows,” he says. DeBar sang a cappella with the Stanford Mendicants, directing the group his senior year, and even returned to perform with them for a year after completing his master’s in public affairs at the University of Texas.

Courtesy Phil DeBar

His life since then has been a set of variations on that theme. DeBar, who has chimed in with almost every vocal group he’s encountered, today sings in two choruses and a barbershop quartet and hosts a monthly a cappella show, “The Human Voice,” on KKUP-Cupertino and other Bay Area radio stations. “I try to spread my passion through the show and invite people to learn to sing,” DeBar says. “I’m one of those crazy people who think anyone can sing. It’s easy. Most of the harmony parts are very logical and simple to pick up.”

With Robert Campbell, DMA ’85, a co-founder of Stanford’s Fleet Street Singers, DeBar helps lead the Bay Area chapter of the venerable Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. The pair also judges international quartet and choral contests.

DeBar’s wife, Jane Rozga, ’80, stages and choreographs occasional shows for the society. They met at Stanford when Jane was recruiting Mendicants to sing in the student musicals she directed.

“I can honestly say I’ve done every kind of a cappella,” DeBar says, “except maybe two-vent throat singing or exotic foreign-music forms.”

That’s on top of his day job as an online database editor for the Gale Group in Foster City. To save time for his musical avocation, DeBar telecommutes from home in Santa Rosa.

He says he’s proud to have witnessed an increase in a cappella’s popularity during the past decade. “It has just exploded, both in colleges and professionally, as well as in the recording industry,” DeBar observes. “More than 100 new college a cappella groups have formed in the ’90s.”

The appeal, in his view, is simple: singing without accompaniment is an uplifting experience.

“To feel those sounds all around you—it’s just outrageous,” he says.

—MELISANDE MIDDLETON, ’02