About Me

​I'm Brian Wansink.   I'm a retired Cornell marketing professor, and I play tenor sax in a Finger Lakes Motown band called the X’Plozionz.   

Although most of my weekend musical adventures have been in rock bands, I've also played sax in a Grateful Dead quartet, an 18-piece WWII-vet swing band in New Hampshire,  a country rock band, an Ella Fitzgerald  jazz  quartet in Illinois, and a Dutch funk band in Amsterdam.  

The thing is . . . I have almost no natural musical talent or aptitude.
 
I’m a mediocre musician who aspires to someday reach the level of "pretty good."    I say this  because I am often embarrassed during a show, but I've realized that you don’t need to be a great player to have a great time playing music with other people -- or for other people.

When my mom passed away in a memory care unit during COVID, my 13-year-old daughter and I experimented with playing  two or three shaky songs in nursing homes in her honor.  After a few missteps and some course corrections, this expanded to hour-long monthly theme shows for the eight different dementia and Alzheimer memory care units in our town.

In early 2025 we started giving free 3-hour workshops to encourage and teach other musicians in our town how to "Play it Forward" in nursing homes and senior care.    We now give shortened quarterly versions of these in-person workshops because we've put all of this materials online for musicians all over.   We're now focusing on helping develop programs to help music teachers take their student groups into nursing homes.

In addition to working with Play it Forward, I'm active in professional music orgs (NAfME, NYSSMA, MEIEA,  North American Saxophone Alliance, and the Association for Popular Music Education), I write academic articles on Rock & Roll saxophone, and I speak at music conferences on Playing it Forward and on making music more fun.  More fun for students, for adults,  . . .  and for new retirees.  ​