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About Me
I'm Brian Wansink. I'm a retired Cornell marketing professor, and I play tenor sax with the Motown band, the X’Plozionz ("The Rock & Soul Band of the Finger Lakes").
I've played in a dozen different bands -- mostly pop and rock bands, but also a Grateful Dead quartet, a 18-piece WWII-vet swing band in Vermont, an Ella Fitzgerald jazz quartet in Illinois, a country rock bar band in Utah, an Indie trio in Amsterdam, a Steely Dan tribute band in New York, and a 5-piece Dutch funk band.
The thing is . . . I have almost no natural musical talent or aptitude.
I’m a mediocre musician who aspires to someday be "pretty good." I say this because I've learned you don’t need to be a great player to have a great time playing music with other people -- and for other people.
When my mom passed away in a memory care unit during COVID, my 14-year-old daughter and I experimented with playing songs in nursing homes in her honor. This quickly expanded to hour-long monthly theme shows in the different memory care units in our town. We'd usually bring another musician (in the fliers below, we call them a "musical guest") who was curious about playing or singing a couple songs to see how it went for them.
I've played in a dozen different bands -- mostly pop and rock bands, but also a Grateful Dead quartet, a 18-piece WWII-vet swing band in Vermont, an Ella Fitzgerald jazz quartet in Illinois, a country rock bar band in Utah, an Indie trio in Amsterdam, a Steely Dan tribute band in New York, and a 5-piece Dutch funk band.
The thing is . . . I have almost no natural musical talent or aptitude.
I’m a mediocre musician who aspires to someday be "pretty good." I say this because I've learned you don’t need to be a great player to have a great time playing music with other people -- and for other people.
When my mom passed away in a memory care unit during COVID, my 14-year-old daughter and I experimented with playing songs in nursing homes in her honor. This quickly expanded to hour-long monthly theme shows in the different memory care units in our town. We'd usually bring another musician (in the fliers below, we call them a "musical guest") who was curious about playing or singing a couple songs to see how it went for them.
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At that point, we starting giving free 3-hour workshops to help encourage and teach other musicians "play it forward" and perform in memory care units. We still give these in-person workshops quarterly, but we've now digitally expanded them into this national network.
Now, thanks to a grant from the New York State Student Music Association (NYSSMA), my youngest daughter and three wonderful music educators (Dr. Elise Sobol, Jonathan Allentoff, and Katherine Howell) are helping expand this to help music educators and students to Play it Forward in their student combos.
Now, thanks to a grant from the New York State Student Music Association (NYSSMA), my youngest daughter and three wonderful music educators (Dr. Elise Sobol, Jonathan Allentoff, and Katherine Howell) are helping expand this to help music educators and students to Play it Forward in their student combos.
Now that I'm retired, I'm active in a number of professional music orgs (NAME, NASA, NYSSMA, MEIEA, and the Association for Popular Music Education), I write academic articles on music, and I speak at music conferences on Playing it Forward and on making music more fun. More fun for students, for adults, . . . or for new retirees.
