About Me
I'm Brian Wansink. I'm a retired Cornell marketing professor, and I play tenor sax and bass 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, an Ella Fitzgerald jazz quartet, a country rock bar band, an Indie trio in Amsterdam, a Steely Dan tribute band, 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 has come to enthusiastically embrace it. But if bands gave sportsmanship awards for trying hard, I'd earn most of them because I love swinging and entertaining.
Although I always wanted to play saxophone, I grew up playing French Horn because it was the "free instrument" my Iowa high school gave me. I finally learned to play sax in my thirties when I was a lonely single professor at Dartmouth.
Now that I'm retired, I've joined a number of professional music orgs (NAME, NYSMMA, NASA, and APME), I write academic articles on music, and I give conference speeches on making music more fun. More fun for students, for adults, . . . or for new retirees.
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, an Ella Fitzgerald jazz quartet, a country rock bar band, an Indie trio in Amsterdam, a Steely Dan tribute band, 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 has come to enthusiastically embrace it. But if bands gave sportsmanship awards for trying hard, I'd earn most of them because I love swinging and entertaining.
Although I always wanted to play saxophone, I grew up playing French Horn because it was the "free instrument" my Iowa high school gave me. I finally learned to play sax in my thirties when I was a lonely single professor at Dartmouth.
Now that I'm retired, I've joined a number of professional music orgs (NAME, NYSMMA, NASA, and APME), I write academic articles on music, and I give conference speeches on making music more fun. More fun for students, for adults, . . . or for new retirees.
