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 gets better every year but who will probably never be better than "pretty good." But if bands gave sportsmanship awards for trying hard, I'd earn most of them because I love swinging and entertaining. I say this because you don’t need to be a good player to have a great time playing music.
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'm active in a number of professional music orgs (MEIEA, NAME, NASA, NYSMMA, and APME), I write academic articles on music, and I speak at music conferences 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 gets better every year but who will probably never be better than "pretty good." But if bands gave sportsmanship awards for trying hard, I'd earn most of them because I love swinging and entertaining. I say this because you don’t need to be a good player to have a great time playing music.
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'm active in a number of professional music orgs (MEIEA, NAME, NASA, NYSMMA, and APME), I write academic articles on music, and I speak at music conferences on making music more fun. More fun for students, for adults, . . . or for new retirees.
