A Quote by R. Carlos Nakai
I studied trumpet for almost 15 years and was performing with a professional concert marching band in parades and rodeos. I was headed back east to study music, and if I hadn't been intrigued with the Native American flute, I suppose I'd now be jockeying for first chair of the brass section of some orchestra, or perhaps I'd be teaching music in a school system.
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The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them.
I studied music for my first two years in college. When I went to UC Berkeley, I failed the admission requirements to get into the music school there, so I studied communications and public policy, which actually were a greater engine for my career than a musical education would have been. If I had gotten into the music department at Berkeley, I'd probably be a timpanist in an orchestra right now.
My training in music has been very eclectic - as first a flute player from classical chamber music to jazz, Greek, Brazilian and African music to contemporary concert music.
When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.
I started to study the flute in 1951. The flute has been utilized by African-American musicians as far back as the early Twenties. If you take a look at some of the old pictures of Chick Webb, then you will see the flute right there on the bandstand among the woodwinds.
I had a drummer in my band who started teaching me tricks to come up with interesting rhythms. Because I don't come from a musical background, I've never studied music, and I don't know music theory at all, so a lot of stuff I discover on my own are things students would learn in the first grade of music.
I've always been a lover of classical music ever since I was an early teenager I suppose. I remember the very first piece of classical music that grabbed me was I bought an LP of Daniel Barenboim performing Mozart's piano concertos and I would have been about 14 or 15 at the time and I remember I played it over and over again.
Each culture has some knowledge. That's why I studied with Saj Dev, an Indian flute player. That's why I studied Stockhausen's music. The pygmies' music of the rain forest is very rich music. So the knowledge is out there. And I also believe one should seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. With that kind of inquisitiveness, one discovers things that were unknown before.
I've been working at performing for five years now. I've been working in Australia and Spain and England. When I was only 15 or 16, 1 was performing in bars; I could have had legal problems, but it's also the only way to get to know what music is all about.
I was very young, maybe five. The opera was very... I was attracted to opera to the point that I think it's the reason I started to write music for films. I never studied. There are film and music school that teach you how to write music. I never studied that. But the influence of opera, which is a combination of storyline, visuals, staging, plus music... that was perhaps the best school I could have had. That's what gave me the idea of coming to Hollywood to write music for films.
In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.
I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.
So what's happening with the audio/visuality, for the first time we are doing the music - the people who would come to the concert love the music - they loved him and loved his music - for the first time in concert it's not only the music. Now it's time to know the man. We know the music, but what was the man like?
My first ambition in life, I made up my mind I was going to become Miles Davis. I studied music, music theory. I played trumpet for nine years. One day, my mother explained, 'You can't be Miles Davis. There's one, and he's got that job.'
The very first concert I ever went to was a Green Day concert when I was 12 years old, at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Ont., and I remember right after seeing them perform I started a band, and I wanted to get up in front of people and start performing. Ten years later, to be on the Green Day 'American Idiot' tour is really awesome.
Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.
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