He is not only a musician, but he is the new President & CEO of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM). Previously he served as Vice President of Music Education & Technology at Hal Leonard, and he is the immediate Past-President of the Technology Institute of Music Educators. He has taught online graduate courses at VanderCook College and served as Director of Education for PreSonus Audio. As a performer he had been playing first trumpet in the MetWinds in Boston and has enjoyed a long career of performing in symphony orchestras, pit orchestras, and top 40 bands.
“I do not have a childhood memory that doesn’t have an instrument in it… I had been playing guitar since I could hold one… I thought I was going to play drums and then I thought the slide on the trombone was really cool… and then two years later I… switched to trumpet.”
“A lot of my experience is when I was living in Louisiana… and started getting in the gigging scene… played in the top wedding band of Louisiana… and the tunes that didn’t have trumpet I played keyboard ‘cause I had minored in piano in college, so I could play the synth parts.”
“I may or may not have interrupted a Randy Newman performance once. That was a really embarrassing moment in my life.”
“I've always been so gravitated towards education… I think for me it's just like, I think it's the same thing about music making. You make music because you are creating sounds that bring people emotion.”
“The way I really think about music making is… we take found objects – metal, string, wood, whatever it is – and we actually create sounds that make human emotion; like, we make people feel.”
“That was the dream from childhood; to play music, to go to music school, to go to grad school, to start gigging, and you think you've, at that time I'd made it. I was teaching music.”
“I’m in this for the next 25 years. I’m the fourth CEO in 76 years.”
“We’re an evolving industry and we need to be learning everyday ‘cause that’s our job.”
“The NAMM Show today – even in April, the show we just had a month ago – is the world’s largest global gathering of the music industry… and we take that responsibility very seriously.”
“The importance of getting together is because that you don't bump into someone on a Zoom, that setup you have to do. You don't run into the halls. You don't see someone, you don't get introduced to someone who knows someone that gives you an opportunity that didn't exist before when you're on a Zoom, being presented at. You're not all talking at the same time.”
“NAMM’s purpose is not four days, it’s 365 days.”
“NAMM is a band. John Mlynczak’s not even the front man. I don’t consider myself the front man of this band. I consider ourselves like an orchestra where we’re all sitting together. We’re all sitting here playing… And it’s that collective sound and again it’s kind of our industry, right? We’re a membership association. We represent the collective impact.”
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