When I was in third grade, I got up on the stage and I did my Elvis Presley impression

and I sang "Hound Dog".

And the girls in the fourth grade started screaming.

And I said to myself there something going on here.

This is kind of cool if the girls in the fourth grade are screaming for a kid in the third grade.

I got to realize that being a musician is almost a form of wizardry or sorcery or alchemy.

There's a magic to it which is difficult to really explain, but it impacts people pretty

much the same way all over the world.

Everybody has an emotional response, a passionate response to music whether they like what they're

hearing or they don't.

It has a huge impact.

And no matter what culture you're from, everybody reacts to music.

Everybody loves music or has a strong emotion when hearing music, and it made for an interesting life.

There was a teacher in my high school, in Hicksville High School, during my high school years who

was a chorus teacher who was probably the best teacher I ever had.

He made music history very interesting.

And he made even chorus fun and interesting.

And one day he told me that I should consider becoming a professional musician.

This is when I was still in high school, 10th grade, 11th grade.

And for a teacher, an adult, to tell me that was, you know, very, very important.

Most of my friends thought it was kind of a silly idea to become a musician.

I mean nobody where I came from became a professional musician.

People either went into the service or they went to college or they went and got a job

in a factory and that was the end of that.

But this teacher wanted me to consider being a professional musician.

And that was an epiphany.

It was a real eye-opener.

I like to do master classes.

I like to be a teacher when I can be.

I actually wanted to be a teacher at a young age, but my path went somewhere else.

But it gave me the opportunity later in life to do master classes at colleges, at schools.

And I've been doing it for years.

I quite enjoy it.

There is a lot that I have up here that I'd like to pass along just to help people avoid

making the same mistakes I made. Because there was no book,

there was no course in how to be in the music business.

And there's all kinds of traps and difficulties you can run into.

And I managed to survive a lot of that just by my own wits or luck, whatever you want

to call it.

And I always wanted to be able to help people to avoid, you know, those same pitfalls.

And that's why I do master classes.

I still, to this day, do them.

Well, I think it's very, very important to have arts education in school, in public schools.

In public education, the first things to go when the budget gets tight are the art classes

and the music classes.

They usually keep the athletic stuff, but who is going to nurture all the young musicians

who have no other recourse to education?

Who is going to nurture artistic people?

I think it's necessary to reach down and start at a very, very young age.

So, to me, that's probably one of my most important interests.

[ Music ]