Timothy McAllister

[Laughs] Oh my goodness.

Okay.

Mhm.

Oh wow.

Mhm.

Yeah, I mean I would have given anything to have heard that live.

Okay.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, of course. Nice, nice red, red indentation. [Sniffs] You know.

Mhm.

Sure. We—we, we, we grow up, you know, I—[Clears throat]—so, I was, I was born and raised in, in, in Texas, okay? So one thing that maybe is, is not completely, you know, um, evident in the world of music is that Texas is the greatest state for—for school band. You know, for high school band, junior high band, marching band. We're talking big money thrown into these programs. Very affluent communities getting behind their music programs. Access to great instruments, access to great private lessons. Uh, you know, competitive, competitive marching band, competitive concert band.

And I was just swallowed up in all of that in Houston, Texas. And my parents, uh, my, my mother and my stepfather were both NASA engineers. They were—they were, they were involved in the Space Shuttle program as software designers and simulator, uh, software designers and hardware.And, uh, you know, my mother—there's a long story even there. My mother was a, a major figure in the—all of the whistleblowing that, that, uh, came out after the, the, the Challenger disaster. So, like, you know, my mother was one of the first that, that essentially brought down Rockwell and all of that. And if you remember Morton Thiokol and the O-rings and all the things that happened, all this conspiracy cover-up about the short—the, uh, the shortcuts that were made, uh, in the construction of the shuttle—

—which ulti—which ultimately, you know, resulted in all of—in tragedy. But you know, I grew up in a, in a house of overachievers in that way. My mother was, you know, she was, you know, she's—she's still alive, but she was a, you know, kind of a gifted mathematician and, and, and designer. Uh, and so, you know, um, and so this—she, she grew up, though, when she was a stud—uh, when she was a child, she was a pianist and a violist. So she was—she always, uh, she always just—I don't know, the stories became more and more exaggerated as I—as she recounted them, but she was principal viola of the Louia—Loui—Louisiana All-State Orchestra, you know? And she played piano. She played the uh, Warsaw Concerto with the Shreveport Symphony.

Okay, there you go! Yeah, I'm—I'm playing with Shreveport Symphony this year. I mean, I'm—I'm essen—and that's where all my extended family's from. So, for me, it's like returning to a home of sorts, you know? So, um, but anyway, so my mother was a musician. She ended up getting a teacher certification later. She kind of went back to school. She did kind of continued, you know, adult continued education in, in computer programming, and Fortran, and Cobol, and all the early languages. And she, um, and then she kind of worked her way into NASA.So, but anyway, so I went to a high school that was full of children of, of, of, uh, NASA engineers and all of the subcontractors and, and all of the, you know, yeah, all of the, uh, either jet fighter planes or Space Shuttle and, and anyway. So we were—we were kind of an overachieving high school, and when it came to our band program, I mean, we were playing major repertoire that we associate with the concert band movement. We were playing all that repertoire, you know, as early as—for me, it was early as ninth grade. I was being exposed to Paul Hindemith symphonies and, and Samuel Barber, and names that just became part of, like, just standard, standard knowledge, you know? Assumed knowledge that you knew as a ninth grader who Paul Hindemith was.Um, and, and, uh, and I loved the community of school concert band, but in this case, we were—we were doing some pretty heavy music. Um, I found myself really connecting with that music. Like, I, you know, who could—I, I can't even imagine now, you know, talking to a 14 or 15-year-old who actually could say they loved the music of Paul Hindemith. [Laughs] You know? But like, for me, I was turned on to that. Like, it was amazing to me. And then, of course, that was a gateway to, uh, Stravinsky and everything—everything else, Boulez. I mean, I started just en—encountering all of that music.Um, I think trying to find my place in all of it was to say, "Well, I know about jazz." And when I heard transcendent jazz playing like John Coltrane, the—the divide and the problem in the—in the pedagogy world of everything we do is, how do you get from point A to point Z? You can't just pick up the saxophone and start being Coltr—John Coltrane. And so I think where there was a major gap, and that's starting to do—to become better in the jazz world, there was this major gap about the how-to, you know, uh, and whereas in the—in when you start learning instrumental music through, say, school band, or we talk about, you know, solo literature, concert literature, chamber music, there has always been a long systemic path that has been laid out in front of all of us. You do this, before you do this, before you do this, before you do this. You learn these scales, you do—and so the pedagogy was always very clear.And for me, it allowed me to—it felt like the—the, you know, elite jazz playing was just—I couldn't de—I couldn't demystify it in any, by any means. I worked on it, I developed it, but I think I made my mark early enough, and there was enough kind of a reward system of being a good classical player through band, band music, and solo competitions and con—I won my first concerto competition at 16.

It was the Glazunov, you know, concerto. And um, with the Houston Civic Symphony, you know? And I stood up on that stage and played that concerto, and I think that was it. My—my script was written of what I wanted in my life.And then the number one, the number one trans—transformative moment for me was I saw the, the—heard and saw the, the, the premiere of Nixon in China with the Houston Grand Opera and John Adams, and I was, I don't know, 15? And uh, 14, 15, and my teacher, my saxophone teacher, was playing saxophone in the—in the, in the pit.

And so when I saw that, and I—how al—and I had already had this background in kind of in the band movement dealing with living composers, and then seeing the path of the solo repertoire, when I saw this opera of John's, you know, where he was still at this point, you could say still a little known in some ways, um, I think that's when I—I, I pointed to that and I say, "I want that." You know, I don't know how and how and—how and how and where and how that's going to, how that's going to evolve, but I want that. And it didn't mean I didn't love, you know, hearing Charlie Parker and, and Coltrane and all of that, but I didn't see the path, you know?

Yes.

And it was—because it was the spirit of that. And I think that, that sort of fed, fed, fed me, nourished me a lot. I mean, I could—I could immerse myself and I worked on improvisation. I don't think I'm a fantastically creative player. I, I can get around when I need to, and, and, but it was a certainly as a saxophone player, you—in, in your formal training in college, you're—you're not going to escape that, you know? You, you're going to develop—well, in, in most cases, uh, in conservatory systems, you're going to—it's going to, in a performance major setting, you're going to study classical and all of that. But, but as a saxophone player, it's just—you, you, you, you can't allow yourself to ignore the jazz side of the instrument. It's just too important.It's—you know, we're talking about an instrument that is solely emblematic of an entire art form. Okay, when we say—when we say classical music, we're saying, we're thinking piano and violin. When you say jazz, the very first thing you're—you're thinking is, is saxophone. So, you're not going to ignore that. But it's—it's safe to say that it is, I think—I don't think it's controversial to say—it's virtually impossible to become amazing at, at, at both.And so there was just a sense that, uh, in there—we could—we could name maybe on, on one hand the people who were transcendent players in both styles, you know? And they do exist, but think about how hard that is and how—

Sure. Absolutely.

Marsalis, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, these are—these are special talents. I mean, you could even—you could go fur—farther. You could say—I don't know if Bernstein was an amazing improviser, but he certainly was a composer, you know, he—

Yeah, exactly. So you know, almost like cocktail—cocktail piano. But, no, but I—I think for me, I mean, that fork in the road was, was very clear. But I just kind of kept my—I just kept kind of one ear to the ground of everything in jazz, and, and then, and then I—I feel like it's something I'm very strong in terms of teaching and reading and feel and time, but it fed my classical playing.And, and I, and I'm always—as you said—and, and I'm always, um, I, I feel sorry for the people who would reject that, that idea that jazz, uh, would have nothing to offer their classical playing.

Mhm.

Well, I think it's—for us, it's a—it's a—it's a, uh, it's a difficult topic because we, we say that the, the person who invented the instrument was, uh, an unsavory figure, you know? Adolphe Sax himself, you know, he had—political rivals, he had manufacturer rivals, there was tribalism tied to all these different aesthetics between the French infantry band movement and that, those aesthetics versus German versus UK, uh, you know, uh, I guess in this case be like British brass bands and all of that. So, so Adolphe Sax was taking work and business away from all of these kind of established lines of instrument manufacturing. You know, he's essentially—it would be impossible today to literally an invent an instrument from nothing and then be able to approach an orchestra at this point in time and say, "You need to add this instrument to your orchestra." So, it's unheard of.And so the brazen nature of this man to be able to go to all his friends—Hector Berlioz, and, you know, Meyerbeer, and Bizet, you know, all—to go to all of them and be like, "You need this instrument in your orchestra. I'm telling you it's going to be a game-changer." You know, so that—so a percentage of them took, took, took him up on it. While the others laughed! You know, it's like, "Are you serious?" You know, like, "This is ridiculous. What is this thing you made? It's a—this is a joke, and you named it after yourself?" [Laughs] Right? I mean, it just kind of—it may—it's amazing to think about what he was able to be successful at, the inroads he made. He got—he, he got Berlioz to include it in his treatise on instrumentation, and the rest is history.So, then the composers start to experiment with that, and, and, and it took a while for that to find its legs. But I'm also of the opinion that had Brahms heard—okay, I mean, if I'm just going to toot my own horn here, [Laughs] if Brahms had heard me play, I think Brahms would have liked the saxophone. Okay? Or, or, or my teacher—had, had Donald Sinta played for Brahms, okay, there's no reason he wouldn't have been enamored by the instrument enough to write for it. So, there—there it is. The instrument developed way too late.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Well, you know, that's a great question, and I also think some of it's tied to the—just the history of the teaching of the instrument. So we, we, we associate the first instrument that we would learn on, if we weren't, you know, coming from another instrument, if we were, you know, for, for me, star—straight out of in sixth grade or fifth grade, some kids start as early as fourth grade, but, uh, the alto saxophone is the, is the, is the center line, right? That's—that's the through line, the through line by which all the pedagogies kind of centered around.

And so the alto saxophone is considered our—it's really the main instrument. And then, uh, but there's been—there have been identities that have been kind of associated with the different sizes. I mean, it's, uh, the soprano saxophone in many ways, if you, if you—I think about, um, I don't remember if it was Arthur Benade that talked about this. I'm trying to remember the root of this, but there—there are these kind of acoustical, uh, studies about, about the nature of, of sound in instruments, and you—and one could argue that all the instruments ultimately are indistinguishable except for the attacks. So if you were to shave off digitally the attack of a clarinet, and you shave off the digital—the, the attack digitally of a saxophone, you wouldn't know what you were hearing. And so there was a—until you got deeper into that, you know, sound or phrase or something like that, it would be that acoustical breakdown. So with clarinet, sorry, the soprano saxophone, we're starting to narrow the acoustical overtone, you know, recipe, so to speak, and we lose its identity, uh, in relation to oboes and clarinet, English horn. They all start to blur together. So we often think of the soprano saxophone as almost being the most classical of the saxophones because you could, you know, you could kind of disassociate and hear an oboe in there, you could hear a clarinet in there.And alto is a little deeper, it's a little mellower, and then it has a little more of a huskiness, and so we start to associate that as—as a, a saxophone identity. With tenor, it just took off in jazz because it just—you could just get in that deeper place in your voice. I mean, it certainly created these, uh, these associations with, with the great jazz singer of, of, you know, tessitura vocal ranges and, and—

—you know, where—where Billie Holiday sang, and, and where Ella sang, and it's just there was a sense that, that tenor just spoke a little more that way. And, and then with baritone, it's like, well, the baritone is holding down the bottom of the section, and, and then it's—and it's gruff, and it's rumbly, and um, and so we tend to think of that instrument, if you can play it really well, it almost can sound like a cello, [Laughs] you know, uh, uh, you could say that good playing might create those associations. Um, but I do think it's easiest to associate classical music with the alto and the soprano.

Sure.

Thank you.

Mhm, mhm, I think so.

Sure, and, and we've seen that. We—we, we've seen, we have seen that instrument, uh, you know, approached in that way. Um—

Well, I—I, I—your, your—I think you're often trying to figure out where the strengths of the instrument lie and, and what, what are the prime identities of the instrument. So if we want—if we want to look at just the extremes that John Corigliano put me through in Triathlon, he's seeing the soprano saxophone as most related to his concept of clarinet playing. I mean, even in the early days, uh, of our, of our workshopping together of Triathlon, he really just wanted to hear how the soprano saxophone actually, um, how similar it was to the clarinet. So he would—he would, he put his own clarinet concerto in front of me when we were in his, in his, in his home, and he said—and he said, "I would like to hear what this would sound like on the saxophone, on the soprano sax."

You know, and so he just want—he needed to be able to kind of associate where those timbral breaks are, what happens in the lower extremities of a conical-bore instrument versus the low extremities of a cylindrical-bore instrument like the clarinet. And then, with the baritone saxophone, he puts me through a different pace because he decides to disassociate that low stereotype of the baritone saxophone, and he's putting me in the stratosphere of the altissimo, uh, which his publisher kept telling him, "You know these notes aren't possible, John, you know that, right?" And he's saying, [Laughs] you know, and he's saying, "Well, Tim's told me he can do it, Tim told me he can do it." And they're like, "I'll get back to Tim and find out." And then I get an email from John Corigliano that says, "My publisher says you shouldn't—these notes are not possible." And, well, so there is a kind of a sense that, look, we have been—we're still—the spirit of innovation exists for us. We are constantly re—redefining and moving the needle for the instrument.But for John, he saw the baritone saxophone as the culminating instrument, the one that could do it all, that could push into the range of the soprano all the way, and you have all of that bottom range. So he saw it as the whole saxophone family rolled into one instrument. So if you look at that, you are going against type, you are pushing against the identity of the baritone saxophone. Um, and so it really comes down to what a composer's vision of the instrument is, and, and and I—I think most composers are going to say, "Well, look, I don't intend or need to write that amount of risk in the piece. I want my piece to be, you know, palatable, accessible, quick—quickly learnable, in, in, you know, in, in, in, in, uh, um, comparatively, and I want this to highlight what is the, maybe, the center line identity of that instrument."So, in that case, I think what is special about the baritone saxophone is just the power and this—this quality in the lower end of the instrument, of this—that where the—where the instrument is at its widest, where the instrument is at its most kind of, you know, barky and primal, you know? Um, and, and with soprano, you know, you want to take advantage of that kind of—that, that ping and that shriekingness of the upper register. I think the alto saxophone, that—its, its true identity rests in that beautiful middle, melancholy, and those what—that is what all these composers really were uncovering at the turn of the 20th century. They were—every single example of saxophone in, in all of these kind of top 40 orchestral, uh, examples, it's always slow, bel canto, lyrical, melancholy, the orchestra is stripped away, the famous solo in the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances—

—you know, it is the embodiment of this nostalgia, this—this, this longing for his childhood, the longing for pre-revolution Russia. And—

I can give you a little story on that, and it's tied to my history, and it's tied to my school and, and my teacher, so—well, the Philadelphia Orchestra for many years, uh, was in residence here in Ann Arbor, uh, through the University Musical Society at what was called the May Festival. So they were here every May, gave tons of concerts. So, uh, this would have been, you know, early '40s, um, um, you know, Rachmaninoff was here, and he was—he was just joining the orchestra, but he was in the midst of writing this piece and essentially, you know, looking at either expanding it. I—I actually don't remember if the piano version came later or if it was a short score version, or if it was—he orchestrated the piano version of it, I can't remember, but um—

So, he um, um, he was trying to figure out how to handle this solo. He wanted something very special in the—in the orchestration. Um, and you know, from—from what I heard, he spoke to Prokofiev about this, I think there was just a real sense that right now the saxophone was having a moment, uh, in, in the, certainly coming out of the popularity of Gershwin and all of that, and you know, you can—you can say the—you can see that, you know, Bolero is starting to have some legs at this point, so there's Ravel and his use and, and whatnot. So, uh, he decides that he, he would like to essentially try out two versions of this: one being a saxophone solo, and another being an offstage soprano—an offstage singer. And so he workshopped both versions in Ann Arbor, um, and I'm not citing—I don't have any sources on this, this was all just—just told word of mouth by my teacher, Donald Sinta, because the person they asked to play the saxophone, to try out the saxophone version of this, was uh, his predecessor, so, uh, Larry Teal, who was the first saxophone professor anywhere in the United States, was here at the University of Michigan, this is, you know, this is the beginning of academic saxophone is here. So I'm—I'm the only—I'm the third teacher at the University of Michigan. So and, and we're talking professors, we're not talking about the part-time teachers that are brought in, you know, at the smaller or the conservatories, for, for instance, we're talking university saxophone professors, we were the first, and well, Teal actually wasn't on faculty yet, he was the number one—he was the number one freelance player in all of the Detroit Metroplex. So, they called him to come in and play that solo for Rachmaninoff. And he trialed both, and the piece was premiered the next year in Philadelphia, and he used saxophone. And then they came back, and so that was the premiere, he—he used a clarinetist in the orchestra to play, but when they came back to Ann Arbor, they did it in Hill Auditorium with—with Teal playing. So, and, and, and so the, the, the story there was that he heard good enough saxophone playing, in this—in this, in this instance, he heard good enough saxophone playing that to, to really, uh, to, to—to allow the piece to happen, we—we are grateful to this—to this moment. Um, and I think this was true with Ravel, he heard Marcel Mule, there was a sense that at all of these moments in time, there—we had good players at the right place at the right time, that were—that were, enticing figures like Maurice Ravel to use the saxophone.

I think so, at this point, we've reached that place in, in, in this—in this kind of, you know, musicological arc, that we are now indispensable, at least in a piece like that. And it's also helped us evolve as players, too, because that actually is a very challenging solo. It's in a very difficult key, it's in all the problem notes of the—literally, every note of the solo is a bad note on the instrument. [Laughs] So, we, we, we joke about this a lot, and there's a bad history of it being played by double-reed players who weren't up for the task, who weren't specialists or didn't have—

Yeah, and they, they didn't have that kind of formal training to really know the instrument.

Oh, sure. [Sniffs]

Sure.

Mhm. We are—I mean, it is just embedded in the pedagogy from the very beginning. So, all of our teaching etudes and technical studies are—are sequentially building—or, six—I should say they are sequential skill-building exercises, and we're slowly integrating vibrato studies. And, for us, compared to, say, the flute or the oboe, the means by, by which we produce that are different. We are talking about a, a, a regulated jaw vibrato that, that literally, you know, uh, creates this—this change in the pitch as we change subtle tension on the reed. Um, and we're not using a diaphragm vibrato, we're not using kind of like a, a throat undulation. Uh, the way we shape our oral cavities has a huge impact on how flexible and how deep that vibrato might be, so we do have kind of different opinions. We can say that in every field, there—tribalism exists, in every field there is this kind of different dogma, and we have that that, that, that exists, and you have these, you know, demagogues in all of these areas, right? You have these famous teachers sort of railing on other teachers.Well, we have these kind of schisms in the saxophone world where some people feel that, you know, the vibrato should not be, uh, a major component of the sound, and then where it's something that's a little more subtle and embedded in the straight tone, and there's other teachers like my teacher that felt the vibrato should be in line with something, uh, like a vocalist would, would approach vibrato.

Okay.

Yes.

Absolutely. Well, so that probably the earliest stereotype for us would be the—this great French tradition that, that was really anchored by Marcel Mule, but Adolphe Sax himself was the first teacher of saxophone, I mean, he created demand for himself. He built an instrument and then he got hired by the famed Paris Conservatoire to teach his instrument, because his instrument became mandated as a—as an instrument for the entire French, you know, infantry system.

So, that's kind of amazing, you know, that he was able to get—he built—he built a line of instruments that suddenly there was a demand for it to, to have formal instruction. So, he, uh—he's teaching this instrument, and at that time, vibrato's not part of the instrument. So, the vibrato is associated more at this with this kind of emerging primordial jazz movement, right? So vibrato represents something kind of reckless in the sound. Maybe we were associating this, you know, straight-tone singing and art-song singing and all of that versus an operatic tradition and, and operetta. It's all the same, it parallels that. But, if you listen to the string players and the singers of the '20s, and if we look at Casals, listen to Casals, and we listen to Heifetz in, in, in, in—uh, they—we're saying that vibrato is very deep, very regulated, very fast, and, uh—and the remnants of that still exists in the string traditions, but it's not nearly the same. And, and of course, it now it's nonexistent in some instruments, but, yeah, so it was seen that when you play classical saxophone, you would use no vibrato. And if you played vaudeville music or film—this kind of film music that was coming about, or, you know, you know, in, um, not, not—well, cabaret, maybe, but, but certainly light music, any light music, the reference to that, to, to the lightness of it—of that music, was to use vibrato. So we heard this quite a bit in the '20s, late teens. We're talking 1917, we, major figures like Rudy Wiedoeft, who was all over the airwaves.It's—it's, I—I'm al—maybe you've, maybe you, you think about this, um—

Buescher, well, Buescher, absolutely. So, but I think about this a lot, Michael, about like this, this, this idea of cultural amnesia, you know, like— [Laughs]

—that, that, that we have, that, in, in, in, in essence, like every decade, we're having to kind of reinforce things that came before. And, and, and people don't remember that in the late 1910s, it was saxophone all over the airwaves that, that, that, that, that existed, you know? And it was because, because Thomas Edison, Thomas Edison Records, his first artist signed was Rudy Wiedoeft, and the great vaudeville saxophone tradition was hitting the airwaves, and that's the sound of the '20s. And then we had this massive blow-up of what we call the saxophone craze in the '20s, where, I mean, I, I, I—again, I'd have to look at the figures of, of this, but, but the, the exaggerated figure is that there was a saxophone in every household, okay? Because it was—

Right, right. Well, so it, and especially the instruments that were keyed in early—these early instruments, some of them were keyed in C and F, so you could play it, you could buy a C-melody saxophone, and you could read over the shoulder of some—someone sitting at a piano.

Mhm.

Sure.

That's a great question, and it's also, you know, I think in some ways it was even more ambitious. I mean, I think it came down to the composers that had the time for me, or the composers who were wanting to be a part of it, or the composers who were willing, in essence, to maybe take a small fee for it because they want to be part of this project, you know, um. And, I—we, we initially wanted it to be something where we were at first, uh, both me and my, you know, my co-curator, my partner in this, Liz Ames, wonderful pianist, um, we, we, we, we, I think at first, we wanted to target, uh, really young composers. Oh, not young, I mean, people, composers maybe just coming out of school, that, that, that sort of this would be one of their first high-profile experiences to be, be part of a project, to be kind of the sense of community that comes from being on the same album with, maybe, you know, some of their heroes, who knows? Um, but it, we felt of, we saw it as a service early on, that, that we wanted this to be a way for them to get into, to writing for the instrument. It was much more feasible that they could write a two or three-minute or five-minute piece, um, in a short amount of time, and that could then serve as programming, a recital repertoire, and because I—we've often seen the use of encores as um, a concert, you know, uh, you know, or denouement, or something that was just a little, you know, uh, appetizer, or, you know, or, you know, or a little digestive at the end. But, we, we thought, well, it's, I think it's important that a program has this wide range of, of, uh, voices, not just sort of your anchor pieces. You know, we often see, even in orchestra programming, we, we, we've gotten into this, this, this mode where, where, uh, the concerto needs to be, if there's a concerto featured on a concert, it really needs to stay inside of a 20-minute length because we need to make sure we dedicate the second half to this big multi-movement symphony, okay, we have to do that, right, there's some—and so, and then if we're going to have a concerto in the first half, we need to make sure the first piece is not that long, [Laughs] right, so we've run into these ruts in, in curation, and—

Yeah, there's a lot, right? But when it comes to recital programming, you know, it's, it's the same kind of thing. Well, the recital, you, it's, there was this, this, this, this, I don't know, I don't want to say a myth, but a sense that your curation has to, the bigger the piece and the longer the piece, somehow the, the more credibility was giving to that piece, and—

—and that's not true. I mean, there are amazing pieces in the history of instrument, of, of all music, I mean, that were—that were short, you know, little, you know, splashes. Um, so we just saw that as a, a way to build a deeper program that would feature more and more names and younger composers, um, and, uh, get them writing for the saxophone. Now,

Sure.

I think that was—that was a bit of this, that was the, certainly the mission, and then we wanted to start to, to kind of build on our networks and our friendships and, and, uh, you know, our, uh, and so where the—where the project kind of expanded in two directions. We had sort of, you know, we had a figure like Wynton Marsalis writing a piece for us, uh, and, and, and he did it essentially as, as an almost an exchange for some other, you know, Liz Ames was actually orchestra, uh, doing the piano reductions of his, uh, tuba concerto, you know, and it's, as a gift to us, he wanted to write this piece for us. And, you know, he took—he took time out of his massive schedule to do that for us, and, um—but, uh, Jennifer Higdon's been a longtime dear friend and, uh, you know, we—we've been able to kind of pool together our, our, our, our, our resources, if you will, uh, of friendships, networks and, and being able to get it funded by some university, uh, assistance, uh, and then just even out of pocket, just to make these things happen. And, and when I spoke with Wynton Marsalis, uh, about his piece and we were—he was just kind of coaching us before we recorded it, you know, he said, "You know, I don't need any attention. I—I'm happy to, to do the PR for this album to talk about the other composers on this album."

That's just who he is. He's like, "I don't—I don't need to talk about me, I want to talk about these others." And, and I think, now, there is the spirit of the project. That, that, that we have all these composers kind of like piggybacking on, on the PR of each other, and they're all supporting each other.

And that, yeah, that's—that's, that was a big part of it.

Oh, of course we can. [Laughs]

Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate being with you.