And welcome back to another WXAV podcast, another part of the series with our little crossover special with St. Xavier's music department. And I'm here with head of it all, Dr. Salmon.
How are you, Dr. Salmon? Doing good, Anthony. Can I call you DJ Naphkin?
Yeah, you can call me DJ Naphkin. I am the host of this little series. So you could call me either. And you're like the only professor besides Pete here at the station that like knows my DJ name.
It's pretty funny. It's a great name. Thank you. I appreciate that very much.
DJ Salmon would be really good too, if you ever wanted to come up here with us. Mixed-naster fish. Oh, that would be good too. All right, so for people that don't know, you are the director of jazz studies here at St.
Xavier. What is your primary instrument? Guitar. Guitar.
How long have you been playing guitar? Oh, a lot longer than I have not been. OK, OK. We could leave it at that, you know?
It's root to ask. It's root to ask an inch. So I won't do that. Have you like written your own music before?
Oh, yes. With your band, Tanner Mann. Tanner Mann is Tanner Mann. How long have you been writing music?
I think I've wrote, sort of writing my experimenting in probably high school. Probably high school. Yeah. And then it got into college.
I started learning more about the process of how to write their harmony, their melody, all of that stuff. And then I really got into arranging, really enjoyed my big band, ranging class. And my love for jazz big band there, and how to use all those colors and sounds and horns and such. It was great.
So now I did my masters there. I pursued masters with an emphasis in composition, jazz composition. So that when I started writing and recording all my original stuff there. So yeah, that got me all the combos.
All the combos got time in the studio part of the combo class. And I went to CRC Chicago recording center and recorded my own. All six to eight members of the combo would submit something. And we'd have to just do it all.
I think we only had 20 minutes, 30 minutes tops there to record all our original stuff. Yeah. Went really quick. But I always thought I was really great to get that.
You walked away after you're done. I had some great recordings of myself and with a great band, great musicians that we've been playing all semester. So yeah, some of the most recordings I would send off to help get me some of my first gigs. So when they wanted to know, what did you sound like?
So having material that you wrote and recorded and performed on, I wanted to bring that experience here for our students. The great thing you mentioned, you know, it's under madness. We recorded that album. Oh gosh, now what is that?
Two years now? I believe it's two years. And we went to the Ivy Lab studio on on Clyburn. And I had a great experience with them.
Really great studio. The engineer was phenomenal. And got the wheels turning and going, man, it's a great place to bring the SXU group to do some things here. Got talking to him.
And last year I had an extremely strong two combos there. And I've always been the last concert. Has always been since I've been here. You write your own material.
So it's an all original material concert. That was always the thing in the works here since I've been here. And so last year was the first to introduce now that next. The studio aspect.
Yeah. For those that don't know, Dr. Samina usually sets up like a pretty good theme for every one of his jazz shows. So at the end of every school year, you can look forward to original compositions from our own students.
How was being hands off in the studio different from being really present when you conduct? With conducting my big band, I'm in front of them I'm directing entrances. I'm almost kind of being like the guy on the tarmac directing, which direction the plane needs to go. And with the combos, everybody's the director.
So I'm going to make sure everybody has that confidence. The thing with the studio was that hopefully that they've practiced enough that they can sit down. And you know, like I said, I was behind the glass next to the engineer listening to what they were laying down. There was no kind of safety net for it.
Yeah. It's recorded that they had to deal with the. With the fact that it's on records. Exactly.
Exactly. And what was nice was I think even one of the students said afterwards, like, and that was really hard. I think there was only a couple of tunes of such as you had to get into a different mentality. You could drive yourself crazy knowing you could do it better.
And so that you had to be confident in what you were doing in that moment. And what was laid down is you have to make peace with it pretty quickly. So yeah, it's a perfect assignment to carry on just in general there. Just you're appearing the best you can.
And you do the best you can at the core. I hope everybody had fun. And I know they're all excited to do it again. You kind of having the Elies view of the band.
Did you feel like the chemistry within the students kind of changed being in that sort of setting? Or do you feel like it was kind of the same? Yeah, you know, I think everybody was extremely excited, but also really focused. I mean, really seriously, the big challenge was we lost, unfortunately, a drummer for our second combo.
And Luis stepped in and actually kind of had to learn the tunes. And I think that is valuable in itself. Because what does studio musicians do? They get called and say, hey, I have this thing.
I need to be recorded. You don't know what it is. You don't know. You have the talent, the skills, all of this.
You have to put together within moments to recreate somebody else's vision. I thought that was a really cool thing there. And Luis did brilliant. He gave me a good decent 15 minutes on his experience with this.
He was just, everyone did really good. But I think also it also allowed us to do some added things too. I think one of the tracks we added some percussion. The flute player Sergio's tune.
It was a Latin tune. We were in the Break House of Things and the studio. I mean, they had everything. They just showed up to play.
To play. Great amps. You got tambourines. He comes in with like three tambourines.
Some conga comes in with three conga's. So much fun. I think that's all I need for you. Yeah, so Dr.
Salmon, thank you for joining me. Keep listening to WXAV 88.3 FM and WXAV podcast.