Episode #63: Amy Sanchez - The Plane Flying, Rhino Saving French Horn Player

She's played the french horn on a Kendrick Lamar album, saves rhinos..... and flies planes! It's safe to say I've never met anyone quite like Amy. We unpack all of this and more in today's episode. Enjoy!  Amy Sanchez is a professional musician and educator who simultaneously cultivates seemingly unrelated passions as a pilot, wildlife conservationist, photographer, and avid traveler. Finding ways to combine these endeavors with her career as a horn player has provided constant inspiration, growth, humility, valuable perspective, and of course, some entertaining stories along the way.  As a freelance horn player based in LA for almost 20 years, Amy has recorded on a diverse range of albums with Kendrick Lamar, Dave Matthews Band, Jennifer Lopez, Florence and the Machine, Kamasi Washington, Carrie Underwood, Idina Menzel, Michael Buble, and others, and recorded for prominent films such as Spiderman No Way Home, Lightyear, Star Wars Rogue One, Moana, Coco, Incredibles 2, Frozen 2, Star Trek Beyond, Jurassic World, etc.. She performs frequently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Pacific Symphony,  and numerous regional groups as well as the Juneau Symphony and the International Chamber Orchestra of Puerto Rico. Amy has been the horn professor at UCLA since 2014, allowing her the opportunity to help shape the trajectory of young musicians toward both personal and professional success.  A performance in 2018 celebrating the life of hip-hop producer J Dilla with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s Suite for Ma Dukes at the Cape Town Jazz Festival in South Africa provided Amy with an opportunity to venture into the wild and gain insight on difficult issues in the protection of endangered species. This lead to her organizing conservation safaris with South African wildlife non-profit Nkombe Rhino. In turn, Amy created the brass ensemble Horns for Rhinos, and founded Nkombe Wild (a US 501c3 organization) to combine music and conservation in an effort to raise funding and awareness. On the heels of her work with wildlife in Africa, Amy found an opportunity a bit closer to home during the pandemic, photographing brown bears in Alaska. Travel and performances in Alaska seemed to follow naturally, and as one passion often ignites another, these travels inspired her to earn her private pilot certificate in 2021. Fully invested in the idea that our unique experiences shape who we are as artists, Amy continues to discover ways to tie exploration, photography, and the protection of wildlife and wild-land into her career as a musician.