" data-original-title="" title="">Sam Pilafian. Sam had an amazing ability to cut through all the clutter and really helped me focus on what was most important in my playing. In my first classical lesson with him, he paid me perhaps the biggest compliment of my life. After I'd been playing for about 20 minutes, he said, "you're a jazz player aren't you? I can hear it in your phrasing." Sam was deeply committed to bridging the jazz and classical worlds, and much of what I've done with my playing career has been heavily influenced by our friendship, which is a story you'll hear from pretty much everyone who spent time with him. In the tuba and euphonium world, we're also lucky to have a very strong professional organization, the International Tuba and Euphonium Association, and for over 50 years now it has provided an excellent safety net for young players and a great place for professional communication and collaboration.

I knew I wanted to be a musician when...

I'd been playing tuba for about a year and half, and as a seventh grader I won a few auditions for high school band clinics. Suddenly I was traveling around the state, hanging out with much older students and playing in great bands. I was hooked. Though I spent a lot of time listening to jazz as a young musician, playing jazz on tuba came a bit later for me when I moved to Las Cruces for graduate school in the mid-'80s. I'd been in town less than a week when I got a call to play a dixieland gig with the Creole Jazz Band. I found myself in a truly world-class traditional jazz band with very serious players and really found my musical home. I've spent the rest of my career traveling back and forth between the jazz and classical worlds.

Your sound and approach to music.

The great tubist Arnold Jacobs taught "song and wind," which Sam Pilafian and others interpreted basically as "always tell a story." Throughout my career, I've picked projects working with great classical composers and fantastic jazz musicians who were always willing to do the unusual, often letting the tuba step out front and be the soloist. After many of the great traditional jazz guys I played with passed away, I also found myself singing more and more because no one else was willing. There I'm just trying to get the words right and make the changes!

Your teaching approach

My teaching career is somewhat unique, in that I teach everything from undergraduate music appreciation to non-music majors, both jazz and classical, all the way through intensive graduate music classes in history and research methods. For many years, I was also a studio tuba and euphonium teacher. Not to keep harping on my association with Sam Pilafian, but basically, I fully embrace his philosophy that you teach the student in front of you, meeting them where they are and finding the best way to help them move forward. There's simply no single path to learning. Out of a class of 200 or more non-majors, if I can get a few to come out to some live shows and buy that old Kind of Blue album (or just add it to their playlists these days!) my work is done.

Your dream band

I became a huge Leon Redbone fan in high school, and I always dreamed of playing tuba for him. It never happened, but over the years I've gotten to work with a number of musicians he did record and perform with. Those gigs have all been dream bands for me. Playing tuba with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, the Dukes of Dixieland in their prime, Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena band, etc...any of those would also be my dream gig. As Steve Martin wrote in L.A. Story: "Let your mind go, and your body will follow." In my heart of hearts, being a traditional jazz tuba player is where I feel the most free and at home.

Road story: Your best or worst experience

I spent three years during my undergraduate degree playing tuba in a five-piece rodeo band. It's a bit of a lost art now at rodeos, but back in the day, it was like a circus band gig on steroids. One weekend we'd be on the back of a flatbed trailer in Eclectic, Alabama (yes, that's a real place...look it up. It's about an hour south of the middle of nowhere!), and the next weekend we'd be in the Superdome in New Orleans. So many crazy memories from those times, like having to play the "Coke Song" in Paducah, Kentucky for about 35 minutes straight when the lights went out because the local Coke distributor was the show sponsor. On a visit to New Orleans in the early '90s, I took my horn to Fritzel's, hoping I could sit in for a tune or two. Pianist