USC Thornton School of Music

And so from that age, from the age of nine, he was my main mentor.

I stayed with him all through school and all through my time at USC Thornton School.

But in addition to that, I was very, very fortunate to have a mentor named Heichiro Oyama.

Okay.

Wow.

Those sound like really incredible mentors for sure.

And so you mentioned you went to USC Thornton.

What path led you to that school and how did your time there affect your musical development?

And he just kept playing all the way through elementary school.

Into high school, he started playing with some other kids and having a rock band and, uh, various rock bands throughout high school, and then he wanted to go to USC music school.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, he had been studying regularly with a great, great drummer in, uh, California named Gregg Bissonette.

So I said, "Hey, would you-- Are you-- Do you give lessons?" And he started teaching Mac.

Mm.

And Mac just had some great, great instruction as a young guy, and Greg helped him get into USC Music School in 2010, and he went through a four-year program at USC Music School.

Went in as a drummer, and by the end of his time at USC, he was a full-on composer.

You know? Just things that I'm like, "There's so many people to honor," and that I just make sure that that's a tool that my music is used for.

Are you right now working at, uh, with students at the Thornton School of Music? You had mentioned in an interview the importance of imparting to them how to play with feeling or how to evoke feeling.

I would be curious to hear a little bit more on that, particularly if, say, a student has learned how to play technically, but they look at the notes on the page as notes, and they're not necessarily feeling those notes.

I just thought that was fascinating.

I want to say thank you, too, and also just mention for the listeners, if you're interested in more information about The Great Bailout, and if you don't know about it, you should look it up.

You can go to moormother.net. That's M-O-O-R mother.net. And there's also blacktimebelt.net is a website, a piece of art, really, worth checking out.

It has just been such a pleasure to, to speak with this multi-talented artist/professor at University of California Thornton School of Music.

You wear many hats.

I don't.

Upright bass player, runs the Thornton School of Music and the LA Philharmonic.

Okay.

He's wrote a book called Frackle Fingerings.

This relates to my experience with Asia.

So I taught at the Thornton School of Music at USC for about nine years.

And I taught music marketing, music finance, music partnerships.

And before the start of every semester, before I met the students, and this is the last time I did it, this was 2019, and I had 85 students.