We recently connected with Michael Neufeld and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Michael thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

In middle school and high school, playing trombone was one of the few main things I was interested in. Most of my friends were in band, and it was an environment where I felt like I could accomplish something that was personal to me, not just a grade in a class. I think my parents knew I was going to be a professional musician before I did: they watched me constantly in county, state, and even sometimes national-level honor ensembles throughout 7-12th grade, but it wasn’t until 10th grade that I had the moment of clarity for myself. On a break during Fresno-Madera Counties Music Educators Association (FMCMEA) Honor Jazz Band rehearsal, a friend came up to me and said, “Hey Michael, you need to check this record out! I think you’ll like it.” He proceeded to play “Slashes” by Marshall Gilkes, off of the album Sound Stories. To this day, that is the most impactful moment of my career. Gilkes begins the song with an impressive display of dexterity on the trombone, playing pedal tones to simulate a bass line and a fraction of a second later playing the actual melody of the song two octaves higher. During the song, he takes an improvised solo that captured my whole attention. He had range I’d never heard before, and his melodies snared my very soul. His skill and creativity commanded me to learn how to be like him. For the rest of high school, I’m sure my band director and classmates were annoyed out of their minds with how often I practiced that single song. Musically and technically, that was the song that sparked my drive. Even philosophically, I think the concept of Sound Stories guides my entire creative process: I love the idea of crafting a story to tell, not just notes that sound pretty or cool, but something that an audience can relate to. If “Slashes” is the reason I started taking this profession seriously, then Sound Stories is the reason I continue to do so.

Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Michael Neufeld, and I am a professional trombonist. I just graduated this past spring from the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at CSU, Long Beach with my Masters of Music in Jazz Studies. Before that, I did my undergraduate degree at USC’s Thornton School of Music, also in Jazz Studies. I grew up in Fresno, California but moved to Los Angeles and later Long Beach for my education, and I currently live in Long Beach. I play all sorts of crazy gigs and teach in a variety of settings, including my own private lessons as well as coaching in schools. My favorite gig is with my brass band, BLOW. Our leader, India Anderson, formed the group during COVID lockdown while all of us musicians were sitting in our office chairs at our desks attending “ensembles” for school credit. She, I, and four others started the group in that setting, filming videos in parking garages six feet apart from each other, but today we have many more members and many more opportunities that have carted us all around the state. It’s a very personal ensemble to me, because it’s something I’ve watched grow from nothing into something that helps pay my bills. We play private and corporate parties, public events and marches, and our own shows, and we even have an album planned to release in November! Our craziest gigs include playing to a virtual audience of ninety thousand viewers on Kai Cenat’s stream, taking the stage at Anime Expo and the 626 Night Market, and playing in the background of this year’s SLS Trick of the Year advertisements. Aside from work with BLOW, I also played in Disneyland in the summer of 2022 and with The Temptations and Four Tops whenever they roll around through California.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I touched on this during the “About Me” section, but my brass band, BLOW, is something that evolved out of resilience. When COVID hit in spring of 2020, my musical life crumpled entirely. I moved back to Fresno, to my parents’ house, to my room with a bunk bed and dark blue walls, painted during my childhood to look like a space or Buzz Lightyear-themed room. In that room, I endured Zoom class after Zoom class, feeling like I was committed to a sort of insane asylum. For the remainder of that semester, the biggest accomplishment I made was starting a TikTok account and posting a video of myself every day “Rickrolling your feed until I go viral.” Summer came and went, and I reached an agreement with my parents that I could move back to Los Angeles in my old apartment if I could promise them to be careful with all the nasty stuff going around. That year, my TikTok account really started to take off. But more importantly, a friend of mine, India Anderson, reached out to me one day and expressed what all of us musicians in lockdown were feeling: “I need a group to play with. A real one, not some Zoom, remote-project nonsense.” She and I and a handful of others began rehearsing in parking garages, trying to create literally anything that we could post online and brighten the world with. We managed to land a gig: playing for tips in the parking lot (socially distanced) of the Beachwood Café just under the Hollywood sign. The world began to get safer as the vaccine was introduced, and we started looking for more opportunities to play. We were hungry. We played for tips in Santa Monica at the Third Street Promenade and in bars across LA. BLOW started really pushing to get our brand together and market ourselves as a band worth hiring. India did most of the heavy lifting in this. It’s been a crazy three years of working hard on ourselves, but now we can say that we’ve played for actors, movie directors, high level influencers and celebrities, even as far as being hired by the Polish government! And the best part is, I got to do it all with some of my best friends. It’s fun looking back and seeing how far we’ve come, doing literally as much as we could (not much) during COVID, and now having some of the best experiences of my life with this group.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This next answer might be a little controversial. I actually don’t try to be the best trombonist in the world. That’s something that has taken a lot of working on myself to be at peace with, and I think it’s a very freeing state of mind to be in. I went to a musically intense high school. It wasn’t an arts school, but, for example, we won A/AA/AAA WBA Grand Championships while I was a freshman, and we were invited to Indianapolis for the National Concert Band Festival while I was a junior. It was demanded of us that we give our all to the ensembles we were in. Other schools had fun being in music. We had fun getting good at music. That coupled with my degree at USC, a highly competitive music program, meant that I was forced to be better than everyone around me. If someone was playing better licks than you were, you were left behind. In more recent years, I’ve had a few conversations with friends and fellow performers that regard the intersection of skill and how often you actually get hired for gigs. I’ve learned that there’s a sort of threshold you can get past where people who call others for gigs don’t always need “the best,” they just need someone who is skillful enough to play the part. And when you get past that threshold, there are way more important things to sell yourself with: punctuality, good at working with others, and more. You can be the best player at the jam session, but if you throw a fit at someone else or never show up on time, no one is going to want to be around you, much less hire you. All things considered, I still really enjoy my high school’s mentality of getting really good being the fun part. But that was the only thing that drove me for a long time, and that led to some major burnout and feelings of inferiority. It’s taken a lot of introspection, but learning to be at peace with who I am and where I am in the process has made playing music as a profession more enjoyable for me. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, not even to myself. And ya know what? I think the best gigs I’ve had have all been when I operated under that mindset.

Contact Info:

• Website: michaelneufeld.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mneufeldmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MNeufeldMusic
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MNeufeldMusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MNeufeldMusic
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@mneufeldmusic?

Image Credits
Richard Takenaga, Jimmy Emerzian, Timothy Neufeld, John Brannon