Our Introduction to ASMAC - The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers

Though some folks remember this differently, it was Amy "Aizhou" Liu and Blythe Schulte who connected us to ASMAC. I knew early on that they were on the Social Media Committee, and one day they took the initiative and made an introduction.

(Side story: Once I received a call to ask if I was a part of that committee, and I didn't really know why. Because you needed a minimum of 35,000 followers. I had eight or nine.)

We were heading toward our big Virtual Conference, and Amy and Blythe set up a Zoom with one of the Board members, Milton Nelson. About twenty minutes before the meeting, Amy called me to tell me that half the Board was showing up, so be ready. And on that day, about fifteen or so zoom squares popped on. I didn't know any of them.

A Saturday Zoom session with the composers joined by ASMAC's Gayle Levant and Charles Fernandez, and trombone mentor, Ric Becker.

I pitched Inception to their Board, with the idea of becoming the high school education wing of ASMAC. The meeting was successful, and Milton said he would find someone to take a spot at our conference, where we would feature ASMAC as the main attraction of the day.

ASMAC was also in the middle of running their amazing slate of virtual workshops, and November 7th happened to be the day they were bringing in Michael Giacchino ("The Incredibles", "Spiderman", "Star Wars: Rogue One", "Lost", etc.) So we put ASMAC in the 4:00 pm slot when their session would presumably be done.

Karen clearly hustled that day, because just before 4:00 pm. all of these professional musicians she had talked about logged on to our conference. We had the most number of attendees for the ASMAC workshop.

I asked Gigi Johnson, UCLA Center for Innovation, Music Department, and podcast host, to be the guest moderator of the session. Amy and Blythe were also participating, and I was the last panelist.

I can tell this story now in 2024 because this person and I are now friendly.

Apparently, the ASMAC speaker had just gotten off a plane. In hindsight there was speculation that this person had taken a sleeping pill, and then upon arrival in Hawaii, had a glass of wine.

It was bad. (Imagine a 2924 rambling Trump speech.) Without getting into specifics, this person managed to offend our Board Chair, the parents of several of our highly religious students, and Dr. Gigi Johnson.

Karen and Maksim Velichkin were at my apartment motioning for me to cut this person off, but I could not as this was our first ASMAC collaboration. Amy and Blythe were stunned silent, Gigi and I slogged through it.

That was a lot of music industry players' introduction to Inception -- very weak. And that was Inception students' introduction to ASMAC -- even weaker.

The first call I got the next day was from ASMAC Board member Charles Fernandez. And then President Gayle Levant asked to see the video. She quickly wrote a letter of apology to Gigi.

Chuck and Gayle crashed the next Saturday session to tell the kids about ASMAC. Gayle and Milton agreed to redo the panel so that we could use this as the ASMAC/Inception collaboration video from the conference as it went out. Gigi moderated the follow up panel.

Please click on the video below for the video of the complete panel.