Music Historians
Marilea Zajec and her husband Victor became the historians for the Midwest Band Clinic and over the years collected and wrote of the importance of the annual events impact on music education around the world. Victor attended the first program in 1946 and Marilea’s first Midwest was as a performer...
Dominic Milano played an important role in the history of the music products industry as editor of Keyboard magazine beginning in the 1970s and into the 1980s. It was Dominic’s article of MIDI that first shed light on the inner workings of the development of MIDI and the issues that faced the...
Mark Vail has preserved some of the music products industry’s greatest history as author and researcher of a series of publications. In 1993, BackBeat Books published Mark’s landmark book Vintage Synthesizers. Four years later the same publishers released his The Hammond Organ: Beauty in the B....
Yukio Sakurai studied photography and art at the university in Tokyo before his uncle asked if Yukio would come to work for him. His uncle was the founder of the Japan Music Trade Magazine and Yukio was very interested to work in the music industry, which in publishing required his training as an...
Paul Johnson formed one of the early surf bands in Southern California during the golden era of instrumental music. As a guitarist and songwriter, Paul performed and recorded in the days before the Beach Boys, when it was common for an instrumental recording to be on the Top Ten lists. Over the...
John Boylan is best known as a hit-making record producer working with Charlie Daniels, Linda Ronstadt, Boston and the Little River Band. In addition to his successful career, John has a passion for the history of electronic and recording equipment. He has studied the roots of recording gear and...
Dr. Ruth Lion’s late husband, Alfred Lion, was the founder of Blue Note Records. Together they played a colossal role in the documentation of jazz throughout most of the 20th century. The long and impressive list of artists they recorded and promoted reads like a Who’s Who of Jazz including Monk...
Walter Carter along with his wife, Christie, formed Nashville's "friendliest guitar store" when they opened Carter Vintage Guitars. With a last name so well known in country music, you can understand why a beautiful painting of Mother Maybelle Carter adorns the outside wall of the building. The...
Sam Hinton was a national treasure. It seems appropriate to use that term when talking about him because he become an important and invaluable preservationist of some of our nation's greatest treasures, folk songs. Sam spent many years traveling the backwoods of this country in search of...
This audio only interview was conducted for a radio program by Dan Del Fiorentino and donated to the NAMM Oral History program: Warren Vaché Sr. was a jazz bassist and author whose son, Warren Vache Jr., is a noted jazz cornetist. Warren started out on drums but was asked to switch to bass as there...