David Fish:  

This is from the bio of my college's website. I'll try write something more personal when I can: Chair, Music Department / Associate Professor of Music / Director, Music Business/Popular Music Concentration / Coordinator, Music Technology A native of Tucson, Arizona, David Lee Fish began playing saxophone at the age of eleven. He continued study of the instrument at Western Michigan University with Trent Kynaston, earning there both the Bachelor and Master of Music degrees. After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a saxophonist and music copyist and worked for such clients as Don Ellis and CBS Television. As a saxophonist, Fish has also performed with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Louise Belson, Cher, the Temptations, and the Miracles and has appeared at the Montreaux Switzerland Jazz Festival. Fish strayed from jazz in his early twenties and developed an interest in popular music that had begun with his experience playing with funk and rock bands while still in high school. He taught himself how to play guitar and worked the coffeehouse and club scene as a performing songwriter in San Francisco. From California, Fish returned to Western Michigan University as an adjunct instructor of music. While there, he was selected to take part in an National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on traditional Japanese music taught by William Malm at the University of Michigan. This led to his study of ethnomusicology under Malm and Judith Becker at Michigan, where he earned the Ph.D. in musicology (1994). As part of his studies, Fish conducted fieldwork on Shinto festival music in Tokyo for three years during the late 1980s. In Tokyo, he studied shinobue flute, taiko drum and Japanese lion dance with Taneo Wakayama, Professor Emeritus of the Tokyo National Conservatory and fourth generation leader of a troupe of Shinto performers honored by the Japanese government as one of that nation’s Important Intangible Cultural Assets. In 1995, Fish received a research grant from...Expand for more