Thomas Hojnacki

"I've had some astonishing teachers over the years. One of them, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, who worked with Ray Charles, was a formative influence when I was a teenager in Detroit. He really explained swing articulation to me one night so that I got it, and that made all the difference to me. He was also very encouraging, and to be encouraged as a young person by someone that legendary gives you the courage to pursue music."

"My whole career as a professional musician has been about playing diverse styles of music. I've been fortunate enough to have the kind of training that lets me move pretty easily from one kind of style and performing group to another. So when I teach harmony, I try to show how much of the harmonic structure of music is the same from one style to another. The things that differentiate styles are often superficial."

"I often give my students the form of a tune and a specific chord progression and ask them to pick a key and write their own piece—to choose a style and create a rhythmic motif that will serve as a basis for the melody. It always astonishes students to hear all the stylistic diversity that comes back into class from the same chord progression. Students get three things from this project. First, they're working hands-on with the material in creating their own piece; second, by hearing the same chord progression over and over again, and having worked with it themselves, they learn to hear it and recognize it in other music; and third, they begin to appreciate the stylistic diversity that's possible from the same harmonic font of possibilities."