Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Weiss.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My musical story has been a long and somewhat winding one, and I definitely didn’t start out knowing where any of it was going to lead.
I grew up in El Paso, Texas, and music was a big part of my life from an early age. I tried a few instruments that didn’t exactly stick, piano and guitar among them, before I finally found the bassoon in sixth grade. For whatever reason, that was the instrument that clicked. I loved it, I was good at it, and before long I was competing in regional and state-level competitions and becoming more and more involved in music. I picked up saxophone in eighth grade as well, which gave me another way to be involved in bands and different types of music, but bassoon was always the instrument that felt like mine.
After high school, I moved to California to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I was studying City and Regional Planning. I honestly didn’t arrive at college with any real understanding of what playing bassoon in college would look like. I wasn’t a music major and didn’t necessarily think of music as something that would become such a major part of my life.
Then I discovered this entire musical community around me.
I started playing with ensembles at Cal Poly and throughout the Central Coast and suddenly found myself surrounded by some extraordinary musicians. That opened doors to opportunities with organizations including the San Luis Obispo Symphony, Music Academy of the West, Carmel Bach Festival, and the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival, now Festival Mozaic. I was studying city planning during the day while somehow building this completely separate musical life at the same time.
That period really changed the trajectory of music for me. I realized that you didn’t necessarily have to follow one prescribed path to have a meaningful life as a musician. There was this whole world of orchestras, chamber groups, festivals, pit orchestras, freelance musicians, educators, conductors, and people who simply loved making music together. I wanted to be part of it.
When I eventually moved to San Diego, that musical world expanded again. Over the years I’ve played with symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, musical theater pits, community groups, touring musicians and all sorts of other projects. I’ve had opportunities to perform with groups including the La Jolla Symphony, Grossmont Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Philharmonic, Coronado Philharmonia, and many others around Southern California.
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most is that my musical journey isn’t really defined by the list of ensembles I’ve played with. It’s defined by the people I’ve met through them. Some of my closest friendships have come from sitting next to someone in an orchestra, spending weeks together in a pit, rehearsing late at night, or getting called for a random gig and meeting somebody for the first time. San Diego has an incredible community of musicians, and I’ve been very fortunate to become part of it.
I’ve also always gravitated toward the organizational side of music. Since 2013, I’ve served as the Personnel and Orchestra Manager for Villa Musica’s Summer Orchestra and Wind Ensemble, helping bring musicians together and managing everything that happens behind the scenes to get an orchestra onto the stage. I later joined Villa Musica’s Board of Directors, which gave me another perspective on what it takes to build and sustain arts organizations in San Diego.
Then, in 2014, I started the Left Coast Quintet.
What began as a group of musicians getting together to play wind quintet music has grown into something much bigger than I ever anticipated. Over the past decade-plus, we’ve performed weddings, private celebrations, community concerts, corporate events, educational programs, arts events, and some wonderfully unusual gigs. We’ve built a library of hundreds of pieces ranging from Mozart and traditional wind quintet repertoire to Broadway, jazz, pop, movie scores, and video game music.
More importantly, we’ve developed our own personality as an ensemble. I never wanted our concerts to feel stuffy or inaccessible. We want to play at a very high level, but we also want people to laugh, learn something, recognize a song they weren’t expecting to hear from a wind quintet, talk to us afterward, and feel like they were actually part of the experience.
Along the way, I’ve also tried to create opportunities for musicians to connect with one another. I started the San Diego Bassoon Collective in 2016 as a way to bring bassoonists together to play, network, mentor younger musicians, and generally celebrate an instrument that doesn’t always get a lot of attention.
The newest chapter has been taking what we’ve built with Left Coast Quintet and turning it into something that can have an even greater impact. I founded Left Coast Music as a nonprofit organization so we can move beyond simply being a performing ensemble and create more opportunities for public concerts, educational programs, collaborations, and performances that don’t necessarily have to be driven by ticket sales or private-event budgets. I want us to be able to bring great musicians and great music into the community, compensate musicians fairly for their work, and make those experiences accessible to people who might not otherwise encounter live chamber music.
In a strange way, that has brought together so many different pieces of my life. Even my background in city planning and my professional career outside of music taught me a lot about organizing people, building programs, working with communities, and turning ideas into something tangible. Now I’m applying many of those same skills to something I’ve loved since I was a kid in El Paso trying to figure out why anyone would willingly choose to play this weird double-reed instrument.
When I look back at how I got here, though, I don’t really think about individual jobs or performances as much as I think about all the people I’ve met along the way. Some I’ve been making music with for more than a decade. Others I’ve met because somebody called me on a Tuesday afternoon and asked if I could play a concert that night. Those friendships and relationships are what eventually created Left Coast Quintet, and they’re now helping us build Left Coast Music.
I’m still, first and foremost, a bassoonist who loves sitting down in an orchestra, quintet, or pit and making music with friends. I’ve just somehow also become the person organizing the musicians, producing the concert, talking to the audience, serving on the board, writing the grant application, moving chairs, and figuring out what we’re going to do next.
It’s certainly not the path I would have predicted when I picked up a bassoon in sixth grade, but I’m pretty happy with where that weird instrument has taken me.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I don’t know many musicians who would describe their musical careers as a smooth road. Music is an incredibly rewarding thing to have in your life, but it can also be frustrating, unpredictable, expensive, competitive, and occasionally completely ridiculous.
One of the biggest challenges for me has always been balancing music with the rest of my life. I’ve had a full professional career outside of music while simultaneously trying to maintain a serious musical life. There have been plenty of days where I’ve worked a full day, driven across San Diego through rush-hour traffic, rehearsed for three hours, gotten home late, and then gotten up the next morning and done it all over again. Somehow, we musicians convince ourselves that this is fun.
Building Left Coast Quintet has brought an entirely different set of challenges. When we started in 2014, nobody knew who we were. There wasn’t a built-in audience waiting for another wind quintet to appear in San Diego. We had to build everything ourselves: our reputation, our music library, relationships with venues and clients, our website and marketing, concert opportunities, and eventually an audience.
There is also the basic reality of running a professional ensemble. Five musicians have five different careers, families, schedules, other ensembles, and commitments. Finding a date when everyone can perform sometimes feels like the greatest accomplishment of the entire concert. Then you have to find a venue, choose the music, rehearse it, promote the concert, get people into the seats, move equipment, print programs, pay everyone, and hopefully have enough money left over to do another one.
Money is probably one of the biggest challenges facing small arts organizations. I strongly believe professional musicians should be paid for their work. At the same time, I want our community concerts to be affordable, and whenever possible free, because I don’t want someone’s ability to pay for a ticket to determine whether they get to experience live music. Those two goals don’t naturally work together financially, which is one of the biggest reasons I created Left Coast Music as a nonprofit. Grants, sponsorships, and donations give us another way to bridge that gap and hopefully allow us to do more ambitious programming while still paying musicians what their time and talent are worth.
There have certainly been disappointments along the way too. We’ve pitched concerts that never happened, played events where I wished more people had shown up, applied for opportunities we didn’t get, and spent countless hours working on ideas that ultimately went nowhere. One of the things I’ve had to learn is that you can’t let any one rejection mean too much. Sometimes the answer is no, sometimes the email goes unanswered, and sometimes an opportunity comes back around three years later from someone who remembered you.
Another challenge, particularly with a wind quintet, is simply getting people to understand what we are. Everyone knows what a string quartet is. Tell someone you’re bringing a wind quintet to their wedding or event and sometimes you get a slightly confused look until they actually hear us. Part of our job has been showing people how versatile these five instruments can be and that chamber music doesn’t have to mean sitting silently in a concert hall listening to music written 250 years ago. We can play Mozart, but we can also play the Beatles, ABBA, Broadway, jazz, Disney, John Williams, video game music, and plenty of other things people immediately connect with.
Probably the most important thing I’ve learned through all of it is to keep showing up. Keep meeting people. Keep saying yes to interesting opportunities. Keep supporting other musicians and arts organizations. Keep trying things even when you’re not sure they’re going to work.
Some of the best opportunities I’ve had came from something completely unrelated that happened years earlier, or from a musician I met on a gig who later recommended me for something else. That’s why the friendships and relationships I’ve made along the way mean so much to me.
The road definitely hasn’t been smooth, and I don’t expect it suddenly will be. But Left Coast Quintet is still here more than a decade after we started, we’re playing more interesting music in more interesting places, and now we’re building the nonprofit side so we can hopefully make an even bigger impact in San Diego. That’s a pretty good reason to keep going.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
At the center of everything I do musically is the Left Coast Quintet. We’re a professional wind quintet made up of flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon, and we’ve been performing together in San Diego since 2014. We perform public concerts, weddings, corporate and private events, educational programs, arts and cultural events, and pretty much anywhere else someone will let five wind players set up some chairs and start playing.
What we specialize in, and probably what we’re best known for, is taking the traditional idea of a chamber ensemble and having a lot more fun with it.
We have a music library of more than 800 arrangements at this point, and it is all over the place in the best possible way. We play the great classical repertoire written for wind quintet, but we also play movie and television soundtracks, Broadway, jazz, pop, folk music, video game music, Disney, the Beatles, ABBA, John Williams, and plenty of music people would never expect to hear coming from a wind quintet. One of my favorite things during a concert is watching someone in the audience suddenly recognize what we’re playing and seeing that smile appear on their face.
I think what really sets us apart, though, is the way we interact with our audiences. We’re serious musicians, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Our concerts aren’t five people walking onstage, silently playing music for an hour, bowing, and disappearing backstage. We talk about the music, tell stories, make jokes, explain our instruments, talk with people afterward, and try to make everyone in the room feel like they’re part of what we’re doing.
I especially love introducing people to the instruments themselves. Most people have seen a flute or clarinet, but a surprising number of people have never stood three feet away from a bassoon or really heard what an oboe or French horn sounds like on its own. Kids are fascinated by them, and honestly, plenty of adults are too.
We’ve also become very good at adapting to the audience in front of us. A concert at a museum might be completely different from a performance at a senior community, a wedding, an arts festival, or a school. We can play Mozart and Beethoven in one program and follow them with Star Wars, Super Mario, West Side Story, and the Beatles. To me, that’s one of the great things about music. There doesn’t need to be a wall between “serious” music and music people simply love listening to.
What I’m most proud of, though, isn’t any particular performance. It’s that we’ve built something that has lasted.
Left Coast Quintet has been part of the San Diego music community for more than a decade now. We’ve performed all over Southern California, worked with wonderful organizations and venues, and built relationships with an incredible network of musicians. The musicians who perform with us are people I respect tremendously, but they’re also friends. I think audiences can tell when the people onstage genuinely enjoy making music together.
I’m also proud that we’ve increasingly been able to use the ensemble to make live music accessible to the community. We’ve performed dozens of free public concerts over the years, and that mission is now becoming an even bigger part of what we do through Left Coast Music, the nonprofit organization I recently founded.
Left Coast Music is really the next evolution of what we’ve been building. The goal is to create more free and accessible performances, collaborate with other musicians and arts organizations, develop educational opportunities, and help support professional musicians while bringing live music into more communities throughout San Diego. I want to create opportunities where the musicians are compensated fairly but the audience doesn’t necessarily have to buy a $50 or $100 ticket to experience them.
I’m particularly excited about the possibilities beyond just the quintet. Left Coast Quintet will always be at the heart of what I do, but the nonprofit gives us the ability to collaborate with other musicians and ensembles and think much bigger about what we can contribute to San Diego’s arts community.
Ultimately, I think what sets us apart is that we’re trying to remove some of the barriers people associate with classical music. You don’t need to know when to clap. You don’t need to know who composed something or what year it was written. You don’t need to dress a certain way. You don’t even have to think you like classical music.
Just come listen.
If you hear something beautiful, discover an instrument you’ve never heard before, laugh at one of our terrible jokes, recognize a movie theme you love, or leave wanting to hear more live music, then I think we’ve done our job.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think I have an interesting relationship with risk because a large part of my professional career outside of music has been in emergency management, where you spend an awful lot of time thinking about risk, what could go wrong, and how you prepare for it.
So I’m probably not the person who blindly jumps off a cliff and figures out where I’m going to land on the way down. I like calculated risks. I want to understand what I’m getting into, have some sort of plan, and then I’m usually pretty comfortable taking the leap.
Music has actually pushed me to do that quite a bit.
Starting Left Coast Quintet was a risk. There was no guarantee anyone needed another chamber ensemble in San Diego, and certainly no guarantee that people were sitting around thinking, “You know what my wedding really needs? A bassoon.”
We started anyway.
Over time, I’ve put a tremendous amount of time, energy, and my own money into building the group. We’ve purchased music, built an enormous library, created marketing materials, produced concerts, rented venues, hired musicians, and committed to performances without always knowing exactly how things would turn out. Some ideas have worked wonderfully. Some definitely have not.
Producing our own public concerts has probably been one of the bigger recurring risks. When you’re the one putting on the concert, you’re suddenly responsible for everything. You have to find and pay the musicians, secure the venue, advertise, print programs, handle insurance and logistics, and then hope people actually show up. There is always that moment before a concert where I’m wondering whether we’re about to play for 200 people or twelve.
But I’ve also learned that if you’re always waiting for someone else to invite you onto their stage, you’re giving someone else control over whether your ideas ever happen. Sometimes you have to build the stage yourself.
Creating Left Coast Music as a nonprofit was another big step. It would have been much easier to simply continue operating Left Coast Quintet the way we had for years. We had established ourselves, we were performing regularly, and we had a model that worked. Starting a nonprofit means taking on a completely different level of responsibility, including fundraising, grants, governance, building a board, developing programs, and figuring out how to make the organization sustainable for the long term.
But I also realized that if I wanted to do more than just book the next gig, I needed to take that risk.
I want us to produce more free community concerts, hire more musicians, collaborate with other arts organizations, create educational opportunities, and bring live music into places where people might not otherwise experience it. Those things require resources and infrastructure that go beyond what a small performing ensemble can realistically do on its own.
I think one of the biggest risks in anything creative is actually putting your ideas out there. It’s very easy to talk yourself out of something before anyone else ever gets the chance to say yes. I’ve certainly done that before. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become much more willing to send the email, submit the proposal, call the venue, apply for the grant, introduce myself to someone, or suggest an idea that might sound a little crazy.
The worst thing that happens most of the time is someone says no, or even more commonly, doesn’t respond at all. You move on.
And every once in a while, someone says yes.
Some of the most interesting things I’ve gotten to do in music started with one of those yeses.
So I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a huge risk-taker. I think I’m more of a calculated risk-taker who has become increasingly comfortable betting on the things I believe in. If you care about an idea and you’ve done the work to give it a reasonable chance of succeeding, at some point you have to stop planning and try it.
I’d much rather look back and say, “Well, that didn’t work,” than wonder for the next ten years what might have happened if I’d tried.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.leftcoastquintet.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/leftcoastquintet
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/leftcoastquintet
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandiegobassoon/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@leftcoastquintet-sandiego
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/left-coast-quintet-san-diego-5
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/leftcoastquintet
