Something Else Reviews
(Full interview at the source)
PRESTON FRAZIER: Adam, tell our readers about your musical upbringing.
ADAM LARSON: I grew up in a very musical household. My mother is a trumpeter and in her 32nd year of teaching as a junior high school band director, and my father is a drummer who taught for 11 years as a band director before moving into a career in computers and IT in 1993 when my sister was born. My father and I played together every weekend from the time I was 13 until I left for college at age 18. My first instrument was drums at about age 7, and I quickly became uninterested after I thought the pinnacle of drumming was having the ability to play-a-long with the then-smash hit single “MMMBop” by the boy band Hanson. I was much more interested in basketball and sports. I also played piano from around the same time, until about age 12. I hated piano and decided I wanted to spend more time practicing saxophone. My late grandfather, Jack Larson, had been paying for my piano lessons because it was something that he never got to do when he was a young kid — a kid during the depression — and I remember calling him from the piano in my parents living room and asking him if he would be willing to allow me to use the money to take saxophone lessons and he enthusiastically said “That would be just fine!” I chose the saxophone because I had narrowed it down to trumpet, drums and saxophone when I was 11, and I had no interest in taking direction or lessons from either of my parents and he had a spare alto lying around the house so I thought, “What the hell!,” and started playing in 5th grade.