#TOWER OF POWER HOW TO#

Everybody wants to bring their A-game to help the collective and that’s all the time. “You gun up, you get on stage, and you put it out. “One thing about this band is that, even if someone isn’t feeling up to snuff, it doesn’t matter,” says keyboardist Roger Smith, who has been with the group since 1998. All through high school in a jazz band, listening to jazz and other types of music with horns and horn sections.” Adolfo Acosta. I had no idea what jazz was, but that changed my life. When I got to 7th grade, I heard the junior high jazz band at assembly. It wasn’t easy and it still isn’t easy! But it was fun, and I really enjoyed it. “We got to choose one and I wanted the trumpet because it looked easy: just three valves. “I was in 4th grade and we the opportunity to play an instrument,” he recalls. Trumpeter Adolfo Acosta is actually one of the few bandmembers who started out on the instrument he plays in the group. It was only when that didn’t work out that he discovered the joy of drumming. Garibaldi initially wanted to play trumpet, but found himself practicing violin instead because his elementary school band had run out of trumpets to give out. Kupka, for example, started on oboe but switched over to baritone sax in his college years because he wanted to play rhythm and blues. Sal Cracchiolo.Ī number of other ToP members report starting out on a different instrument than the one they’re best known for. But not Cracchiolo, who discovered the trumpet when he was 12 years old and quickly fell in love with the sound of the instrument. Someone with a lesser musical inclination might have given up at that point.

#TOWER OF POWER HOW TO#

I learned how to read music before the alphabet.” Nonetheless, he soon decided that piano was not the instrument for him … and neither was accordion, or violin or drums. Both of were music teachers and they me on piano at 4 years old. “My parents said I used to sing all the time when I was a newborn. “They say that we don’t pick music, music picks us,” says trumpeter Sal Cracchiolo, who joined the band in 2011.

“We were all friends and we partied together, but we were all out there trying to outdo each other.”Īll these years later, Tower of Power is still together, celebrating their 50th anniversary and still trying to outdo one another every time they take the stage or enter the recording studio. “We all hung out together,” says Castillo. We were making it up as we go along - kind of like what we do now!” “With Tower of Power, it was all in,” he adds. And the Bay Area musicians were this mix of all of this.” “There was music of every possible type in your ears at all times,” he says. Garibaldi is still amazed at the amount of musical diversity that was going on at the time. A couple of years later, fortified by the addition of drummer David Garibaldi and several other musicians, they formed the legendary band Tower of Power … and they’ve been going strong ever since.