David Silverman: Sketches and Sonatas

This week on The Stereo Image, Mike sits down with his old friend David Silverman. He's an Emmy-winning director and animator on The Simpsons, and the artist behind every one of Mike's album covers, and he joins Mike for a wide-ranging conversation about how a childhood spent poring over miniature orchestral scores turned into a lifelong love of the tuba, jazz, and everything in between.

David traces the whole arc: hearing "The Rite of Spring" in middle school, working backwards through Stravinsky and Shostakovich to Bach, borrowing an unused school tuba over one summer, and following that horn through marching band, a trip to Japan, Preservation Hall, Burning Man, and decades of sitting in with musicians in New Orleans. Along the way, he tells the story of his own path from teenage caricature artist to The Simpsons to Pixar, and how playing music alongside people like Pete Docter and Bud Luckey finally helped him understand chord theory.

It's a conversation about curiosity, craft, and the strange, winding way a life in music actually gets built.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: How Mike Met David Silverman
• 4:44 Discovering Music as a Kid
• 5:43 Growing Up in a House Full of Art and Ideas
• 8:06 Piano Lessons That Didn't Quite Take
• 10:18 The Rite of Spring and a Turning Point at 13
• 13:40 Working Backwards Through Music History
• 17:23 Shostakovich, Copland, and Isaac Stern
• 21:07 Finding His Way to the Tuba
• 24:00 Why the Low Instruments? A Brief History of Brass
• 27:06 How Adolphe Sax Invented the Saxophone
• 29:18 Preservation Hall and the School's Forgotten Tuba
• 32:04 The Visual Side of Music: Scores as Art
• 34:36 Sleeper, Tommy Johnson, and the Tuba's Sense of Humor
• 37:31 College Bands and a Trip to Japan
• 40:24 Becoming "The Band Cartoonist"
• 42:38 Caricaturing the National Symphony Orchestra
• 46:17 UCLA, Animation, and the LA Times
• 48:27 Learning Jazz and a 12-Year Tuba Gap
• 49:39 The Simpsons, DreamWorks, and Pixar
• 51:20 The Pixar Band and Finally Learning Chords
• 54:12 Burning Man and the Burning Band
• 55:48 New Orleans, Jazz Fest, and Preservation Hall Friends
• 57:55 The Music Behind His Animation Work
• 59:40 A Cigar Club and a New Band
• 1:03:17 Wrapping Up (For Now)