James Zimmermann

And that's what was about to happen in his blind audition.

He was the last man standing after days of difficult competition.

But accidentally, we found out it was him during deliberations.

And our conductor and the rest of my colleagues who are on this blind audition panel said, oh, I don't want to play with this guy.

What do we do?

And the conductor says, all right, we're going to declare this a no win situation.

We're going to send him home and we're never going to speak of this again.

And I said, over my dead career, can you do that?

So I took a stand against the conductor and all of my colleagues and said, we are going to march back into the conductor's office and tell him how despicable that decision was.

And we're going to give this black oboist a chance to prove himself.

And we did that.

He crumbled.

The orchestra management hired him unilaterally with no vote of his colleagues.

So he can now never say that he was hired based on our qualifications, our vote.

He was stamped a DEI hire forever.

And when I protested, he made up a Jussie Smollett-like narrative about me that I was a stalker and a racist and a nasty person and a white supremacist.

Well, then they gave him another probationary year so he could prove himself and prove that he was going to get tenure.

That's maybe a piece of the detail that you were missing.

After a player wins a blind audition, they're typically given a one-year probationary contract where the player is evaluated on whether or not they're a good fit.

Because a blind audition doesn't tell you everything about somebody.