Terry Gross

So did they give you a sense of what to expect, you know, if you lived the life of a musician?

What were you able to figure out?

And what is the oath?

When you said you thought musicians should take a Hippocratic Oath, I thought it would be, you know, first do no harm.

And that would be something like never perform boring works again.

I have a conducting question, I mean a stick question.

You studied classical stick technique.

How much of that do you use now and how much of your technique is based on what you've learned and improvised over the years?

You were very close to Leonard Bernstein.

Do you feel like you learned a lot about conducting technique from him?

You were on the road with James Brown once, right?

So did you learn anything you could apply?

So did it change the way you conducted at all, or the way you organized your beat?

Your grandparents were stars of the Yiddish theater, Boris and Bessie Tomaszewski.

And well, I think your grandfather died just a few years before you were born.

Correct.

In what, 38 or 39?

And you say what, 30,000 people attended his funeral?

That's extraordinary.

Did you grow up thinking that you literally had show business in your blood?