Brass Mash Member Deep Dive: Kai Easley
Sometimes, life can be kinda hard. Other times, life is easy! And we are so lucky to have Kai Easley playing trombone with us in Brass Mash! Kai is a Cal Poly student, studying statistics as well as contributing his fantastic sound to the Cal Poly symphony. Besides being an incredible ensemble player and soloist, Kai also serves as our lead intern who trains other students the setup and breakdown procedures for before and after our shows. This is so important - help from the interns allows us all to be able to get home sooner after gigs.
Please enjoy getting to know Kai a little better. He’s a real cool cat and his trombone playing is out of this world!
Year joined Brass Mash: 2022
Current favorite mashup: One of the talk-box feature ones, “Just Evacuate.”
How did you come to join Brass Mash?
I sat next to Ben [Kerr, trumpet player] in the Cal Poly symphony. One day after rehearsal, he asked me if I was interested in joining this group. He sent me a link for the YouTube so I could check out the group. It looked super cool and fun, I said I was down to join the group. My first rehearsal was the week of the January Liquid Gravity show.
Tell us about your first Brass Mash gig.
I did forget my music. I got a little confused - I heard there was going to be a set list at the gig. In my head, I thought that the set list was going to be more music. I didn’t know that the set list was just a list. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think about my first gig…Thankfully there was the back-up iPad, so Colin just gave me the iPad and I read off that during the gig. He’s prepared for stuff like that, so it was all fine.
It was a great gig, too - super fun. It was my first time playing with the group for a show. I’d rehearsed with you guys earlier that week, but the show was different. It was performance energy, and it was super fun to perform with everyone for the first time.
Aside from that… I remember a couple weeks after that was the Tamale Festival. It was at night, super cold, and raining. That one was fun, though.
Share one core Brass Mash experience.
Usually I just think about how fun the group is to play with. Everyone in the group is super cool, super fun to play with, everyone is super talented. It’s fun to perform the music and the mashups, listening to the mashes intertwine, and seeing the crowd’s reactions. Seeing that they’re happy and excited to be listening to the music too. We’re super engaged in the music we’re playing, but the crowd is also very engaged in what we’re playing. It’s just a super fun experience for every show.
Recent shows have made me think that crowd surfing is one of the core experiences that I’ve had. I just wasn’t expecting it! In February, I was looking down at my music, I look up and there’s one or two people getting tossed in the air! It was totally unexpected. I remember in Bree’s last show [Aug. 2023] I suggested she go out with a bang and suggested crowd surfing. And now we can actually do it!
Just getting to play music and perform shows with everyone…everyone in the group is fun to make music with. Every opportunity we get to play together is so much fun. [Me: Yeah, the comradery has been so strong.] Band chemistry!
