{"id":30313,"date":"2025-10-01T00:11:01","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T07:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/?p=30313"},"modified":"2025-10-01T16:48:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T23:48:53","slug":"mackenzie-leighton-handles-the-bass-ics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/mackenzie-leighton-handles-the-bass-ics\/","title":{"rendered":"Mackenzie Leighton Handles the Bass-ics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mackenzie Leighton. Photo by Michael Oletta.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The decision to take a gig playing bass on a cruise ship didn\u2019t have the career implications a young Mackenzie Leighton had hoped for\u2014but it did end up shaping an even more important part of his life.<\/p>\n

When asked how he became a professional musician and teacher during a recent interview, Leighton explained, \u201cI started gigging in high school and the phone never stopped ringing.\u201d After a few seconds, he added, \u201cThe only conscious decision I ever made was to work on cruise ships. Before I even played the bass, when I was in eighth grade and playing trombone, I always thought that I would be going to college, and then play on cruise ships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having visited France while in high school, Leighton already had his passport in hand as he approached graduation from San Diego State.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was wrapping up my final semester of college, I did a a little video audition with an agency, and then I flew to Australia for a cruise ship.\u201d\u00a0That first cruise did teach him more discipline, he said, than he\u2019d possessed before.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first was a little cocktail trio. We played five hours a night every night for the entire duration of the contract. It was kind of jazz, ballroom dance, and a little bit of pop thrown in. It was cool because when I was younger, I wasn\u2019t much of a practicer. I wasn\u2019t the guy to sit in a practice room for six hours going at it.<\/p>\n

\u201cEd Kornhauser\u2019s reputation is that he\u2019s always doing a million gigs, and he was already doing that when we were in college. And I just wasn\u2019t that organized. I didn\u2019t even have a calendar\u2014I didn\u2019t have that side of it together when I was in college. But when I was on the ship and doing the gigs, I learned how to do gigs. I missed the driving to new gigs every night, but I got lots of hours of playing in, learning new tunes on the fly.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Leighton with Irving Flores. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

While on a cruise, the musicians are scheduled to play seven days a week with no nights off, Leighton said. Each contract was usually between three and four months, and then when the contract ended the cruise line would fly him home from whatever port he was in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did a whole summer in Alaska, and so they flew me home from Vancouver. I always tell people if you\u2019re unsure about cruising, Alaska is the one to try because you can gain more from seeing the sights from the ship than any other cruise.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would do cruises to New Zealand out of Sydney. I\u2019ve been to every continent except Antarctica.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leighton said that after spending four years working cruises, he decided to get a master\u2019s degree, so he could teach, which might make for a more balanced life.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s fact that he met the love of his life on one of the cruises\u2014and she was not a fellow staff member.\u00a0\u201cI met my wife on a ship. She was a passenger; \u00a0we got in a lot of trouble,\u201d he said, laughing at the memory.<\/p>\n

STARTING OUT
\n<\/strong>\u201cI was born in Minneapolis; my parents are both from there. They moved out here when I was seven. The company my dad worked for opened an office out here. I think they jumped at the chance to get away from the Minneapolis winters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leighton is an only child, and so he had no older siblings to help him navigate popular music while growing up in Coronado.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember going to Sam Goody with my dad and got Victor Wooten\u2019s A Show of Hands <\/em>and Jaco Pastorius\u2019 self-titled album.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Leighton with joshua White. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Leighton said he ended up being more interested in the Pastorius album and feels that probably shaped his subsequent interest in serious jazz. As far as playing music goes, he took up trombone in middle school. He doesn\u2019t recall why he chose the trombone but said he took private lessons in Coronado from Dirk Koman.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Koman] is a trumpet player who had a really methodical teaching method that sort of ended up setting me up. A lot of it transferred over when I picked up the bass.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you play a brass instrument, your embouchure and your lip muscles have to stay in shape. What he\u2019d do is we\u2019d work on other fundamentals while we were doing that. The way the trombone is set up, you have a chord in each of the positions, so you\u2019re learning music theory while you\u2019re learning technique.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said both of his parents were very supportive of his music. His mom had played in the school band as a child and on top of that, \u201cI was getting into some trouble when I was 12, but when I got into music it really focused me, and my parents saw that it was good for me and so they were supportive.\u201d<\/p>\n

After three years of playing trombone in middle school, Leighton suddenly switched gears. \u201cI borrowed a friend\u2019s bass the summer before high school. He\u2019d had it but was tired of it. Basically, I locked myself in a room and figured it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

That fall, he began classes at the Coronado School of the Arts, which he described as \u201ca separate program on the campus of Coronado High School. The arts students would stay on for extra eighth and ninth periods focused on arts curriculum: music, theater, visual arts.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It was here that his enduring friendship with pianist Ed Kornhauser was forged. Leighton said he started out on electric bass before learning the double bass around the age of 15\u2014and admitted that going from the fretted neck of an electric bass to an upright bass, with no frets, was a challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was pretty tough for awhile in the beginning. I still remember very clearly trying to play the bass line from \u2018A Night in Tunisia.\u2019 I couldn\u2019t play it; I had a little skill on the electric bass, but I could not make it happen on the upright. Ed Kornhauser teases me because he remembers my saying, \u2018I\u2019m going to quit upright bass.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI started taking some classical lessons from Erik Johnson; he\u2019s not in the symphony, but he plays a lot of freelance classical stuff around town. We were getting in with the bow and getting the intonation together. A typical electric bass has a 34-inch string; a double bass has a 42-inch string, so the notes are going to be further apart.\u201d He said Johnson taught the positions using bass method books, written by Franz Simandl (1840-1912) , a double bassist from Austria Hungary.<\/p>\n

Leighton also pointed out that there are actually more notes on a double bass. \u201cAn electric usually has 24 frets, or two octaves. An upright bass can usually get past that\u2014a little bit more range, although most people aren\u2019t playing up there that often.\u201d<\/p>\n

LEARNING
\n<\/strong>It was during high school\u2014and through school connections\u2014that Leighton first got paid for a performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe played at an unveiling of a new fountain at City Hall. And at 15 or 16, I played in the orchestra for some musicals at City College.\u201d<\/p>\n

But music wasn\u2019t yet set as his professional path.<\/p>\n

\u201cI enrolled at San Diego State as a music major. But I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted music as a career. I was taking a geography class and liking it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Leighton with Ed Kornhauser.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Leighton changed majors but kept music as his minor and kept his seat in the SDSU jazz band\u2014but his bachelor\u2019s degree is in geography. It was at SDSU that he fell in love with jazz as well as the upright bass.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt probably took me at least a year to sort of decide I want to really get my head around jazz,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad is a huge music fan\u2014a big Stones fan, Bob Marley, Springsteen. And even though he never listened to a lot of jazz until I begin playing, for some reason he had some Thelonious Monk records when I was growing up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got into jazz through Jaco. Probably at first more through admiration for his chops more than anything, then realizing the guy had insane musicianship. Then I started branching out, listening to Mingus Ah Um<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In high school, a few of his fellow students were into jazz, but at SDSU he was surrounded by music students who were heavy into jazz. \u201cDoug Walker and Harley Magsino were grad students, and I was blown away by those dudes. Being in that environment with people who took it seriously was motivating.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was at SDSU for nine semesters\u2014seven out of the nine. I was in Bill Yeager\u2019s band, called the A Band or just the jazz ensemble. We just called it the A Band.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leighton said the only two semesters he wasn\u2019t in the band were his first and last. And he described the ensemble as a typical big band, with 17 or 18 pieces, depending on who auditioned.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was often but not always a B Band, and the way they did it at SDSU in the first week of classes was that everybody auditions, and then they piece together bands based on people\u2019s skill levels and class schedules.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring my last semester there was a geography class I HAD to take in order to graduate. The conversation telling Bill, it was like disappointing your parents.\u201d<\/p>\n