Ramon Ricker is Senior Associate Dean for Professional Studies, Director of the Institute for Music Leadership and Professor of Saxophone at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. As a senior administrator at Eastman, Dr. Ricker has been instrumental in shaping Eastman’s innovative Arts Leadership curriculum that offers courses on Entrepreneurship and Careers, Leadership and Administration, Performance, Contemporary Orchestral Issues and The Healthy Musician. A full-time Eastman faculty member since 1972, he was the first titled saxophone professor at the school. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Polyphonic.org, an Eastman-sponsored website for professional orchestra… musicians. His association with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra first began as a clarinet soloist in 1972. In 1974 he won a position in the RPO as a member of the clarinet section, and continues to play in the orchestra today. He frequently performs as a guest saxophone and clarinet soloist and clinician in high schools and colleges throughout Europe and North America, and his books on jazz improvisation and saxophone technique as well as many of his compositions are looked to as standards in the field, with over 140,000 copies sold worldwide with translations in French and Japanese. He has performed and contracted the music for hundreds of television and radio commercials and themes, including national accounts for ABC, NBC, HBO and Arts and Entertainment. Throughout his career he has straddled the Ivory Tower and the Real World, and has built a reputation as a distinguished teacher, an effective administrator, a versatile orchestral and jazz musician, a well-known author of books on jazz improvisation and saxophone technique and an astute businessman. He is certainly the consummate “street-wise professor.”