Why I was Kicked out of NCW
I thought this website would be up a fair bit longer before I wrote something like this, but because of recent events that have happened, I feel the need to make this. As of 07/23/2026, I have been kicked out of North County Winds, which is a community band in the Poway area of San Diego County that I first joined back in 2023. It’s part of the San Diego Music Consortium. The reasons for me being kicked out are total BS, but they are so egregious that I feel the need to write about them. I’m going to call out one specific person for this (maybe a few others in the future), and that man is a trombone player by the name of Stephen Johnson, though he goes by “Steve”. I’ll be going over a lot of events that happened, so do your best to comprehend all of this.
WARNING!!! STRONG LANGUAGE AHEAD!!!
Steve is a trombone player that a lot of people in San Diego County are all too familiar with. He’s an incredibly annoying person, and he’s not a very good player. Some of the things that make him annoying:
He talks all the time, and he loves the sound of his own voice. Conversations with him are better referred to as “lectures” by him.
He loves to give people unsolicited advice about their playing. Whether it’s someone warming up before a rehearsal, or someone making a slight mistake during a rehearsal, you can count on Steve to run his mouth and critique people like that all the time.
He’s old; he’s retired. The reason why this matters is because if he was a young guy having all the problems he’s having, you could at least blame it on a lack of experience. I’m not saying that excuse is valid for someone to use, but it doesn’t even exist in his case.
He loves to force his way into conversations; in particular, there were many times where I’d be having a one-on-one conversation with someone else, and my body language very clearly indicated that it was a closed conversation (ie. facing the person I was talking to and away from everyone else). He would regularly come up to me during times like that and stare at me like a weirdo. He’d try and chime in to give an unsolicited opinion from time-to-time.
If you want a simple way to think of Steve, I think most people would describe him as a “narcissist”. I have a problem with that word because I believe that many so-called narcissists don’t actually care about themselves and are just trying to cause as much damage as they possibly can, but I’m not going to fight anyone over the terminology they decide to use. To put it simply, I believe that Steve Johnson has bad intentions; whatever word you want to use (narcissist, psycho, nutcase, wackjob, etc.) doesn’t matter to me. DISCLAIMER: I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has bad intentions, but I will give evidence and explanations for why I believe this.
Before the start of a North County Winds rehearsal, Steve comes up to me to talk. The reason why he wanted to talk was because I switched sections since I was preparing for an audition on another instrument. Steve says this to me as an opener (paraphrase) “Did I piss you off?” That’s such an awful question to ask someone, so I decided I would just answer honestly; I told him “Yes”. He then responded “Why?” I know a bait when I see one, so I just didn’t answer that question. He tried asking it a few more times, and I continued to ignore it. He then started talking about random stuff, and as I’ve said before, he just can’t stop running his mouth, so he continued to talk for a while before going back to his seat.
Because he asked, I decided to send him an email about why he annoys me. That email looks like this:
In this email, I was incredibly blunt about my opinions on him. In particular, I made it clear NUMEROUS TIMES that I don’t believe he has good intentions. I point this out because any regular person who is accused of having bad intentions would have a vested interest in proving said accusation wrong, especially if the person who accused them is someone who they think highly of. Steve has said in the past that he likes me. However, Steve isn’t a regular person, so he decided to do something very different when I accused him of having bad intentions.
After this email, Steve would consistently make passive aggressive remarks towards me whenever he saw me in rehearsals. He would purposefully try and talk to me even though I made it clear that I didn’t want to talk to him. When you hate someone but have to see them on a regular basis, I firmly believe that the mature response is to just ignore the person, which is exactly what I did. Steve decided to aggravate me, and I firmly believe he did it on purpose. I told him that I don’t believe he has good intentions, and HE STILL TRIED TO TALK TO ME. That makes me convinced that he was purposefully trying to get a negative reaction out of me.
Some time after that email, he sends me this one:
In case you don’t understand what’s wrong with the two emails he sent me: regarding the 1st one, if he had said everything and just left out that last sentence, then there’d be no issue. That’d be a perfectly fine and cordial email that I’d have no problem responding to. As usual, he has to be passive aggressive, but he puts all of that passive aggressiveness into that last sentence. He’s being disingenuous by pretending that my only issue with him is his playing. If we go back to my first email, I criticized his playing because of a bigger issue: HIS UNSOLICITED ADVICE that he gives to others about their playing. After I call him out on his disingenuous statement, he then proceeds to play stupid in his 2nd email. In case you don’t understand this, he pretends that he wasn’t passive aggressive in his 1st email and says that he’s “Just reaching out.” I call him on his BS, and he doesn’t have a response to that.
He continues to be passive aggressive towards me before and during rehearsals; he continues trying to intrude into my conversations, he continues to pretend that there’s no bad blood between us, and he just shows no remorse for all this petty crap he’s been doing. On 07/16/2026 before a NCW rehearsal, Steve did some absolutely abhorrent stuff. What he did is summarized in this email I sent after that rehearsal to a party that will remain unnamed (technically the next day since it was past midnight):
The most important part of that exchange is when he shouted this at me: “GO F$CK YOURSELF! YOU CAN KISS MY @SS! YOU’RE A COCKY SON OF A B1TCH!”. That’s definitely an odd way to talk to a guy that he said he supposedly liked. You can virtue signal all you want about the language I used against him, but I was honest with him about the fact that I didn’t like him.
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from everything I’ve said so far: don’t ask Steve Johnson to play trombone if you need a trombone player. He’s an awful person to work with, he’s not a very good player, and many trombone players I know don’t really have anything good to say about him.
Getting Kicked out of NCW
On 07/23/2026, I get a call from a board member for the San Diego Music Consortium (the umbrella entity that North County Winds falls under) who tells me that the board has decided to kick me out of the group. I ask why they decided on me and not on Steve; I was told that Steve resigned. Whether or not that means he’s no longer section leader or he left the group completely wasn’t made clear to me, and I didn’t ask for clarification. I was also told that they were made aware of the first email (04/06/2026) and some other materials; what those other materials are is unknown to me. I also was not told how much the board knew about the situation; I don’t know if they knew of Steve calling me a “Cocky son of a b1tch!” They didn’t tell me who made them aware of the first email; I assume it was Steve, but that is only conjecture on my part.
Keep in mind that the board DIDN’T EVEN ASK ME ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED. They just decided to kick me out of the group without talking to me, save for the one member who delivered the news. After the call, I received this email:
They decided to label the language I used in my email as “threatening”. I would say that’s disingenuous, but they did make it a bit vague (I assume on purpose) because threatening can imply several things. However, I firmly believe that most people would say “threatening” implies physical harm, which my 1st email definitely didn’t do. I’m sure you can take a few guesses as to what they meant by “threatening”, but that doesn’t change the fact that they didn’t specify. Them saying “It also elicits fear and a sense of hostility…” is also disingenuous because I stated explicitly that if Steve didn’t talk to me anymore, he wouldn’t have anything to worry about. And in case the board can’t figure out what “anything to worry about” means: I’m referring to how he wouldn’t have to worry about being recorded.
After this email was sent, I sent an email to Vince Hernandez - the director of NCW - saying this:
“I have to ask:
What'd you want me to do in that situation? Let Steve walk all over me like he does to everyone?”
Naturally, Vince didn’t respond. I followed up with a 2nd email:
“So no response is your response? Good to know...”
Summary
Which leads us to where we are right now. Let me give a brief summary of everything that’s happened.
Steve Johnson, a trombone player who is notorious for being an awful person and someone who’s not a very good player, starts giving me serious problems and asks me what he did to annoy me.
I send him an email that lays out in plain language some of the things I find annoying about him and what I believe about him. I don’t believe he has good intentions, and I tell him that he needs to fix his behavior and/or stop talking to me.
He then regularly engages in passive aggressive behavior towards me during rehearsals engaging in the “activities” that I told him I found annoying.
He sends an email to me and just has to be petty during this email. I call him out on his pettiness, and he plays stupid and pretends to not understand what I’m talking about.
During a later rehearsal, he comes up to me to continue his passive aggressive statements; we have a useless conversation (as every conversation with him is), and then he cusses me out.
The board for SDMC (which has authority over NCW) is made aware of the situation. How much of the details they possess is unknown to me except for the initial email.
They decide to kick me out WITHOUT EVEN ASKING ME ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED. I wasn’t told who they talked to, so again, I don’t know how much of the situation they are aware of.
I’m called by a member of the board who lets me know that I’m kicked out of the organization. They send an email to confirm said statement.
I email the director of the ensemble about what he expected me to do in a situation like that. He doesn’t respond.
Closing Remarks
All of this is to illustrate why I can no longer recommend for anyone to join this ensemble. If the ensemble is going to kick out a musician as competent as me - someone who is well liked by almost everyone for being a relatively easy person to get along with and being a really good player - because of another person who is not held in high regard due to his poor playing abilities and his even worse personality, then this is an ensemble that shouldn’t be taken seriously. You can argue that this is an isolated incident; that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a HUGE screw up on the part of the leadership of NCW (again, I don’t believe all of them agreed with the decision, but a majority did), and it’s an error that should not be forgotten.
If you are thinking about joining this ensemble, let me just say this: DON’T.
