There are no good gigs....

by Minim Pro @ 2010-02-25

Those of you who have been following the last couple of posts will know that I've been discussing my observation that musicians in the jazz genre are often amongst the worst at promoting themselves and their music.

I believe that the blame for this lies at least partly with some misconceptions and negative beliefs in the mentality of the average jazzer and I've been talking about them recently in the hope that musicians will realise that a) they're not alone in the way they think and b) that they can change their mindset and take control of their own musical careers. Catch up on the previous posts on this subject here and here.

Today I want to talk about a couple of often-held but errant beliefs about the way the world views our music and what jazz musicians should expect their lot to be. They could be summarised as this

Nobody likes jazz any more and there are no good gigs

Many musicians are toiling away in obscurity, passionate about jazz but believing that the audience for the music is tiny (and shrinking), most audiences don't understand what they're listening to anyway and that they can't get decent gigs because good gigs don't exist unless you're a megastar. Sometimes statistics seem to back this up. Jazz CD sales are at an all time low, the average age at jazz concerts is increasing and, in America at least, the percentage of the population which has attended a jazz gig in the last 12 months is shrinking.

 

In fact, it's not hard to find gloomy predictions about the future of jazz and the state of the listener and it's also pretty easy to see why jazz musicians can feel like they don't really stand a chance of even getting people to listen to them - never mind making any money. Yet statistics can usually be found to support any claim and you could point, for example, to the huge increase in the number of jazz festivals over the last decade as proof that it's not nearly as bad as some people would have you believe. D C Dowell of apassion4jazz.net says that the number of jazz festivals has increased tenfold over the last decade and jazzfests.net has over 1,000 jazz festivals listed for Europe alone.

As for CD sales, they're going down in every genre and it's hard to find any figures for people downloading jazz, listening to jazz on internet jazz radio or via legal streaming portals like last.fm or spotify. I think it's fair to say that it's practically impossible to know how many people out there are into jazz - and yet assuming the worst is still common. But this is an argument that's not going to be won by logic or statistics. Much of the jazz musician's malaise probably stems from his own experiences - playing an endless round of background music gigs where he is largely ignored or at conservative venues where he feels obliged to play standards in a mainstream style. These gigs often form the majority of his performing life and venues that actively promote jazz seem to be depressingly few in number.

Yet I would argue that there is a reason for this and it is largely to do with the fact that many jazz musicians remain unrealistic about the way the modern musical world works. For the musicians of previous generations, work was plentiful when they were coming through the ranks and even though jazz may not have been as popular as it once was in the '20s and '30s, the demand for live music in the '60s and '70s of all kinds was still huge. This meant that a jazz musician only had to do two things to get work; learn to play and get known on the scene. Unfortunately, those days are now gone and yet for many jazz musicians, going to jam sessions is the only 'self-promotion' that they do. They're clinging to a hopelessly old-fashioned paradigm of the music business and are doomed to failure and frustration if they refuse to change.

To be fair, it's not entirely their fault. Inevitably, learning to play involves asking for help and advice from older musicians and if you ask any veteran player on the scene what you should do to get gigs they'll trot out the mantra above. If their advice on playing is spot on, it can be hard to realise that they're wrong about the career side of things as well. Now don't get me wrong, being known on the local scene is important and I would always recommend being a visible and active member of the jazz community but it's also important to realise that's not enough.

Most of the time, the 'scene' will only deliver the background music/function/restaurant gigs and if musicians want to play venues where people actually listen, they need to make it happen for themselves. For frustrated jazz musicians stuck in the belief that nobody is listening, there are no good gigs and there's nothing they can do about it, realising that the world has changed and accepting that the 'old school' path to building a jazz career has disappeared is the first step to getting out of the rut.

The second step is to realise that there is an audience out there that yearns to hear new and exciting jazz and the reason nobody listens at gigs or just wants to hear the same old standards is not because most people are ignorant and wouldn't know good music if it bit them in the backside, but because the musicians are playing to the wrong people.
http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2010/02/25/there-are-no-good-gigs-8071728/