Sort by Price: The Value of Artistic Expression

An inability to assess the real value of something leaves us with no other recourse but to evaluate it against something more familiar. And in a world where speed is a virtue, the idea of stopping to smell the roses (long enough to assess value) sounds more like a cliché than a practical habit. Therefore, when you can’t ascertain the value of one thing over another, a race to the bottom where the lowest price wins ends up being the deciding factor.

One of the realities of freelancers is that we don’t scale, as only we can do the work that we do. Therefore, we must either trade a ton of time servicing lots of clients/customers, or we must work to obtain a smaller number of better clients/customers who have more income and a palette for the work we do. And the most tried and true way to cross this chasm has always been to market what you do for the smallest viable audience you can, as they’ll distribute all the heavy lifting among themselves to connect you to others that share their aesthetic. What’s great about this is that you don’t have to over commit both your time and resources to mass marketing strategies, as that would negate the idea of reaching the smallest viable audience. So once you determine who your audience is (i.e. people who share your beliefs), then you go all-in on talking to these people about what you do, and why they might care. Now I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight this one extra perspective, as I think it’s one that’s often overlooked.

When you think about the popularity of sports over the arts, it’s because there are a number of media outlets where practitioners of a sport have been allowed to control the narrative of their sport. And even if someone has never played a sport, they can still learn to interpret the game in a way that connects them in an authentic way to the tribes of people who actually play those sports, due to their understanding having been informed by credible sources. But when it comes to something like music, most people’s understanding of it is informed by people whose insights aren’t as well developed as that of a professional athlete giving commentary on the sport that they play. So when you compound the obscurity of this type of analysis towards music, coupled with the lack of exposure that people have to watching and hearing world-class musicians (which isn’t always synonymous with being world famous), there should be no wonder as to why there’s such a giant discrepancy between our collective imagination of what it even means to be a professional athlete versus a professional musician. So again, without the requisite understanding of what makes high level music what it is, why would the public have any other reason but to apply a sort-by-price metric to the music they choose to consume?

Suggested Takeaways…

a) It’s arguable that throughout the history of the world, all great civilizations have been weighed more by their artistic contributions as opposed to the strength of their military or GDP. So to increase the premium on our focus for high level forms of artistic expression could really shift the way we all connect to one another across cultural, political, and religious isles.

b) Developing a personal relationship with the smallest viable audience you can for your product and/or service, presupposes that that audience will tell others like themselves about you and what you do so that it gives them yet another reason to deepen their relationships to one another (i.e. tribalism).

c) If you don’t control your narrative, someone else will.

How to Land a Gig

In paraphrasing Quincy Jones, the day I learned to draw a line in the concrete between music and the music business, it too was the beginning of the rest of my life. So while “music” is the art of creating music, the music business is the art of selling music. And if you don’t understand the terrain of the latter, then you’re DOA, as we’d say in the military.

Now like the military, you don’t win battles when you lack knowledge of the terrain you have to navigate. And as it stands, there are many aspiring music professionals whose dreams of a prosperous future are being led to the slaughterhouse because they’re not being briefed well enough on what the rules of engagement will be once they deploy their skills in the “real world.”

Within the battlefield of Jazz, regarding how musicians monetize their efforts, those battles have always been waged on three fronts: small venues, education, festivals. But in all actuality, small venues and the education system have always been the bedrock under which this music has maintained its relevance in society. But for the working musician, the battle is really fought in the small venues throughout the world. So with that said, let’s take a look at what that looks like for securing a gig as both a leader and a side musician.

Leader

The first thing you need to know is that for many small-business owners, it took them getting a loan from a bank (or several) to open their doors. And for many of them the most readily available piece of collateral they had to secure their loan with was their home. Therefore, by definition, someone’s business is in effect a second residence for them. So when you reach out to a venue owner to ask for a gig in their “house” before rapport is built, it can send a message to the owner that your relationship with them is purely conditional. Meaning that, if there’s no opportunity on the table to perform, then you’re not going to be a loyal supporter of them and their establishment. So what may feel like a sterile business interaction to you, may be taken personally by them (depending on their temperament). So if you don’t come correct, you might get put in the “friend zone” without ever knowing it. And 90% of the time they’ll never be transparent enough with you to tell you this, thus leaving you to continue scratching your head while you watch everyone else get the performance opportunities you want. So as John C. Maxwell always says, “you have to ask for a heart before you ask for a hand.”   

Side Musician

There are two ways that you can go about getting a gig with someone, and both present their advantages and disadvantages.  

Narrow: This means you’ve keyed in on one or more particular people whose band you want to join. So the way to approach this is by learning their book of music SO WELL that you leave them no logical option but to hire you; or at least open other doors for you and them to work together in another capacity. The upside is that you’ll know exactly how to invest your practicing. The downside is that you might not get hired, thus leaving you to possibly feel like all that work was for nothing. However, like exercising, there’s never really a downside from doing it.

Wide: This means that you’ve taken the time to learn as many songs as possible across a wide array of genres. The upside is that you’ll probably become employable across the widest demographic there is. The downside is that it may take longer to develop a depth of understanding within any genre of music, due to having to spread yourself so thin. And if you’re starting this process as an adult who’s trying to live off of performing, you may find yourself skimming over many important musical details in order to quickly get your name out there as someone who’s worthy of being hired.

Suggested takeaway’s….

a) Business IS personal. So when you approach someone about a gig in their venue, your approach should be to figure out how to bring more value to them and their business FIRST. After all, they have what you want, not the other way around!

b) Just like getting a gig at a venue, the best way to show that you care about a leader and their music is to show up to their gigs. By doing this, it’s a show of how committed you are to learning their music the right way. So not only do you get to hear how the songs are to be played, but you also get to develop rapport with the leader in advance.

c) If you want to develop a reputation for being a super well rounded musician, then the best way to do so is to go to as many shows around town as possible to get a sense of what constitutes a “standard” in your area. After all, what’s the point in learning a bunch of songs that you can’t play with anyone in your area. So just like learning someone’s book of music, you can apply the same concept on a regional scale.

As always, leave a comment to let me know what you agree or disagree with. So let’s talk soon!

The Jazz Dilemma: What is it, and why might it be worth talking about?

Back when MySpace was at the forefront of the social media race, an old college friend used to have a profile tagline that read “I’d rather be relevant than famous.” However, it could be argued that those who are famous are indeed relevant, as the energy behind and frequency within our conversations about them make them so. When we talk about them, I believe what we’re really engaged in is the exercise of either reinforcing or questioning the framework of our own values, but at a safe one-arm emotional distance. And more importantly, who our values seem to align with, and how we ultimately feel about that. Therefore, it can be argued that the sliding scale of a person’s relevance is tied to the amount in which we think we might benefit from having a conversation about them. So if you believe that relevance can be equated to usefulness, then this begs the question of “what is Jazz and why might it worth talking about?”

As we’ve already seen, and continue to see within the styles of Hip-Hop, Rock, R&B, Pop, etc., they provide the public with more obvious ways of incorporating their perceived value (for better or worse) towards their everyday lives, as it gives people content to converse with, sell stuff with, and share within the realms of fashion and speech patterns—all of which are just cultural symbols that people deploy to make it easier for other members of their “tribe” to identify them within crowds. That said, let’s take a quick look at one of the most pervasive forms of music to come about in roughly the last 40 years: Hip-Hop.

It has been said that never in a time throughout the documented history of music have large contingencies of people (especially the youth) ever chosen to identify themselves as being specific products of a musical movement like they do with Hip Hop (i.e. “I am Hip Hop,” “I live Hip Hop,” “I eat, breath, and sleep Hip Hop”). Now granted, during the formative years of Rock & Roll, and even Jazz for that matter, we find that it was also the youth who rallied behind these two movements as well, as they found that they could use certain aspects of the music as a means of validating, to varying degrees, the energy behind the types of opinions they held. However, the power of Hip Hop—which really has to do with America’s long-standing fascination with anything associated with black male youth—is that its aesthetic is now just as interwoven into the everyday fabric of our society as is Starbucks and Nike. So how does this relate to Jazz you might ask? With the way that Jazz is generally marketed and presented these days, coupled with an ever increasing audience that has no significant history of having tried their hand at playing music of any kind at a high level (unlike with sports), the public’s relationship to Jazz is generally one of indifference. However, when people do think about some Jazz that they may have liked, it may have been related to a vocalist, as this is one “instrument” that we’ve all tried practicing behind closed doors. And to further prove my point about the public’s general feeling of indifference towards Jazz, is that their point of consumption is usually within public spaces where the volume is low enough to talk over, thus further conditioning them to regard it as a piece of interior decoration that doesn’t require much of their attention. A perfect example of this would be when the Grammies had Esperanza Spaulding, of all people, performing as background music immediately following her upset over Justin Bieber for “Best New Artist” in 2011 while they made their announcements about the next artist to receive their awards. Could you imagine them having asked Jay-Z to perform while they announced the next award recipient? Clearly, the answer would be no. So as you can see, what Jazz needs is a total branding overhaul, where the public is taught how to interface with it like what has been done with the more popular genres. But in order to do so, it would need to be done in a way that still reflects the hidden values that have helped to sustain Jazz up until this point. So the first step in re-branding this music appropriately lies within an understanding of what it even is in the first place.  

            The word Jazz, like any other style of music, is merely a marketing term. No more, no less. After all, real musicians put their energy into trying to play what they hear, not what to call what they’re playing. It’s also important to remember that the word Jazz had already been in circulation before it was ever attached to a sound. So a fair etymological definition for Jazz would be that it’s a term that was used to describe popular American music at the turn of the 20th century, whose roots can be found in both the Blues and Ragtime music. And whereas the Blues is more akin to an African-American sensibility towards early “American” folk music, Ragtime is more reflective of Western European Classical music and its residual effects upon the types of early Marches that were composed by people such as John Philip Sousa. However, the important piece of connective tissue between the Blues and Ragtime is the application of the black aesthetic on both. Hence, when you combine these two styles, and run them through an early black filter, what you get is a distilled version of the type of Jazz that people such as Louis Armstrong helped champion. So while this information is all well and good, the question still remains as to what, if any, might be the usefulness of Jazz on our society and the world at large?

            The answer to the above question is that Jazz, like sports and politics, is just another structural model that can be used to evaluate the democratic nature of relationships. So when you learn how the instruments function independently and collectively, a mirror suddenly appears that allows you to gain some insight into how either you or someone else is being. This is no different than how we can use fashion, food and drink choices, speech patterns, and choice of vocabulary as a litmus for how either we or others may be thinking and feeling at any point in time. In fact, I tell people all the time that even when we talk, we’re engaged in Jazz improvisation, as the words we use have to be relevant to the conversation, because if the goal is to build upon a set of ideas, then what would be the point of using words that few people can comprehend? That’s like talking to a baby about the stock market. What’s the point? So when I’m performing, I’m just using ideas that I already have a handle on. But it’s how I string those ideas together that will either attract or repel you from the “conversation.” In short, since listening comes before comprehension, and comprehension comes before action, then just like martial arts, Jazz is the human practice of creating a continuous sequence of appropriate moment-to-moment decisions, so that when it’s all said and done, you can look back with pride for the choices you’ve made.