[Dixielandjazz] Too Many musicians, not enough gigs

[Elazar Brandt]

Shalom Steve,

Obviously I did not pay adequate attention to who started this thread. I have no
argument with you. Indeed, your posts have given me many ideas and motivation to
take my band to new places and try new things.

I was responding to the complaints of many of our colleagues, that incompetent
musicians or amateurs or people who make noise rather than music are stealing
the lion's share of the market from the real musicians, i.e., us. Well, that's
probably true. In a perfect world, there would be many more Shakey's Pizzas and
jazz clubs and New Orleans restaurants, all of them paying top dollar for good
or even not so good trad-jazz. But that's not the planet we live on.

One thing that we do that some of my colleagues might take issue with is that we
will take gigs for any reasonable pay. We have a pay scale that we start with,
but we would rather have the gig than not have it, and we also would rather play
gigs with 4 or 5 of us making $100 each than with 2 of us making $250 each.  If
we price ourselves out of the market, then we end up playing mostly on the
street, where we're lucky to make $25 each and sell a couple of CDs in a similar
amount of time. Of course, we play the street too, for publicity and to gain
experience. Eventually we will command the $250 each for the whole band, but we
feel that we need to earn it. We have new players and a relatively small
repertoire, and we still have some cooking to do. We also have relatively little
overhead, no PA equipment, no vehicle, etc.

Yesterday we played for a bar mitzvah of the son of one of our local radio
personalities. He hired us after hearing and seeing us on the street. In
attendance were a host of other radio personalities, one of whom has worked with
us before when he was the MC of an awards ceremony at the Hebrew University, and
we provided the music. We played well, had lots of good comments, and we'll see
what comes from it. Lately we've been getting a lot of good gigs.

In short, if one loves to play the music and wants to make a living at it, just
get out there and play for whoever will listen. You have to start somewhere. The
rest will come with time and some hard work.

Elazar
Doctor Jazz Dixieland Band
Tekiya Trumpet/Brass Ensemble
Jerusalem, Israel
<www.israel.net/ministry-of-jazz>
Tel: +972-2-679-2537




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve barbone [mailto:barbonestreet at earthlink.net]
> Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 4:38 AM
> To: dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Too Many musicians, not enough gigs
>
> Dear Elazar:
>
> Sorry for the confusion. The premise is that that are not enough gigs for
> the amount of musicians that are out there driving cabs, working in
> MacDonald's etc. I did not mean to suggest that fewer musicians would create
> more gigs for those that are left. No doubt the law of diminishing returns
> would result in even less gigs if there were fewer musicians because those
> remaining musicians would not do much to develop any more.