You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Get Gigs at Good Places - #52

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

Peter and Adam discuss ways to get and keep a gig at good venues. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to talk about how to get gigs at good places. I'm all yours. Okay. Now, this is a question from Joe from the Facebook group, the Jazz Piano Studio group. What's up, Joe? What's up, Joe?

And so it's interesting how to get gigs at good places. I'm thinking great places, spectacular places, basically not bad places, right? Right. Okay. So how do we do that? Well, step one would be to actually sound good. So that you fit in at the good place.

That's true, right. Yeah, no, no, joking aside, have it together, have your music together. Don't, you know, if you're trying to get gigs anywhere, good place, great place, crappy place. Yeah. You have your music together, if you have your playing together, if you have a sound, a concept, other good players, all of these things help in getting gigs in good venues. Is that kind of like the dress for success concept? Very much so. Yeah, or just like, you know, if the content that you're submitting to the venue isn't good, why would they ever book you?

Right, right. And then I think it has to be, you know, you want to be at good places, but they need to be appropriate places for you. Totally. And for your group. Also very important. For your music. Now, that doesn't mean it needs to be typical or, you know, it can't be an unexpected place. Like maybe you have a vision for your, you know, jazz string quartet with, you know,

vocal ensemble and you're thinking about the atrium at the art museum. You're a visionary and you see how that that could work. Maybe they don't know that. That could be a great thing. So you're going to need to kind of talk them into it and explain your vision on it, which is fine. But I mean, just make sure it's appropriate to your music and that you can kind of visualize yourself succeeding in that kind of situation. You know, like I love classical music and I used to play a lot of it. I haven't been playing much lately, but I want to get back into it. So I'm going to do some classical gigs in the next few years. But I can tell you, the first gig is not going to be

a solo piano recital at Carnegie Hall. It's not? No, I don't think so. I mean, the verdicts, you know, not that I would love to do that, and I would prepare as much as I could, but, I mean, I want to go to where it's appropriate to my level and kind of where I'm at with my classical journey right now. So it's going to be like, you know,

next to the indoor pool at the local YMCA playing for some old ladies as they swing laps, and we're going to work our way to Carnegie Hall. Just the Chopin Nocturn, these old ladies do. Hey, it's good things. Swimming. Good swimming music, man. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Well, our next tip is to, and this really applies if the venue that you want to play is near you, but that's to patronize that venue, to go there and see shows, to get them know the people that run it, that book it, that own it, that work there. You know, make yourself known. Put your face out there. Right. It's very helpful to build these relationships with people so that they know that you're not

an insane person that wants to try to book a night of. music at their venue. Right. And so notice that Adam said patronized the venues you want to play. He didn't say patronize the venues. I knew that was going. But that seems to be done more often than patronizing. So like patronizing would be, well, it's a little slippery slope because I don't even exactly know what it means, but I think I do know what it means. But that is to kind of come in and be like, oh yeah, this is, I'm above this or I own this. Why aren't you giving me this? You owe me this. Is that correct? It's close.

I'm in the ballpark now. In the ballpark, okay. Yeah, so make sure that you're coming in an appropriate way. And then, you know, for different venues, if it's maybe a little bit above your pay grade now, maybe for you as a leader, think about, you know, going and not only getting to know the venue, but get to know the musicians that play there, maybe you can get on as a sideman so you can kind of learn and develop and get yourself to that position. So maybe I could get like the third piano chair with some Eastern European orchestra that's playing a concert. next year at Carnegie Hall, where it's just a nice, easy part, and then I'll work my way up to the second, and then I'll eventually solo. Is this whole episode about your Carnegie Hall appearance? It's my Carnegie Hall journey. Oh, good. Now it's an appearance. I'm excited. No, I think that is

very important. So, you know, it's almost like this with any aspect of the music business or just business life in general, but it really is all about, you know, the relationships that you build, And the only way to do that is to make yourself known to the people who need to know who you are, whether that's the musicians or the bookers or the owners. I like the musicians thing a lot. I think there's a lot of work to be had in building relationships with musicians who are playing at the places that you want to play. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much, you know, for me, the gigs that I've gotten over the year as a leader, They've almost always come out of some relationship I had with another musician, maybe subbing for them first or playing in their band, and then they got to see me.

But then you have to kind of put yourself out there to certain points. Hey, look, I've got my own project here. Yeah, I got the solo piano classical project, Carnegie Hall. I'm just throwing it out there. I'm just throwing it out there. So now the next thing I want to talk about on this, and I don't know if we've talked about this, Adam, this is a little bit controversial. So feel free to disagree or agree as it were. But that is to, you know, if there's a really good.

venue that maybe you're having trouble getting in, maybe go to the owner or the booker or the proprietor and offer to shoulder some of the promotion, if not all of the promotion for your gig, at least for a certain time period. Yeah, I understand why this would be controversial, but I'm a big believer in give the people no choice that you're trying to impress or that you want to book you. You know, give them no choice, make them realize that like, oh yeah, like, of course I would book this band because they're going to bring in a lot of people and they're going to be awesome. Yeah.

Like, you can never go wrong by promising to make people money. Well, you can go wrong if you don't make them money. I shouldn't say promise, but to show people that you can make them money. Yeah, right? To demonstrate that...

Show them the pathway, at least. Right, exactly. Demonstrate that you have the ability to at least, you know, communicate this project and to help put butts in the seats. I mean, that's no brainer to me. Yeah, and I think, I mean,

the flip side of it, playing a little bit of devil's advocate is that a lot of musicians would say and adopt the attitude that, well, that's the venue's job is to promote the gig. Our job is to sound great and to work on our craft. And that's true, but it's a little bit of an old-school way of thinking, and it's not that realistic to how things work today. And I would also say that, yeah, it's a little bit more work that we have to do to promote the gig,

but the advantage to that is that we can control our audience, have a little bit more of a direct relationship with our audience, which has not even been that possible to do until the last 15, 20 years anyway. And then if that club or venue goes out of business or change ownership or something, you can go get another gig and bring your audience. And you've got the leverage actually now because you're connecting directly with the audience as opposed to the venue controlling the audience. I mean, don't you think it kind of depends on the venue for this kind of stuff? Like my wife and I have had this argument for 15 years because my wife works in restaurants. And sometimes she would work in restaurants that have bands.

And she would always want to hire bands that would bring in a big crowd to the restaurant. And I'm like, but it's a restaurant, you should be hiring the bands to entertain your, like you don't hire the chef because he's going to bring in all his work buddy. You know what I mean? Right. Like, that's not how that works. But on the other hand, if people are buying tickets to see a concert, you know, you have to be able to sell tickets. Like, yeah.

And in this day and age, just like you said, there's so many tools for promotion that we can rely on ourselves that we almost don't need them. Like, honestly, sometimes I don't want them doing it, the venues doing it. I'd rather do it myself. Yep. Because I know I can frame it in a way that is more honest to me and will hit people I know like my music. Right. You can control the messaging.

That's why I told Carnegie Hall for my solo classical recital. Don't put the poster out. Don't put it in the New York Times. I am going to send all my people in email announcing this concert. I will take care of it, all right? This guy's been in the classical scene for two minutes. He's already a pro. Yeah.

But I mean, I think back to – and I think this also needs to be appropriate to the place you are in your career. And it's not even necessarily by age. It's just kind of, you know, there's times when we're hungry and you'll do anything. And I think, like, generally that's a good thing. And I look back on, you know, at times when I was super hungry, just wanted to play so much, I'd be willing to do anything. Some good things actually came out of that. I mean, when I was first in New Orleans and was in my early 20s, I had a trio with, you know, two of my best friends at the time, Christopher Thomas on bass, Brian Blade on drums.

A couple slouches then. A couple slouches. And, like, we played all this. I mean, like, we would get up in the morning and rehearse and then, like, play chess, go to the coffee shop and then go rehearse. We were rehearsing. We were the most rehearsingest trio that had no gigs ever. That's dope, though. Yeah, we were just, like, rehearsing.

And so once we got an opportunity to do a gig, we actually were doing gigs for free. Like, we told the club owners in New Orleans, we're like, we'll just do a gig. We still had to talk them into it. They were good venues, though. Let me listen. Think of that. Think of Peter Martin and Chris Thomas and Brian Play doing free gigs. Yeah, and then not only that.

Nothing to complain about it. We did free gigs. But this is the thing. There were good venues, like with a good piano and stuff. Like, they were listening. You knew they were going to present you well. Yeah, and that's really all we cared about it. Yeah, we wanted to make money and needed it.

But we were like, I don't know, we didn't really have, I mean, we were getting some other gigs. But we wanted to play as a trio. Yeah. And having that audience is valuable. Right. And so we, like, I mean, we went to a great club that I ended up playing for years, and then they promoted me and paid me for many years. But I started out, this is Snug Harbor.

Yeah. We played every Tuesday night for a whole summer. I think this was 91. It was either 90, no, it was 92. It was 92. And the club had actually kind of changed ownership and was even closed for a while. And we played the opening night. They were trying to reopen and they had no money.

I mean, like, they knew that the club was in a good location and that it could do something. But they literally had no money. And the owner was a great guy, George Brumatz told us at the time, he's like, I'd love to have you, but sorry, I don't have any money. We're like, we'll come play for free. He's like, no, I feel bad. We said, no, we'll do it. And then he's like, I don't know if anyone's going to come because we're going to reopen,

but no one thinks we're going to be able to open until next week. So we said, we'll make flyers, and he helped us make the flyers. He copied him for him. And we'll ride around town. We're on our bikes. And we rode around town. Yeah, yeah, we're like putting up signs. Gig tonight, free.

You know, Peter Martin, Brian Blade, Chris Thomas. And we played the gig. And it was, I'm so glad we did that because that led to us playing the next week. And then we played every Tuesday night. And then we eventually started doing weekends. And we played with, you know, Germain Basel. And we did a lot of gigs. They came out of that.

And we built up our audience there. And he rode that gig all the way to Carnegie Hall. All the way. I'm so close, so close. Anyway, you'll hear it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello. You can do that. Absolutely. All right. And if you like what you heard, please leave a review and a rating below. Thanks.