I would like some advice.

[JohnStacy]

EDIT: Please don't say "Move somewhere else."  I can't do that for another year at the earliest.

I live in a small town outside of Amarillo, Texas called Canyon.  For reference, Amarillo has about 200,000 people, canyon has about 30,000, so it's not that big compared to say Houston, LA, New York or any other large city like that, but it is big enough to have 4 high schools, a professional symphony orchestra and choir, a 4-year state university, and other things like that.  However, the music scene is also the size you would expect from a city this size.  Due to being in Texas, country, Tejano, and pop music are king, meaning that even if the quality isn't that good, people will eat it up just because it's the music they are used to hearing.  There is a slightly smaller rock scene, which is still very popular, but jazz, which is my area of performance is very small.
Because of this, there are a few small jazz ensembles that play around the area for private parties and bars, I'm in one of them, and the other is pretty well established in the area.  I am thinking of leaving the group I'm in, but am hesitant.

This group is virtually the only performance opportunity I get currently.  The gigs I get with this group are nice and can pay one or two bills, but I am worried about staying with this group.  For one, the leader is, let's say in a different place than he used to be, and has a history that has yet to follow him here, and if it does follow him I'm worried that the association will kill my professional reputation.  For another, the group is very disorganized.  The biggest part is that we aren't a specific type of band.  In one 4 hour gig, we will play some Frank Sinatra, some 1950s Jamaican pop music, some American pop music from the 2010s and later, some 1940s swing, some Beatles, etc.  The problem with this is that although we are a jazz instrumentation (piano, bass, guitar, drums, 4 wind instruments, and a singer), we play all these different styles on the same set, and most of it doesn't work because we aren't a rock band playing music in rock style, or a world music band playing music from around the world, we're a jazz band modeled after the swing bands of the 1940s trying to play all those styles in their original forms with no arrangement (basically trying to take these genres and literally shove them into a shape that they don't fit).  We don't generally have rehearsals, just show up at the gigs and play, using chord sheets which just have the chords of the music.  No words, no melody, no nothing.  Which, despite the fact that the 2 "leader" wind players (myself and a saxophone) are adept jazz musicians and the other two are less experienced (one is a community college student and the other is a Mariachi player who can somewhat do jazz), it ends up that we have 4 people just noodling and playing random stuff that sounds too busy.  Any attempts at using written out arrangements have failed due to the singer changing them enough that they can't be used anymore during performance, so most of the time it's like...okay we know what key we're in, but other than that it's a complete wildcard what will actually happen in performance.  This has led to many performances that to somebody who knows anything about music sound horrible and are an embarrassment, but since we play to crowds of people who literally don't know anything about music, they're like..."wow this sounds amazing."  Ex members of this band, including one of the founding members actually can't get hired on their own at the venues we've played in because of the reputation they've gotten from the group, which is bad because for some of them, music is one of their main sources of income and their market is shrinking.

I have tried to start my own group, doing a more specialized kind of thing, where we do something like Postmodern Jukebox, but I can't get good musicians without paying them, and I can't get hired to play anywhere because the places have never heard the band perform, and because of that it's a cycle that is really hard to break.  As I am now I can't afford to pay them without a place hiring the group and paying the group, which is how a lot of things work around here to begin with.  For the most part, people think they want jazz, but then when actual jazz is playing, they ignore it or are annoyed by it (which is a consistent thing with the band I'm in now), but when we do pop stuff from today, even if it sounds bad, suddenly people are like..."wow this band is really good and I want to dance to this."  Which is great.  They like that kind of music.  I am not the kind of musician that does that.  I'm not a guitar player, and don't have time to learn guitar well enough to produce a quality performance on it due to going to school and having a job full time.

I also feel like I'm not being pushed at all.  I'm not getting any kind of challenge, nor do I have to think to play these gigs.  There's very little musical reward because the performances aren't good, there is no arrangement value, and most of the time I can literally play whatever I want and nobody will notice.

The OCRemix community is about as big as the town of Canyon where I currently live.  What do you think I should do?  Should I leave the group and try to form my own group again, basically biding my time until I move away from this area in a year?  Or should I just power through it and just deal with any reputation problems that come from association with the group leader and name?  I'm a little hesitant because although the performance experience is not rewarding, challenging, or otherwise worth it at all, I'm scared to go a whole year without any performance opportunities.

Thank you for reading this.

 

[The Nikanoru]

A musician once told me that 'the only problem I have with working with other musicians is working with other musicians.'

From my own experience, I have found that like dating, finding musicians of like mind and drive is like looking for a soul mate - it's not something that you can just go out and get, it just sort of happens, usually due to opportunity and circumstance. Being in a smaller town certainly doesn't help either; less musicians means less opportunity to meet new musicians. That being said, if you are determined to make this happen in the live scene in this town, then you're probably going to have to put up with some of the ... shall we say idiosyncrasies of other musicians in your area.

IMO, starting your own band/group sounds like the way to go, but would you consider being a little less specific with your genre? This is probably why your other band was all over the place musically; everyone wanting to play different things leading to chaos on the set list and no one motivated to fix mistakes on songs they don't care about. As leader, at least you control the message of the band overall; you may find yourself playing boring, easy stuff for some of your mates, but you might find more people willing to 'play ball' that way. Plus, if you are playing to the audience, then it has to be music the audience wants to hear. If they don't like what they are hearing, start looking for what they ARE listening to - perhaps you can find some sort of compromise.

You also strike me as someone who takes their musical skill and performance very seriously. In my experience in the local scene, most musicians go on stage to have fun, not improve performance; that's what practice is for. If you aren't feeling challenged by what's on the sheet music, why not focus on your improv/soloing skill? Or perhaps some more elaboration on the fills? I've had some of the most fun ever on stage just jamming to some random four-chord progression and everyone getting a turn noodling over top of it. Amazing some of the music that comes from it too! Or, you could try writing some of your own music, or changing your parts a bit to give you a bit more of a challenge or...

Long and short (TL;DR version): If you're gonna stay in the town, you gotta work with what you got. OCR has taught me to embrace the diversity of musicians, no matter where they are at - maybe the folks in your area are just looking for the right pitch (also no pun intended).

I hope this has helped in some way. Good luck, @JohnStacy - if all else fails, there's always collabs on OCR!

[Thirdkoopa]

I'll explain more to it on text when you're on but TL;DR: You can't do this to yourself John and you know that. I mean you can, but the benefits are sparse. The only benefit I got from that whole thing is more of a stockholm syndrome.

[JohnStacy]

Thank you for your thoughts.  I appreciate your sincerity in what you write.

 

Quote

IMO, starting your own band/group sounds like the way to go, but would you consider being a little less specific with your genre?

I'm a little confused by this.  I'm not being specific with my genre that much, because jazz is extremely wide to begin with, including swing, Latin, funk, and many other subgenres.  One of the things I keep seeing is that you need to be a group that does something well and then can venture off, and the reason this band doesn't work is because it's a bunch of jazz musicians being told by their leader to play all these different songs from other genres by just giving us chord changes and nothing else.  A lot of those genres don't work with a live brass section unless it's arranged that way.  If all the brass players are just making up a part, it doesn't work coherently.  If I were to just do jazz stuff, then it's people who are doing what they're good at drawing from an already impressively large body of music that is designed to work with this instrumentation.

It's also that I'm not wanting challenge by the music to improve as a musician, that's not my goal.  I play it for fun too, and enjoy playing.  It's what I want to do for my living because it's so much fun.  But when you're playing the same lick over and over and over, and that is not even fun to play, also referring back to the main problem of this band is that we aren't just jamming on stage, we're noodling to create our own parts and it doesn't work.  There are solo opportunities, but it needs organization.  There's no lack of effort to fix mistakes here, we legitimately don't know what our mistakes are beyond "hey that didn't sound good."  Models for this kind of thing are Postmodern Jukebox and bands like that that are strictly jazz ensembles that play pop music, which is what I think we're trying to be but can't do that because of lack of arrangements.  If I started my own group, I wouldn't do hard stuff just for the sake of being a challenge and improvement.  When you have musicians playing at their level and they can put a lot into it because it isn't just solid whole notes or the same lick over and over and over, that enthusiasm comes out in the performance and the audience enjoys it better.

Sorry if it seems like I'm picking apart your advice.  It has, however, given me a new perspective and a new way of looking at it that is encouraging.  Maybe I am wrong, and I am driven in this group by improvement and not playing for fun, and maybe I need to just roll with it.

Thank you for your thoughts.

[djpretzel]

Well, I'm not a musician, I don't perform, so take my advice with a grain of salt or three:

• If you're not being challenged & you're not growing from the performance opportunities, is it really that much of a risk/loss?
• That being said, if you know these folks & have a relationship, I'd try to assert yourself, propose some changes that would make the whole thing better (seems like having arrangements would be a good start!), volunteer to put in the effort to make these changes happen, and see if you get anywhere.
  • If you do, great!
  • If you don't... do you want to be a part of something you know is fundamentally flawed but which resists any efforts on your part to address those flaws? I'd tend to say no... in which case, maybe commute to Amarillo and see what's happening there, meet some new people, go on some adventures, etc. until something clicks?

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I've been down this road, not with Jazz music but rock and it's why I eventually stopped with "bands" altogether. To be fair, I always enjoyed the composing and recording stuff a lot more than performance

but I feel my thoughts are much in line with Nikanaru's:

Most musicians have absolutely no interest in learning even the fundamentals of music. If you ARE someone who actually cares about it and wants to always keep learning, finding even just ONE other like-minded individual is considerable task. From my teens into early 20s, I kid you not, I must have jammed with around 100 different musicians and only a few come to mind who could play to a click, understood chords, scales, modes and have a good ear for pitch. 

It's my observation that a successful band is one that is NOT a democracy. Everyone should know their place in the band, focus on filling that role and not everyone has equal say. If you're the songwriter (or guy picking the covers), that's your job. The drummer is there to play his drums and he BETTER do it in time. The bass player isn't there to noodle around while you're rehearsing or pitch her song ideas; play your bass and shut up.

What I would do, is start your own band and scope out the best players you can find. If the singer shows up and starts changing the arrangement (and he'll change to something that doesn't work) fire his ass. Drummers that think they're too good for a click track? Don't hire them. Guitarist that can't improvise worth a damn, but insist on it? Tell him to either stop, get good or you'll replace him.

Bands I've met who work together well and get things done seem to always work this way. There was a local metal band I liked and I was talking to the singer once about the band's process and what not and she just said "I just show up, sing and go home."