Seven months ago, my wife and I moved from NYC back to Los Angeles, where we both grew up. I could have squirted out a sappy letter to the city and lamented the inevitable lower-quality jazz here in LA and everywhere else. I could have sliced off a blistering takedown of my NYC-musical discontents despite the city's prestige. Or a post that would boil down to "times are changin'...". But nothing came.
"It won't be the same without you."
It will! That's kind of the point of New York: get the best people together so that if you lose one or two, your scene persists. The scenes intermix and the top people blast the ceiling off what you think is possible.
The basic formula still works. New York is a city of masters. But the margin for error shrinks every day and meanwhile the chicken-and-egg problem of so-called talent grows.
"How do you make it in New York?"
"You have to be good."
"How do you get good?"
"Move to New York."
The open secret was always that the city provides ways for hustlers to scrape by even at low income levels, despite all the glitz and flaunty wealth. But there are limits. Good luck pushing your monthly expenses under $2,000 per month: that's twenty $50 gigs and ten $100 gigs. Yeah right! Not enough calories in a drink on-the-house and complimentary baby carrots...
My solution was always "day job." So too for many peers. Music can survive on nights and weekends. But we demand more than dormant survival from the tip of the spear! Music blossoms when its roots have time and nutrition to take hold. Maybe it's an uncomfortable truth but many musicians are at their best living princely lives, as if supported by aristocrats with only a sprinkling of deadlines and "real life." Rich parents play this role in more cases than anyone admits. Your own personal aristocrat!
Long overdue: the admission of just how bourgeoise jazz is. How irrelevant it feels like music has become! God, no! Please! But ask anyone over 30 about the cultural impact of music "back then"... The Zoomers don't have their answer to Michael Jackson or The Beatles, and worse, their cultural soil couldn't support such a figure in the delicate dance between expectation and declaration. "Don't give them what they want...they don't know what they want...give them what they should want..."
What to do, what to do... ugh! It's so bleak.
Here I am, heart full of music, a battery bursting, no way to make myself useful. Put out a record? Why? Play a gig? Who cares? Start a YouTube channel? Come on.
The creaking demise of music as an actual cultural force seems overdetermined from the perspective of today. An inevitable consequence of the passive nature of musical activity (listening), set in motion by the advent of recording technology? A loss to the more-competitive attention grabbers: videogames and social media? The fruits of the evil labor of music-tech companies, particularly Spotify et al?
Yes, yes, and yes. We may be able to win some fights against those forces. But we have to attack with our strongest weapons and toughest soldiers. Now the painful part: musicians share some blame too.
I'm tighter with the weirdos who have never even attempted commercial music: the jazz people, the classical people, the avant-garde people, the computer nerds. Not only did we not stop the moustache-twirling bigwigs from digging our graves; we shoveled dirt, too, and jumped right in the hole.
We did too much for too little: uncompetitive pleasantness concealing deflation in the value of music.
We clung to conservative ideas of what music is, missing all the irony of doing so as progressive, often esoteric artists. We still make songs and albums and pay for legacy studios and scratch our heads when nothing leads anywhere.
We did not teach people how to dig what we do. "Accessibility" has become a loaded and stupid word. But you want people to access your music, one way or another. You are an exhibitionist in some unignorable way!
"How much money would you need to be paid to never release a record again?"
"How much to never play a live show again?"
What's it all really about? Is your music about you? About, uh, love? Technique? God? Sex? Respect?
Answer that question — not easy — and then ask the harsh followup: "Am I working towards that? At all?"
As my own answers develop, they reaffirm my hopeful predictions about music: that it should/can/will return to its nature as an activity: an activity valid without producing objects, valid as a way to spend time.
Spend time, the ultimate currency, on music. That transaction is enough.
I'll follow up. I have more to say about the economics of music. Long story short: the big picture is dark indeed but if that's enough for you to quit, get out of the kitchen.