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Transcript Two:
Work
Song
3:30-5 p.m.
Panelists:
Joan Jeffri, director, Research Center for Arts and Culture, Teachers
College, Columbia University
Martin Mueller, executive director, Jazz and Contemporary Music
program, New School University
Bethany Ryker, researcher, New School University
Andras Szanto, deputy director, National Arts Journalism Program:
You will now be treated to the sneak preview of an unprecedented
study. This panel is going to be led by Joan Jeffri of the Research
Center for Arts and Culture at Teachers College and Martin Mueller
at the New School. They’ve collaborated on this study, commissioned
by the NEA, to take a first look at the realities that jazz musicians
face, the quotidian challenges of pursuing a life in jazz. They’ve
gone out and interviewed well over 2,000 jazz musicians in four
cities—New York, New Orleans, San Francisco and Detroit. Today,
they’ll talk about the New York contingent. Come August, you’ll
be able to read the report.
Mueller: This is, indeed, a big-picture subject, and we will try
to bring it down to a focused level. One of the things that’s
evident as we talk about this, in all of its facets, is that just
like the nature of this music, this report encapsulates the very
essence of the individual and the world. So it’s a big treatment.
I am the executive director of the New School’s Jazz and Contemporary
Music program. We are, I think, the best example of the reconciliation
of the community of jazz, the mentoring traditions of jazz, and
the artist as teacher in an academic setting. What we’ve done
over the last 16 years is almost unparalleled in the history of
jazz education, because we’re trying to do things a little
bit differently at the New School. So much of the work of this study
rings true through the dynamics that play out in our educational
experience, in the evermore important role of education in jazz,
and in the perpetuation of this art form through education—which,
of course, is my key interest in participation.
Bethany Ryker, a student in the master’s program at the New
School, did almost all of the personal interviews, so she’s
gained an amazing wealth of information and experience in hearing
these stories through all these personal interviews. She will be
able to add that aspect as well to the commentary.
Two artists who actually participated in the study have graciously
consented to join us today to put a little of the personal context
of the artist, both in being interviewed and in being an artist
participating in this community in New York and beyond. First is
Carlene Ray/Carlene Russell [Carlene Ray is her professional name].
Carlene’s also been one of our valued faculty members. I also
know Carlene through her work with Ruth Brown. This is a lady who
has seen and experienced and made a lot of music, and who adds a
breadth of observation to all these questions and aspects of the
survey.
And we also have Vijay Iyer, a pianist and composer who has worked
a little bit with Steve Coleman: you can certainly insert more in
the blanks. I’m fascinated by where you’ve come from
and your background, because you have a whole different perspective.
I understand that your parents emigrated from India, and then you
actually got a Ph.D in music and cognitive science, so we’ll
be very interested in your participation here.
First of all, Joan will give us a description of the original purpose
of the survey, its methodology, its formal construct, and some of
the interesting data comparisons.
Jeffri: The purpose of this study is ultimately to improve the conditions
for jazz musicians in the United States. We should keep that in
mind —that’s important.
The Research Center for Arts and Culture was founded in 1985. It’s
known internationally for its work with living artists. We’ve
done quite a few surveys over the last 17 years, which is important
for this one because we can make comparisons with past surveys,
and other kinds of artists.
Our mandate on this study was two-fold. One was to create a picture
of the context for jazz musicians in the four study cities (New
York, New Orleans, San Francisco and Detroit): how are they different,
how are they supportive or not of jazz musicians, what kind of venues
are there, what kind of distribution mechanisms, what kind of education
mechanisms, what kind of funders, what kind of marketplace, what
kind of record companies, and so forth. The other was more statistical:
to do an assessment of what do they need.
We’re probably not going to give you a lot of surprises, and
you’re all going to say, “Well, we knew all that.”
But what we don’t have is documentation. And documentation
is necessary, because to advocate for what you need, it’s
important for the people who make change to have information and
data.
There were two parts to the survey. One was a study of musicians
in the four cities that belonged to the American Federation of Musicians,
and all the locals co-operated tremendously with us, giving us their
databases. We took a random sample from those. Part of the challenge
for us was that in most cases, New York being the exception, jazz
musicians were mixed in with other kinds of musicians. There was
actually a backhanded advantage to that, in that we’ll be
able to look at figures for non-jazz musicians next to those of
jazz musicians who belong to the union, which is very important
in finding out things like income and benefits. That survey was
done on the phone by a survey firm at Cornell University.
A longer version of that study was done in a new methodology that’s
never been tried in the arts before—respondent-driven sampling.
I’m going to explain the methodology very simply. There were
City Coordinators appointed in each city (Martin is the city coordinator
for New York). Those city coordinators were charged with bringing
in six to eight well-connected jazz musicians. This doesn’t
mean “famous.” This means people who have networks of
other people in the jazz community.
Those six to eight people were interviewed, and they were known
as “seeds.” They were interviewed with a 116-question
questionnaire, and they were then given four coupons: three of these
were green, and one of them was pink. The three green coupons could
go to anyone who was a jazz musician. The pink one had to go to
a female jazz musician, because we were concerned that we might
not get enough female response on the questionnaire. So the “seed”
jazz musicians were interviewed, and then they were made to educate
the other people they were recruiting about the survey. Each jazz
musician who was interviewed got four more coupons, and there were
modest financial incentives given when those coupons came back to
the originating person.
It’s very important to us that we don’t just believe
in data, because data without issues are meaningless. So before
we even started the study and the questionnaire, we held focus groups
with the jazz community, we tried out the questions on them, and
we market-tested the questionnaire with jazz musician, so it wouldn’t
be some academic exercise.
The first problem was: How do you define “professional jazz
musician”? We developed a list of selection criteria that
could be applied to the people we were interviewing, and they would
choose their own definitions. These are the six definitions that
we used on this respondent-driven sampling study:
· Do you consider
yourself a jazz musician? (This is normally the thing we ask all
artists, that self-definition of “artistry.”)
· Did you earn
more than 50 percent of your personal income in the last six months
as a jazz musician, or in jazz-related activities?
· Have you been
engaged in jazz more than 50 percent of the time during the last
year?
· Have you performed
in, or with, a jazz band at least 10 times in the last year?
· Have you performed
with or without a jazz band for pay at least 10 times during the
last year?
· Have you produced
a documented body of work—performances, compositions, collaborations,
arrangements, recordings, etc.—that is considered, self- or
externally, jazz?
The musicians felt pretty comfortable with many of these definitions.
You could pick one, or you could pick more of these definitions.
In New York, over half the jazz musicians identified themselves
according to income made from jazz, so that seemed to be a very
important aspect to them. In the questionnaire, we covered several
kinds of areas. We asked about what kind of music you play—voice
was included as an instrument. We asked for background information.
We asked for education, training and preparation; initial influences
in the home; protection (in terms of copyright, in terms of technology);
an area on living, working, and making music; an area of questions
on health, pension, and welfare; on critical review; and on satisfaction.
All of those income questions that are very important—How
much do you earn? How much do you earn from jazz? What other kinds
of jobs do you have? Have you ever received a grant?
We also asked some questions at the end of this questionnaire that
were very telling. First, let’s look for a minute at some
of the data that we found.
Here is some comparison information, very preliminary, on the union
results and the respondent-driven sampling results. This will probably
come as no surprise to many of you, although there were a few surprises
for me.
Seventy-nine percent of the New York union jazz musicians play jazz
for money during the year 2000. One pleasant surprise to me was
that of the union members, 39 percent have college degrees, and
an additional 29 percent have graduate degrees. Of the RDS—some
of which overlap with the union study—42 percent have college
degrees, 22 percent have graduate degrees.
One of the interesting things we learned—because this is a
methodology about networks—we asked a lot of questions like,
“How many jazz musicians do you know by name who also know
you by name? How many of those are women? How many of those are
divided by race?” to get an idea of the social networks of
jazz musicians. We found out something very interesting in the area
of education. Education generally didn’t matter, which is
unlike in many other surveys. Jazz musicians who had an eighth-grade
edcuation, high-school, college, etc. still had fairly large networks
of people they knew in the field, no matter what, with one exception:
people who had doctorates. People who had doctorates had eight times
larger jazz networks than anybody else we studied. One interpretation
of that might be that if you spend a lot of time in the educational
field, some of which supports jazz activities, you have more and
more people you know if you go all the way through to a doctorate.
There might be other interpretations; that was the one that came
most to mind.
Clearly, we were interested in the income figures, and the union
figures (for jazz musicians) were drastically different than the
figures from the respondent-driven sampling. The mean income for
work as a musician in 2000 was $44,972. Of this, 44 percent came
from work as a jazz musician. The median (which is usually a more
reliable number, because the median is directly in the middle) was
$30,000, and of this, 30 percent came from work as a jazz musician.
For respondent-driven-sampling musicians—this is all about
New York, not the rest of the country—the mean income for
work as a musician in 2000 was $17,910. The median was $16,001.
Not very encouraging figures.
These interviews took at least an hour, sometimes much longer. Jazz
musicians were very generous with their stories, their time and
their insight. At the end of the questionnaire, we asked about something
called “greatest satisfactions and disappointments in your
career” and something we called “daily diaries,”
places where the musicians could talk to us about their own experience,
about what we left out on the questionnaire, about what was pressing
to them, about what was important. These responses illuminate the
data. As I said at the beginning, data without issues are meaningless.
Mueller: We await with anticipation the full breakout of these statistics.
The part that became most interesting, however, was the human face.
In all of these interviews, for as many artists as we interviewed,
there were as many different stories told. I think it was a wise
choice to put these “daily diaries” questions in, because
they were where the personality could come out.
I’d like to run down the list of primary issues that were
identified in groupings here, and then we’ll talk about them
a little bit.
In the first area, which I’ve styled as “Problems or
concerns addressed through or from the artists,” at least
four main areas came out. This is somewhat in a priority order as
we saw them—and of course I’d like our artists to comment
on that.
First is the area of economic uncertainty and instability—this
is huge—income issues, health insurance, benefit issues, and
also the effects on personal relationships that come out of that,
and on their art.
The second major area is one of “societal value recognition”:
of the arts in general, but particularly in the context of jazz.
The third was issues of race. It very much came out that the jazz
industry is still steeped in racial issues, and that nobody is really
addressing this. It’s kept down quietly, but it still exists,
of course.
And finally, gender issues are very much at play in these interviews
as well.
In an area we call “Factors and conditions,” which we
might also call, “What we’re working against,”
there’s a longer list.
Many artists spoke about the effect of the institutionalization
of jazz, and under this area, the effect that they feel as an individual
with all the resources going toward this notion of “jazz as
a museum piece,” going to the same big institutions, the money
going to just a few recognized artists, both in regard to opportunity
as well as grants and funding. And also, jazz is becoming less adventurous,
more conservative. There is a general loss of tradition.
This speaks to that whole “lost generation” of middle-aged
musicians who were bypassed when the industry grabbed on to the
“young lion” concept and started exploiting that, rather
than embodying the traditions of eldership, the traditions of earning
the right to be on the scene (we heard expressions of “either
you have to be 80 years old, or you have to be 20”).
And through all of this, we heard of shrinking opportunities to
make music, loss of individualism in the music itself through the
lack of opportunities and the shift of the market to the younger
talent.
In the bigger sphere, the continuing co-option of popular culture,
means jazz has a lesser place in the public sphere, especially in
the U.S. Miscommunication by the media—to many artists, those
of us close to the music agree, the music is alive, it’s dynamic,
and yet the media misrepresents us by its very absence. The industry
values sales, not artistic effort: there’s no risk-taking,
and an anti-jazz spirit. There’s discrimination—not
even so race or gender, but economic. We heard expressions like—and
these are almost quotes from some of the artists)—“artificial
name-recognition and the marketing of appearance” instead
of marketing of the musical value; “societal and economic
issues that perpetuate the status quo and keep the music down and
further depress the individual’s opportunities.”
There were a lot of artists who expressed a sense of… not
helplessness, but a lack of knowing or being prepared for the business
side of the art. There was a lone-wolf mentality at play for many
artists, instead of a bigger concept of community—the idea
that everyone’s always coming together in the community, but
individual survival takes precedence. You’ve got to end up
doing what you have to do to survive, and that affects the psyche
as well. There’s a fragmentation of time and needs, because
of the demand of having to do everything at once, which limits a
bigger view, a planning, a focus.
Before we get to a more positive summation of some ideas and suggestions
that came out of the interviews, this is an appropriate segue into
Bethany.
Ryker: Again, with each of these ideas Martin was listing, there
are faces behind them. I spent an hour or more with many of the
musicians, so the idea is still very vibrant and bright in my mind.
But I want to draw attention to what it means when we look at a
whole body as diverse as the jazz community, and expand on how big
a range that is—no matter what we might think of in our minds
as a “jazz musician.” That notion was really challenged,
as I met so many people bringing in different histories, educational
backgrounds and such. And it first came out in the question, “What
do you think would be best for the jazz community?” when some
colorful interviewee told me very bluntly, “Well, for the
time we put into it, for all the time I’ve spent, for the
music we made, I think the government should give us each $50,000,
and that’s the end of the story.” It ranged from that
to another person saying, “Well, I really think that everything’s
OK. Everyone’s making the music, and there’s really
nothing anyone needs to do. We need to just keep making our music.”
So these are two distant poles in the idea of what comprises this
group of jazz musicians we interviewed.
The group itself was as diverse as these ideas, and the methodology
was such that I didn’t know who was coming for an interview
until they called me, so we didn’t go out and ask for them.
They came to us, and it could have been anybody, young or old, from
someone who had a Ph.D. to someone who just got out of college or
someone who never wanted to set foot into college. We talked to
all of them. We had 76 percent males and 24 percent females. We
even talked about sexual preference sometimes in these interviews.
But there are differences in frequency of work—artists define
themselves not necessarily by their economic position, but by where
they imagine themselves as being. To them, having a day job doesn’t
necessarily mean they’re not a jazz musician. Having a day
job and aspiring toward a full-fledged career also shows that there’s
a different range of problems that people encounter when they get
there. That’s not to say that if you’ve got that major-label
contract, all your problems will go away. Everyone at every stage
had a different range of things they expressed as needs.
The idea of what the jazz community is was itself very contested.
Sometimes, interviewees saw it as a supportive group of people who
look out for each other in career decisions and musical decisions.
Sometimes, though, it was a different idea—it was a whole,
but it was factionalized, and maybe you needed an “in”
to get in with the group who would help you out with certain things,
but if you weren’t part of that group or faction, then you
were left more on your own. So this idea of community is imagined
very differently by the people who are in it.
Of all the things we talked about in these interviews, I selected
three things I want to focus on—larger concerns that musicians
had but on which their perspective differed widely. Even though
someone might agree that more opportunities or more venues for playing
are necessary, it wasn’t true that everyone had any single
idea of what that venue would be, or what those opportunities would
be.
Regarding location, one very dynamic, even polemic, view was: Get
the music out of clubs, “out of the basement.” There
was a dislike of the connection to the cash register, the alcohol
consumption, and the vice that gets tucked away in a basement—no
offense to the Village Vanguard: these are not my words. But some
people desired open spaces that would be available for families,
jazz at any time of the day, not just at the very late hours, something
that they termed “a more hospitable environment.”
But whether they knew it or not, all the musicians I interviewed
were in conversation with everyone who had come before, and other
people said they think the club is a very significant place for
the music—the birthplace of the music, perhaps. It holds something
special as a location, a connection to the participation of audience
and musician, and it’s directly connected to the music. So,
to have one opinion is to have the other.
A second issue is about funding, which sources are appropriate,
how we go about funding this music. Many believe it’s important
to teach jazz musicians how to write grants. Others think that it’s
not important, or that the system of granting works backwards—that
it teaches musicians a particular writing skill and application,
but that it doesn’t necessarily look at the way they’re
making music. The question I heard over and over again is: “Why
does my chance of getting support rely on how well I can write this
application? Does that make a musician who doesn’t have that
specific skill of writing any less deserving of that type of funding?”
Also, there was a lot of discussion of an individual versus a collective.
There are certain instances in which a collective is formed in order
to have the gains, the right tax-status that you need in order to
get funding. It’s harder for an individual to approach that.
One person said, “I feel I don’t have the chance on
my own as an individual artist to get that type of recognition.”
But, in a completely opposite view, some felt that having grants
at all were a bad idea. They didn’t want to accept a handout.
They didn’t want to think they were receiving any welfare
from the government. They were skeptical of the institutional control
that occurs when a grant is given. So we have one group that’s
skeptical of institutional control, another group who’s skeptical
of market and industry control.
That ties into the idea of exposure, and how to properly expose
and give more attention to the music. This was a very important
idea on people’s minds: how do we get this out there? Some
people felt very strongly that attention on network television or
radio would do the trick. Others were very against that, in that
commercial enterprises would corrupt the artistic merit of it. They
felt that as soon as you bring a corporation into the music, it
wouldn’t be what it was before. So where jazz is being heard
is very important.
Another debated issue was that some people think that education
is what we need in order to get better attention and exposure, while
others felt that forcing jazz into the schools pulls the music further
away from its source, pulling it away from the musician who’s
making it and turning it into more of a scholastic thing. They were
very afraid of that. One person said to me, “Listen, if we’re
talking about making jazz popular, or how to engage it as a popular
music, look at hip-hop. They don’t teach that in schools.”
We have a challenge in this project: to look at the diversity of
this group. It was hard for me to draw any conclusions, because
I felt it would be better to just get everyone in a room and talk
it out. All these people have this hunger to perform and are striving
to find the best way to do it, even if they internally disagree
with each other on issues. I think these are signs of a vibrant
community that is very much alive. I would give that to anyone who
says that jazz is dead or declining. I don’t think that at
all. Just ask the musicians out there—they know this is happening.
People were very interested in participating, because they wanted
their voices to be heard. In that regard, I think we have a lot
more to listen to, so we can address these larger questions and
understand who is expressing them. As we’ve learned, these
ideas that came from the jazz musicians are as diverse as the music
itself.
Mueller: We do have two of the important voices who contributed
to the survey with us today. I thought it might be interesting to
talk to our artists and see what they thought of the actual survey—and
more importantly, to see whether you think these are the right steps,
first of all, in terms of representing the community, and whether
or not we’re on the right track in identifying the main issues
the community is dealing with.
Russell: I’ll start off by saying, I don’t even remember
what answers I gave to the questions on the survey. But I think
it’s a very enlightening thing to know that jazz musicians
are finally being paid attention to. Better late than never. But
I’m an active dinosaur. I’ve been around a long time;
I just turned 77 last Sunday. I’m not calling for any accolades—I’ve
just survived.
When I first started out in the business, I knew I wanted to be
a musician. I didn’t know what kind of musician I wanted to
be, but I had an insight into the education that I wanted. My dad
was my role model because he was a graduate of the Julliard School.
But he was a graduate at a time when Julliard had two schools: the
undergraduate school and the graduate school. The year I graduated,
1946, William Schuman was the president, and it was his idea—and
I thought it was a good one—to amalgamate both schools and
just call them one thing: the Julliard School of Music. But I came
into it at a time when I was looking forward to being a concert
pianist. In the meantime, I was being influenced by jazz—bebop
was beginning to come in when I first got to Julliard in 1941. So
I was on both sides of the fence—and still am, for that matter.
But I wanted to know a lot about the music, so I used to go down
to 52nd Street. They called it “The Street”—you
used to know what people were talking about when they referred to
52nd Street as “The Street.” A lot of my education,
jazz-wise, was going to listen, observe, and see a lot of the musicians
in person who I’d heard a lot about on the radio. There was
a station, WEVD, and “Symphony Sid” was the gentleman
who had a program on that station. I learned a lot just from listening
to him late at night. He would come on late at night, and I would
listen him to talk about Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and
this one and that one, and… wow! So I took my few pennies
and went down to 52nd Street—I was about 17, 18 when I started
going down to the Street.
So that was my liberal education: I learned from listening. I didn’t
play anything. I wasn’t so presumptuous to think that I was
good enough to be playing anything at the time, but I used to also
go to Minton’s Playhouse—that was part of my liberal
education on jazz.
On the first day of registration, I met a young lady, a black girl
who was a bass fiddle major from the High School of Music and Art.
We immediately became friends just standing in line waiting to register.
We were both living at home with our parents, and we wanted a little
extra money to spend without having to ask our parents for anything,
so we started looking around for work. And she was the one that
would go out and get the work. Well, we did a lot of different jobs.
I was playing piano, and we were trying out a lot of different things.
But back in those days, of course, there were no jazz courses or
anything of the sort in any of the schools of higher learning—I’m
talking about on the college level. So those of us who were being
influenced by jazz were doing it strictly on our own. The jazz begins
to evolve, but—as Martin and Bethany were talking about—as
a young musician, you don’t think about the economics of learning
about the business. All you want to do is play the music and get
your money that night. You don’t think about what is important
to think about as time goes on—’cause, of course, young
people think they’re invincible and they’re going to
live forever.
Now, I was extremely fortunate. Things just happened to me. I didn’t
plan a cotton-pickin’ thing. After I got out of the Julliard
School, I went with the Sweethearts of Rhythm. I joined them after
graduation, had never been west of New Jersey, but was asked to
go join the band in St. Louis, Mo. And I was thrown into this business
of being a professional musician without ever having had any preparation—from
the frying pan into the fire, you might say. But I kept my mouth
closed and my eyes open, and I learned a whole lot.
Mueller: Have the rules changed today? Do you still function the
same way in the community, in terms of dealing with the business?
Russell: That’s a good question. I think along the way, one
learns how to become astute about the business of jazz.
I’ll give you an example. My late husband (my husband died
in ’63) was Louis Russell. When he had his band, he had people
in the band like J.C. Higginbotham, Red Allen… you name ’em,
he had him in the band. You wouldn’t think about people’s
economic situations. You’d just know them and you just enjoy
their work and you just go to hear them.
But unfortunately, Red Allen got into a situation where he was being
treated for cancer. He was at a hospital up in Harlem, and he did
not have benefits. A lot of jazz musicians don’t think about
benefits that they can get from their work as jazz musicians, but
back in those days, it didn’t exist. He had to go to the hospital
to be treated for his cancer, and before he was even admitted, he
had to put down a lump sum, which was about $400 or $500—which
was a lot of money in the ’50s and ’60s. Had he had
health insurance of some sort, he would not have had to do that.
If he didn’t have the money to get into the hospital, he might
have just languished out there and died sooner. But the unfortunate
part was that he had to come up with the money before he was admitted
to the hospital. I went to see him, representing the Russell family,
and he was not in any condition to do any playing.
The next time I heard from Red was in London. I got a postcard,
and I was stunned. I hadn’t realized he’d had to go
back to work, but obviously he must’ve had to. And that is
a sad situation that exists for a lot of jazz musicians today who
don’t have any medical coverage.
Mueller: Let me see if we can get Vijay in this, because Vijay obviously
represents a newer generation. I’m interested in how you perceive
the hopes of the survey, but more importantly, what are the rules
you see musicians today having to play by? What economics and conditions
are you up against?
Iyer: It’s interesting that you chose to call me for this
panel. When I was being interviewed for this, I was what you would
call a “statistical outlier,” having a Ph.D., having
not gone to music school and having a non-traditional background.
What interested me about what you mentioned earlier was the bit
about networks. I wondered if I was one of the people that had eight
times the number of connections. I didn’t go to music school
and—no offense to anybody in the room—I consider myself
fortunate that this didn’t happen to me, because what happened
instead was really fascinating, and I’ve been very fortunate
to watch it unfold.
What’s always fascinated me about this music in particular,
and what drew me to it before I really knew what I was doing, was
the idea of collaboration. I was interested in working with people.
I wasn’t as interested in shining myself as a soloist or a
great piano player as I was in working with other people and finding
out what happens when you bring different world-views together.
I think that jazz has always been a culture in which this takes
place, where that encounter is highlighted and valued and cherished.
I’ve seen people speak about it as a sort of integrationist
subculture, where people encounter people from different walks of
life and different ethnic backgrounds. I’d like to see more
information about these networks. It would be very interesting to
create a connected chart of individuals and see what kind of connectivity
they have, and how that breaks down along ethnicity and race and
education.
Despite having a Ph.D, when I was in graduate school, I made [the
schoolwork] very much subordinate to my musical activities, so I
just made a point of collaborating with as many different kinds
of people as I could. A lot of it is stuff that happened to me—not
necessarily stuff that I pursued. I’ve worked with people
from all over the world and people of all different ages and class
and ethnic backgrounds. You mentioned my perspective as someone
who’s the child of immigrants from India—it places me
in between a lot of categories, which means I can exist in a lot
of them simultaneously and not encounter much opposition.
I’m fortunate in the regard that I can live in a lot of different
worlds, including, occasionally, the academic world. But more importantly,
I can work with elders like Amiri Baraka and Roscoe Mitchell, and
mid-career artists like Steve Coleman, and people my age or younger—and
work with people who are black and white and Asian-American and
Latino. I don’t want to paint a very rosy picture of these
communities, because they are very divided. I was just talking to
Krin Gabbard about how interesting it is to be able to silently
observe these dynamics as they unfold. It’s been an interesting
life.
It’s funny to be on this panel as an example of a “jazz
musician,” because I’m “a” jazz musician,
but so is she, and look at her. All I can really offer is some narration
of my very peculiar and specific experience, and I’m very
glad that this study is taking place, because it’s a way to
gather all kinds of stories like this and learn from them.
Mueller: I’d like to outline more suggestions that were expressed,
and some of the ways in which artists felt efforts could be made.
Then we’ll open up the floor for some questions.
Many artists spoke of the need for more individual empowerment,
more individual control, and more collective control in the collaborations
and organizations they’ve either banded together or that are
open for advocacy. It’s a compelling call for more individual
capacity to determine their own destinies, protect themselves and
help themselves make a living. That was expressed in myriad ways,
small and large, and it came out in the expression of the need for
more individual-artist funding, and the need to get individual artists
involved in funding decisions. Issues of diversity came up: the
need to spread around the limited wealth that is out there and,
as Carlene expressed, the need for better advocacy through protection
organizations like Local 802.
I’m in an unparalleled situation, as the head of a school
that was the first to have a musicians’ faculty organized
through a union, which achieved a great measure of better working
conditions for them: health benefits and better teaching wages.
And obviously, those efforts can work on behalf of the community
when they’re done in an organized, thoughtful and collegial
way between labor and management.
The second area expressed was the critical role of education. This
means education in the general sense—audience development,
and a more formal reconciliation of traditions that are feared to
be lost: the mentoring tradition, and the fact that jazz no longer
lives only in the clubs, and so can’t be passed on and created
in the pure, original, oral transmissions of those communities’
associations and on the bandstand. There just aren’t the working
bands anymore, in which you could grow, develop and learn through
that mentoring system, five nights a week. These things are gradually
being replaced. Education has a very serious responsibility to address
the important values of the community and this art form.
But more broadly, in terms of audience development, the music needs
to be out everywhere. This is tied to the inability of the music
industry or the culture to present this music property. We need
to return the music back to the masses to try to develop what we
know will be a quality response, if only the public could only hear
and experience it.
Artistic exposure and opportunities was another huge issue—the
fact that there aren’t as many opportunities to play anymore.
Many suggestions came out of that need: subsidization of performance
opportunity, either for individuals or for clubs; the rewarding
of presenters in some way for having more diverse programming—these
things would allow more individuals to get the music out there on
an individual basis and have more exposure. So again: more venues,
more performance opportunity.
The idea was also expressed that the media and industry should wake
up and understand that they have a vested interest in responding
to the art form, instead of burying their heads in the sand and
running around wondering how come things are getting worse and worse.
I’m encouraged by some recent efforts: there is the Jazz International
Alliance, an jazz industry–advocacy group intended, with all
good intentions, to create an advocacy base for audience development.
We see some of these efforts starting to emerge, but basically,
there needs to be a conscience and a responsibility out of that
area of the industry to help uplift the music.
Let me open it up for some questions.
[Audience member]: Ms. Jeffri, I’ve been following your work
for several years. I’ve seen other presentations on the fate
of artists, and I’m curious what has come out of the past.
I see the situation of independent artists getting worse. Have any
of your studies reaped rewards for independent artists? What has
been accomplished? What roadblocks have been moved? Do you foresee
any commercial or political forces we might harness and use to better
the freedom of independent thinkers and expressers, and do you have
any timeline? Because it seems to me that we as artists get studied,
and our situation corrodes—our financial situation, our health-care
situation.
Jeffri: Let me give you two examples of studies I’ve done
in the past and some specific results they’ve had to show
you some of the things that can happen.
New York Foundation for the Arts used some work on a much earlier
study to run an advocacy campaign of their own, using some of the
data to lobby for artists’ needs. And, more visibly, The Pew
Charitable Trusts started a program for individual artists in which
our data played a very seminal role, because they wanted to find
out more about what artists said they needed before they started
such a program. So those are two more concrete examples.
There are a number of ways that artists and musicians themselves
can advocate using our information. We’ve tried to be very
helpful. It would be very unwise for a research group to become
an advocacy group, because we would lose our credibility. But instead,
we can certainly help artists’ groups and individual artists
in using our data. A couple of examples: there was a advocacy group
in Washington D.C. for whom we packaged information in very small
soundbites for their newsletter, that we hoped artists could pluck
out for grants and things they were applying for to help make their
own case. Also, we’re hoping musicians can take some of this
data to their own organizations— whether it’s the union
or the alliance or some other organization—to strengthen their
case for the things they think they need, so they can see some real
results.
I just want to say one thing about dissemination, because I think
that may also help get this information out there. In addition to
the traditional hard-copy reports and the full report on our web
site, we’ve partnered with 15 jazz organizations around the
country. We’ve sent them the questionnaire, and we’ve
said, “Pick a dozen questions that your constituency would
be interested in.” We’ve written a narrative, included
the data, and hired a web designer to create two pages on their
web page with this information, linking to us for more information.
So we’re always looking for more creative ideas to get the
information out and help you use it.
[Audience member]: I just came from another conference, and something
you just said was kind of interesting. You made the statement that
you need to keep research separate from advocacy, essentially “objectivity
versus partisanship.” Why is that? I ask that because the
other symposium I came from had the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,
who in fact crossed that bridge. So I’m wondering why you
see that as something that necessarily has to be maintained.
Jeffri: I don’t think anybody is impartial when they do research—and
clearly both I and my staff come from the arts to begin with, we
were artists, so that certainly colors the work we’re doing,
and we try to invest ourselves in the community. But I think it’s
our role to help advocates by getting information to them; and I
think it would be impossible to do both these things effectively.
So we choose the “resource” camp, because no one else
is doing very much of this. We’ve spent 20 years consistently
presenting research on artists than can be comparable over time.
We think that’s a more important role for us to play, because
we do it well, and we can help other people who do advocacy well
do that.
[Audience member]: You described your sampling methodology for us
but, of course, you had a wide choice of sampling methodologies
for your interviews.
I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the
logic behind the one you used here, and how it compares with other
surveys you’ve done. I’m frankly a little concerned
about the pink-coupon thing, because I lead a jazz band out in Long
Island and am a science journalist, and finding female jazz musicians
there seems almost impossible. I also thought your demographics
seemed a little old. I’m wondering if you skewed the sample
by your methodology, or if you thought about that.
Jeffri: The best thing about this methodology is that because it
is peer recruitment, it gets deeper and deeper and deeper into the
jazz community. And the way to think about it is like the branches
of a tree. In past studies I’ve done, when I haven’t
been afforded this methodology (for which I’ll tell you the
qualifiers of in a minute), what happens is you get the people who
join organizations. If you use organization lists, you get the people
who have the loudest voice, are the most marketable; but you don’t
always get deep into the community, the less visible people. In
this study, because it’s peer recruitment, if I give you a
coupon and say, “you’re a jazz musician,”—if
you know five other people in the community that would be less visible,
that lets us enter a whole new community of jazz musicians. That’s
the biggest advantage of this for us.
The most difficult challenge of this methodology is that it’s
based on people who have a high-contact pattern with one another—it
was originally used for HIV/AIDS injectors. While we thought jazz
musicians have a high-contact pattern, because they hang out and
jam together, the jazz-musician community can be very turf-oriented
by style, by the kind of gigs you play. So it became harder in some
cities to generate that peer recruitment, and it took us somewhat
longer, whereby we increased the number of coupons we gave to each
musician and made some adjustments. In some cities, this worked
very well, and in other cities it didn’t work very well. It
worked very well in New York and San Francisco, and we had some
problems in New Orleans and a lot of problems in Detroit.
[Audience member]: Another perspective that might be of use and
interest—as one of the people who was interviewed who tried
to pass on the coupons—some of us are interested and hungry
enough for an opportunity to express our views: this was a well-meaning
situation and of interest.
But often, I encountered people that said the compensation—in
terms of not being paid for your time—was an echo of what
happens all the time. The other thing that came up was that people
wondered about the value of the survey, and how it would manifest
in any change. So I found it hard to pass the coupons off.
Bill Dennison, Local 802 Musicians Union: We were a modest participant
in helping fund the study. We don’t have a lot of money. But
we were most interested in the results in regard to the financial
situation of jazz artists, whether or not they have health insurance
or pension when they get older, and so on.
Our view was that this study would show
that jazz artists are—far more than the average worker in
this country—uninsured and uninvolved in pension, and even
Social Security. Because if you get paid cash, there’s no
money going into Social Security for you. So we’re hoping
to take the results of this study and convince every jazz employer
(along with the city and the state of New York, who have a great
deal, it seems to us) to make sure this culture continues, and that
the artists who create it are able to live and survive in this city,
because it means so much—to convince employers and government
that there needs to be contracts in place, methods that are available
for the artists to get these benefits. I congratulate the New School
for being one of the employers of jazz artists that’s contributing
to the health and benefit funds of jazz artists. We need to get
the rest of the employers of jazz musicians to do the same, and
our hope is that this study will help us make that argument clearly.
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