Life on the North Sound is good. Christmas cheer has arrived, and peace and goodwill abound. There is a most pleasant mini-time warp between turning off the news and turning on some Bing Crosby Christmas music.
the North Sound Breeze is going dark for awhile, as they say in the theater. There are several reasons for ending this blog, reasons that could be given with a few cliches… enough is enough, if you have nothing to say, silence is golden, don’t overstay your welcome, etc.
Having long understood the concept of “enough,” I recognize it easily these days. The NSB has emptied its heart and brain to the outside world, for better or worse, and it’s finally enough.
Thanks to those of you who followed along, you were often my inspiration.
Here’s my final submission for awhile. Merry Christmas, everyone!
On Being A Musician
I began my music career as a jazz musician, and ended it the same way. In between I was, as Skunk Baxter used to call us, a “studio rat” in Atlanta, composing and arranging jingles and corporate film scores for many clients around the South. But the bookends of my whole career are my love of jazz and of playing it.
If you’re not one of the 5 per cent of us who made it big, then you probably experienced some fairly severe ups and downs during your career. God knows I sure did, as did many of my musician friends. When it was good, it was really good, as we will all tell you, and that is probably the number one reason we stuck with it through the years, along with the fact that we didn’t want to wait tables or work the check out at Safeway.
We won’t tell you the down side, however, as we don’t necessarily like thinking about it, and nobody wants to hear about it. And anyway, how bad could it be? We could always eat, couldn’t we? We could always find a warm place to bed down for the night in the wintertime, couldn’t we? The answers to those pithy questions are, in order, 1. Pretty damn bad. 2. Barely. 3. Mostly. Ha! Got you now, right?
You see, America isn’t an artist refuge by any stretch. It can be f-ing Valhalla if you get lucky. It takes some talent, tons of luck, several more tons of timing, god-given good looks and an ability to do exactly what your very fine press agent and producer tell you to do. I mean everything! The money, the fame, the glory… all of it will come to you! For those very select few, America is a fabulous place to be an artist.
Now, for the rest of us – It’s usually a dog fight of one sort or another. We all have a talent, and nearly always a love for where our talent leads us. And it’s not a light-hearted, fleeting love. Rather, it’s a driving, motivating, unending struggle to hold on to that love, to nourish it, to grow it, to respect it and see it through to what we hope is a most beautiful conclusion.
America is not designed for “the rest of us.” Matter of fact, we usually find, at one point or another, that being an artist in America can be much like a carnival ride, a carnival ride built by dummies… a ride that can break down at any moment, a ride that can throw you to the ground at any moment, a ride that can make you wonder, and try to remember, why in hell you ever got on this ride in the first place.
I hasten to assure you that most of us artists have known about this downside of playing jazz for a long time now. For instance, jazz musicians, especially the good ones, began moving to Europe in the’50’s, maybe even earlier. Paris especially, was friendly and nurturing to American musicians. The audiences appreciated them, the clubs featured them and paid them pretty well. A few of those musicians over there were successful enough to open their own jazz clubs – Ronny Scott comes to mind. His jazz club in London is still successful.
Most Europeans treat the American jazz musician with, at the very least, the same respect they would give the mayor of the city. Well, perhaps not that good, but you get the idea. America, on the other hand, eh, not so much. In the big cities of New York, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New Orleans, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City and Seattle, they each have at least a segment of their population who appreciates, and (to a degree) supports their local jazz scene.
As jazz musicians, we understood, almost from the get-go, that we needed to land in the friendliest spot we could survive in, to ply our trade and survive from month to month. See, things like monthly rent, owning a car, paying the heat and light bill every month… those things were huge challenges for us. Because, you see, America doesn’t pay jazz musicians very well. We are not nearly as easy to market for profit as, say, a four-piece rock band. So by and large, many of us played 6 nights a week merely to survive, and because we loved it so.
It was a musical catch-22 of sorts. We loved playing jazz so much! Yet it seemed to pay maybe one grade higher than your average ditch digger. So, given that, what kinds of fools were we, to continue chasing our jazz dreams while living in nearly-empty apartments and cheap motels, skimping on food, occasionally skipping out on the rent or other bills? I’ll tell you in song titles, “What Kind Of Fool Am I?” “What You Won’t Do. For Love.” And there you have it.
By most standards I had a successful career, partly because much of it was many kinds of music, only a little jazz. As soon as I was able to begin working in the recording studios, jazz became almost more of a hobby for me, though I never stopped loving it and pursuing it. I occasionally took a weekly jazz gig around Atlanta, and delighted in sitting in on some of the other guys’ gigs once in a while. But if jazz were my main source of revenue in all those years, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this now. Yes, I had a great life, a successful career. But did I ever nearly hit rock bottom, as I hinted earlier? Sure, and here’s one of them
Rock Bottom
In some of my last days living in Atlanta, my life got pretty rocky. Being 61, my career had faded and I was up to my ears in debt. It was Christmas time, and things were not good. A fine sax man I knew had called me and said he had a weird gig for a week… playing Christmas music outside of the parking lot of a huge complex of businesses. The Weather Channel was in there, along with several other large corporations. The gig paid fairly well, $150 a day, for only two hours of work. The catch was, we played from six a.m. to 8 a.m. every morning. The sax player, who was well-known all through the South, sounded apologetic but it didn’t matter… I needed the.money and I took the job.
It remains in my mind as one of the worst gigs of my entire life. Where do I start? For one thing, musicians, especially jazz musicians, don’t play in the morning, ever, unless they’ve been playing all night and are still going. Also, we don’t like to play outside, especially in winter. Plus, I had to carry my electric piano and a small amp from the parking lot to the site, every blessed morning. Getting up at 4:30 for a six a.m. gig was unthinkable, yet we did it.
We were placed in a big concrete walkway outside the buildings, to play Christmas music for the people arriving for work in the morning. Whoever thought of that had to be… well, you know. But there we were. The sax man and I played those 5 mornings, miserably. We were both there only for the money, and if you knew our careers, and how much we’d each accomplished, you wouldn’t have believed it. Did we work all our lives to end up with gigs like this? It was demeaning, embarrassing, depressing.
The walkway was depressing for sure, cold cement structures all around us, our music echoing against huge, gray, heartless walls. Our hands and faces were cold, as the weather that week was cloudy, rainy, temps in the middle to upper 30’s. It was cold enough that no one ever stopped to actually listen to us for a minute. And I can tell you, if our Christmas music actually cheered them up a little bit on their walk to work, well then, those folks had some serious problems.
With very few people coming by Thursday morning, we took a short break and moved behind one of the big cement pillars to get out of the wind. We were both shivering, and I knew if there was one thing worse than playing a cold keyboard in the wind, it was playing a cold saxophone in the wind. “Well man,” I grinned, trying to be positive, “I guess we’ve seen better days, huh?”
The sax man, shook his head, looking down. He was quiet for a moment, then, “You know, Hulse, I had it all. The beautiful home, the beautiful woman, money in the bank… I had it all.” He said softly, bitterly. “And then I lost it. All of it. The house, the woman, all of it.” And he looked up at me with a hollow, blank stare that sent another chill through me.
I knew about what had happened to him, but was shocked that he told me now. I didn’t say anything, and after a quiet minute or two we went back to playing. I’m delighted to say I don’t remember what any of the songs in our next set sounded like, but I bet they stunk.
There is a somewhat happy ending to this dreary tale, and here it is. It happened at 8:30 on that Friday morning, the last morning of that ridiculous gig. I had loaded my equipment into the car, started it and it was beginning to warm up inside. The sax man had paid me and left. I started feeling warmer and thought that maybe it was worth it… I was $750 richer than I was last Monday morning, and the inside of the car was getting toasty. Ah, the simple pleasures!
And that, my friends, is a Christmas story of two jazz musicians in America, in
December of 2004.
Steve Hulse
