Contestants, start your engines!
Greetings fearless friends… and hopefully some new ones: this blog is now a Contest Entry, so apparently being read and judged by a panel of experts… (welcome, experts! Enjoy your stay! Don’t jump off of anything I wouldn’t jump off of!)
For other readers, I’ll explain – as part of my ongoing attempt to redesign myself as someone with an ounce of business and marketing savvy, I have bought a book called ‘Music Success In Nine Weeks‘ by one Ariel Hyatt, who runs a prominent music PR firm and is generally regarded as a person from whom one can learn a lot about such things. I have high hopes for this book (rather, for what it can help me accomplish if I put as much of it into practice as I can).
Ariel is now running a contest wherein my fellow entrants and I will blog about our progress through the book, our experiences implementing some of the advice it contains, and so on. Nine blog entries, for the nine major chapters of the book, in nine weeks… Tolkien would be proud.
So here we go. Before I launch into the project, as kind of a Prologue to the main event, let me introduce myself. Since in fact I’ve never done this in these pages before, it probably makes sense to give a bit of background to my quest for Music Success.
In fact I have to come clean and say that I have frankly had on many levels an immensely satisfying and successful musical career so far. Certainly it’s been an interesting journey, all 20-odd-years of it. Perhaps a short recap is in order.
So what exactly is it you do here?
I am principally a jazz pianist; at least, that’s what I have the most training in. I play a number of other instruments, some reasonably well (accordion, flute, french horn) and others in a limited way (guitar, bass, percussion) – but the piano is my first love and will doubtless always remain my main squeeze. She has led me to some rather interesting places.
I’ve been on stage thousands of times, for audiences ranging from a tiny handful to several hundred thousand (for the historic re-opening of Germany’s Brandenburg Gate in 2003). I’ve played in restaurants, bars, clubs, theatres, churches, circus tents, beerhalls, one of the biggest cruise ships in the world, and in the ‘most luxurious hotel in the world‘ (a 4-month stint playing 200 meters over the Arabian Gulf).
I’ve played everything from Corelli to CCR – rock, funk, blues, new age, baroque, opera, swing, standards jazz, hard bop, ballads, modern jazz, freejazz, chanson, balkan, klezmer, irish folk, ‘worldbeat’, disco, techno, house… I hate to say ‘you name it’ but you probably pretty much can. I played in an Egyptian belly-dance troupe for a while. You get the picture.
And I’ve been paid for it. Sometimes not much, sometimes quite handsomely. The peak of this was a 4-year run with the legendary German dinner-theater/circus/cabaret extravaganza, ‘Pomp Duck and Circumstance‘, which is what brought me to Germany. I played for Sting, Larry Hagman, Mickey Rooney, and countless German celebrities. Even Bill Clinton (in the Brandenburg Gate gala mentioned above). It was, in a word, a trip.
I’ve also had some success as a soundtrack composer – most notably with my score to the online cult classic ‘animated comic epic’, Broken Saints. We won an audience award at Sundance, and eventually released a 4-disc collector’s edition DVD which sold nearly 100,000 copies internationally (with distribution by Fox Home Video). Following that, I scored animated prologues for a couple of major motion pictures: Hellboy II and I Am Legend. I’ve also scored a few short films and documentaries, and written for dance and multi-disciplinary performance art.
OK, so… what’s the problem?
The problem is that my career is stalled. Despite all of the amazing experiences listed above, I have not managed to follow through, capitalize on the opportunities that came along, build a sustainable career from a collection of admittedly crazy and fascinating gigs.
I have not done this because, as mentioned previously, it has been almost a point of pride for me that I have no business acumen, no marketing savvy. I don’t hard-sell myself or my work, I just do what I do and let things land in my lap. I’ve had a pretty good run of it, but the Cool Gig Fairy has apparently taken a leave of absence, and it’s time to do something about it. It’s time to let go of that particular bit of foolish pride.
One reason I have no choice but to get proactive and reinvent myself as someone with a clue, is also one of the main reasons things have dried up in the last couple of years: I became a father. My son Alexis was born almost three years ago and, needless to say, it’s been an incredible, fascinating, richly rewarding experience. And while I wouldn’t trade a moment of it for the world, I should add a couple more: immensely challenging and profoundly limiting.
Having made a conscious commitment to be an active and present co-parent, and knowing that the chance to be deeply connected to this little person will not come a second time, I have let a lot of things go that, in retrospect, were probably helping keep the career ball rolling… I don’t go to jam sessions any more, don’t take the gigs that don’t pay much at all (but might lead to better ones later), and don’t have as much time to maintain the casual relationships with other musicians that kept me in their radar.
Can an old dog learn some new tricks?
This hiatus from full-time gigging has given me some perspective on what I was doing, too. I realize that, as fun as it was, and as lucky as I’ve been with it, that path wasn’t really going anywhere. There was no strategy in it. At best it would lead to more of the same, but – economic times being what they are – for ever diminishing returns. The kind of zany gala gigs I’ve done are fewer and farther between these days, and they pay less when they do come along. Also, I’m not getting younger, and there are lots of really great young players willing to do it for less.
Moreover: I’m interested in growing, developing, facing new frontiers. Dabbling with yet another unfamiliar style of music is only so challenging at this stage in the game (plus, I’m running out of new ones to try!)… so altogether, continuing to define myself as a ‘player for hire’, and trying to get back on that horse, doesn’t seem like the smartest move.
So I kind of made a decision to only do things that seemed to be leading somewhere I want to go. Stop saying yes to anything that came along because it might prove interesting. Be strategic. Build something. Be tenacious and persistent. Move confidently in the direction of my dreams, as Thoreau so pithily advised.
OK, sounds great. What are these dreams of which you speak? Aye, there’s the rub. And that brings me rather nicely to my first Official Contest Blog. Stay tuned, watch this space, and enjoy the journey… I’ll try to make it entertaining, if nothing else…
more soon… – tobias
