Jazz Office Hours episode 2: producer's notes

Here's the second full episode of Jazz Office Hours with Cory Weeds and myself, out today:

Questions

Fear in gig booking

"I'm a young student who has only played a few professional gigs. I'm afraid if I try and book a gig now at, say, the 2nd Floor Gastown, people will think I played badly and I'll never get hired there again. Is this the case or how do I deal with this fear?"

This topic took up half the episode, and there's lots in there. Fear about playing badly is a constant within musical careers. It's just a matter of learning to put it in its place over many years; it's reasonable to have it dominate your thoughts as a younger player. That's life.

But then there's fear of not drawing enough attendees to the gig. Cory said – as I pulled to the front with the episode's cold open – that he can smell insecurity about "the draw" a mile away, and when a performer writes in a booking email about how many tickets they expect to sell, he mentally cuts that number in half right away.

A fascinating dance within booking. I'll stop doing that.

Overplaying

"In a local scene, is it possible to overplay – to play too many gigs in a short period of time, and then have not many people come to any of them, because you're playing too often?"

Yes, we agreed, it certainly is. Our threshold is pretty high, though: playing once every couple weeks, or even every week depending on the venues, can still be fine.

I learned a big tip here that I immediately put into play; if I have a local gig booked already, and I want to book another one after that date, I'll tell the (second gig's) booker and ask if that's okay. Seems polite and classy; Cory said he'd appreciate that.

Students' low attendance at events

My paraphrase of the question was this:

• I recall that teachers would organize educational events, often with master musicians
• They would emphasize the importance of those events to students
• Turnout would be less than they expected
• They would go back to the students with exasperation and ask something like, "What do we have to do to get you to attend?"

Cory has noticed younger, highly skilled musicians playing lots of gigs – perhaps skipping these educational opportunities. They "are now our contemporaries", he says, in a way that never was possible before.

We agreed that there's only a small percentage of "really serious students" (Cory). As Jared Burrows once wrote:

"If the success of a jazz studies program is measured by the number of jazz musicians it turns out, then they are all failures."

To be clear, I think Jared meant the proportion of future jazz musicians within the body of all students. Expecting the rest (maybe as high as 80%) to attend masterclasses and workshops might be unrealistic.

Under the hood

Speaking of being realistic, my editing flow got way better with this episode. I saved pre-set effects for Cory's and my voices after episode one, and they did the job this time with almost no tweaking.

Also, instead of a line-by-line edit through all 60 minutes at my desk, I put on a rough copy of the episode while making dinner one night and jotted down necessary edits in my notes app.

All together, that saved me a couple hours of post-production time. And I bet it's only a few more "Um"s in the final audio.