What not to do on a gig

[sgcim]

It's a well-known fact-NYC is filled with Mid-Westerners who just wanted to fulfill their childhood dreams of going to the NY they saw in the movies. Then, when they find out what a living hell it is, they mate with a fellow Mid-Westerner, and get the hell out and breed somewhere else.

[BreckerFan]

Having a day job and doing music on the side sounds like a good deal, but I don't think there's really a way to balance it that doesn't give music the short end of the deal. I know for me that I could not have a kid, work my corporate job, and maintain my current practice/jam schedule (tho I'm pretty obsessed with practicing haha). Which, among other reasons, is why I'm trying to figure out a different career path. Better to be happy and not rich than rich and not happy, imo.

Also no, you definitely do not need to know 500+ tunes to play at jams in NYC. As with any scene, go check the jams out, see what tunes are called, and get those ones down. If you do that while also working on increasing repertoire at a reasonable rate you'll be fine.

[JazzIsGood]

Yes they are transplants in NY, but i mean it does attract the best of the best.

You can play the jams with 150 tunes, but on the real gigs I think they expect you to know quite a lot of tunes, or be able to pick them up after hearing them 1 time through.

[pamosmusic]

Yes they are transplants in NY, but i mean it does attract the best of the best.

You can play the jams with 150 tunes, but on the real gigs I think they expect you to know quite a lot of tunes, or be able to pick them up after hearing them 1 time through.

I mean ... I did live there for a decade, but thank you.

[Christian Miller]

A good time for me to chime in with my favorite quote: "I've forgotten more tunes than I know."

Me too. There’s a lot of helpful info in that witticism….

Also some of the tunes, I forget what they are called or how the tune goes even but my body remembers lol. That period when I learned a large number of old tunes for dancers - quite honestly I do a gig with one of those old bands every few years and someone calls something like ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’, ‘I’ll Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ or ‘Way Down Yonder in New Orleans’ or something, and I stare blankly. The count in happens and I play the song. I must have played those tunes a few hundred times in every state of consciousness lol. This is what happens. The brain is no longer involved in any way.

I must know a couple of hundred of those things lol, no one in the modern jazz community plays them…

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[rpjazzguitar]

Some years back I was in a class with Guinga, the Brazilian composer/guitarist/singer. Somebody called Stella. No charts. Guinga, who is not a jazz musician, knew it and started playing it, but in F, not Bb.

One of the students was a college professor of jazz guitar. Another student was a well known player.

The well-known player got it on the second chorus. The professor got it on the third chorus.

The point is, that even some elite players struggled to play Stella in an unusual key the very first time through.

[RJVB]

The point is, that even some elite players struggled to play Stella in an unusual key the very first time through.

The story has no record of how the participant (maybe not yet) called rpjazzguitar fared?

[AllanAllen]

The story has no record of how the participant (maybe not yet) called rpjazzguitar fared?

Some say he's still searching for the changes to this day.

[rpjazzguitar]

Badly, to put it bluntly. I kept getting confused in bar 9 where there's a fourth in the melody and would end up in the wrong key. I can do it now, but it's been years.

[Alter]

When I was going to jams in NYC (end of previous century ), you could get lists of tunes from players there, I believe one had 500 tunes and another had 1500 tunes (from people doing masters in performance). From one point up the difficulty becomes similar to all the other genres, you only have to learn the tunes, and if you know how the melody goes you can play it in any key.

But you had to know the tunes to play with good players. As Richie Hart told me describing NYC attitude: "If you don't know the tunes you don't belong with us"! I sure spent a lot of time listening to and playing tunes! But that's what the whole idiom is if one thinks about it, you can't really play classic jazz if you don't dive into the music at least as deep as you practice the instrument. And today, after decades of listening to jazz and to many other styles of music (and I have tens of thousands of albums in various formats), it is these classic era tunes that are closest to my heart, I'll never get tired of hearing them it's just great music!

I think the biggest learning breakthroughs I've had all these years of practicing were first, the first time I tried writing arrangements (where you learn so much in say four bars of music), and second actually playing tunes I knew in different keys, thus discovering a whole different way of learning tunes!

[yebdox]

The music life is a calling, much like someone is called to be a priest or monk. The work is demanding, with bad hours, and for people who are intoxicated, and it's low paying but the reward is in the music itself and hopefully, in some of the adventures you take and people you meet doing it. Like being a priest or a monk, it's not for most people so if the wrong person pursues that, he/she will be miserable.

I look at it like one decent gig night=one less day spent at meaningless day job. Simplify your approach and see the benefits. I'd rather be poor than to just have a life of 30 years of 9-5, a brief retirement, then death because I quit working a job I hated. Doesn't sound like a winning combo but if you have first world tastes then it will be required of you unless you have other sources of wealth to expend.

Dawg, you are among the courageous few and I applaud you for it.