Guidelines

In this section Jamie shares with you some guidelines on not just working with him, but also with musicians in general, to make the music fit your vision of the event you're planning and to make the performance the best it can be. No matter who a musician plays for, the organizer of the event—which Jamie compares to the executive producer of a TV show—has a definite vision as to how the event is to turn out. The organizer decides where the event will be, what type of food will be served, how the room is to be lit, what the color and style of the tablecloths will be, and so on, and yes, what type of music will be played. Since you're looking at this website, Jamie assumes the "executive producer" to be you, or that you are scouting musicians on behalf of the event organizer. Whatever the vision for your event, Jamie wants to work with you to make your event a memorable one.

Guideline 1: Always hire a professional

Since by looking at this website you're telling me you're considering me for your event, it kinda goes without saying, but this is solid advice no matter what event you're planning. The late oil-well firefighter Red Adair once said, "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Perhaps an extreme example of getting an amateur to do the job can be seen in this video. I don't think you want someone like that to do your event, but then I'm sure that if you knew of such a person, you'd eliminate them from consideration instantly.

A Midas Mufflers radio ad that aired in the Maritimes in the early '80s made a great analogy: "If you want a plumber to make a nice, neat, water-tight job, you want a man with savvy, a man with experience. Same thing with mufflers." Same thing with any professional in any field, including musicians. What you should always look for is someone whose musicianship is at the journeyman professional level or above, as these levels will exemplify this analogy. Eric Starr and Nelson Starr, writing in The Everything Bass Guitar Book, define musicians of this caliber as "highly skilled, experienced, and often extremely gifted musicians. They make their living as a musician, though they still work mostly in a localized setting...Journeymen musicians also tend to be unionized. Subsequently, they are usually called hired guns or mercenaries. Hired guns are musicians who play strictly for money. They do this because music is their profession and often their only source of income." The union I belong to is the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, the Canadian branch of which is known as the Canadian Federation of Musicians. This video, produced primarily for those who are just joining the AFM, gives an overview of what the AFM does.

While it may be cheaper to get a non-union musician, such musicians tend to either play just for the fun of it or at the semiprofessional level. For simplicity's sake, we'll refer to these people as amateurs. Sci-fi writer David Gerrold might as well have been talking about degrees of musicianship when he wrote in his book The Trouble With Tribbles (1973):

There is a plateau of professionalism that every writer who is going to make it must rise above—there's a level beyond which the amateurishness disappears from his thought and sentence structure and he begins to display a sense of competence and skill in his approach to his material that will eventually win him the all-important compliment, the cheque. Once that plateau is passed, nearly every time that writer sits down at his machine, he will produce readable constructions of words. The "unknown" is the person who will achieve and surpass that level of professionalism. The amateur is the one who will never come near.

A little later in the book, Gerrold's discussion of TV producers is a good metaphor for how I see your role in planning your event and why I feel the need to be better than anyone else you're considering:

Consider: a producer is handed two story premises. They're pretty much the same. Both are equally workable and would make good scripts. But neither is outstanding, just competent. He can only buy one of them; what does he do? He looks at the names of the writers.

If one is a pro and the other's a neo who's trying to break in, which one does he choose?

Which one would you choose?

If you said the neo, you're a hopeless idealist. Go back to square one, you're fired.

If you're a producer, you're a busy man; you haven't got time to run a writing class. You know that a fellow named Robert Bloch already understands television writing; he doesn't have to have it explained to him. He's a known quantity; all you have to worry about is getting him to fit his story into the concept of your show.

On the other hand, you've never heard of David Gerrold—who is this kid anyway? Why should we take a chance on him? He's not doing anything better than anybody else we're already talking to.

And that's the key to breaking into television.

You're competing with the pros now. You have to be better than they are.

You have to do something outstanding to make the producers notice you. You have to do it on merit alone, because you have no previous credits and nothing else working for you.

Amateur musicians are not likely to have developed their musicianship to this kind of level. That kind of development calls for a higher level of discipline that is illustrated in a lost interview published in Read magazine in 1999 (original source unknown) and dated September 26, 1984, in which Frank Zappa said this:

Any ex-musician is an ex-musician for one of two reasons. One, he is not good enough to be in the band any more. Or two, he had a career opportunity that led him to resign his post, for which there are probably thirty people waiting for his job. I have no problem getting people to volunteer to subject themselves to the discipline that's in the band. And if you knew anything about the band and the crew, there is a spirit of accomplishment that surrounds this touring unit that is really quite remarkable, second only to being in the Marines, because this band can go out there and do anything. And they know it. And they are thankful that they are rehearsed to the point where even under the most adverse circumstances they can go out and do a two-hour show that will kick your ass. And the crew will have the thing up and down in record time, and everybody gets along, and they're happy to be doing it.

And that's what the discipline is all about. A guy who leaves the band and complains about the discipline—he's maybe regretting the fact that he's not in the band any more. And so how else is he going to get his name in the paper than to say that I'm a dictator? Well, the fact of the matter is, I am the dictator. I'm the guy who signs the cheques. I'm also the guy that has to take the responsibility for everything that goes wrong. And along with that, I have the responsibility for making sure that the band delivers a good performance to an audience that's bought a ticket. So it's not really being a dictator—it's being the referee between the audience and the band. The audience buys a ticket and I say, "Okay, band, you have to do this, and these people want it good, so give it to them good." And if they don't do it well, they either have to improve themselves or they go. The word in the band is, "Will that be an aisle or a window?" Which means your ticket back to Los Angeles is right over here. And everybody knows that. And I've sent two guys home already from this tour...

But see, the people who find that baffling would be the people that have a union mentality. The union mentality means that too many people do too little work for too much money, and then go on strike in order to get more days off. There are a lot of people like this in the world who think that's the way things ought to be. My attitude is this: I pay money to have a service performed for me on behalf of an audience that pays money to have a service performed for them. And I'm there to make sure that if somebody buys a ticket to my show, they're not going to be disappointed in it. They're going to see a band that knows what they're doing, that does it well, and delivers entertainment for the money that's spent. The same thing on a record. Whether you like the style of the music is irrelevant. The quality of what's put into the show is definitely there, and that quality is the result of a huge cash investment that I have to put out before the tour even starts. It costs a quarter of a million dollars to make a band sound like that. That's talking about two months of rehearsal, six days a week, eight hours a day. Everybody's on salary; the crew is on salary. I have the cost of all those salaries plus the rental of the hall that we rehearse in, the equipment and all that stuff—I pay for it before I get a nickel from anybody buying a ticket. There's not too many groups that will take that kind of a risk, and not too many groups that have one man in the group who takes that financial risk himself. And that's the way I do my business. So if there's something wrong with that, then let me know.

As an illustration of the lower level of discipline, I've worked in bands some of whose members don't help out to the fullest extent possible when it comes to tearing down gear. They might leave some gear lying around, which is disrespectful to the next act coming in because it forces them to be the first band's clean-up crew, thus cutting in to their own setup time. They may not consider the logistical needs of the next act coming in, and so they might turn off a power bar or other piece of equipment that the next act expects to be left on. I've worked in bands some of whose members don't come in with their homework done: in one band, for example, the two vocalists frequently couldn't come to an agreement before coming to rehearsal as to which of them was going to do what line for a given song, and that led to us repeatedly wasting time in the studio. I could go on and on. The bottom line is that a musician at or above the level of a journeyman professional will never be that negligent. That level of discipline is part of what you are paying for.

There's a story involving Picasso. He was in a Paris market when someone approached him about drawing a quick sketch on a napkin. Picasso agreed, producing a sketch in five minutes, only for the person to balk at the one-million-franc price he asked for. Countering the person's observation that it had taken Picasso only five minutes to draw that, Picasso replied, "Well, it took me forty years to learn how to do that in five minutes." This illustrates another part of what you're paying a professional musician for: the years of training to get to the level he is at. How much of that degree of competence are you likely to find in someone who at most does music to earn only a tiny fraction of his annual income?

Then, for professional musicians, there are also administrative costs associated to doing business. I wrote a whole blog entry back in 2009 that explores this in greater depth. This website, for example, costs me US$140 a year, including SSL certificate. My fee includes part of that continuing cost. And what about other promotional materials such as business cards? Promo kits? Audio and video production? You'd be helping to pay for that too. If I'm called upon to prepare special music for a particular gig and I don't have it in hardcopy, I have to take the time to transcribe it, and so part of my fee includes the ink and paper I use printing it off, what I spent buying the computer equipment and software I prepared that transcription with, and even what I'm spending on the utilities needed to even run that stuff off. Would an amateur do that? And then if the professional is an AFM member, then of course there are annual and gig-specific union dues to pay—and on top of that there are gig-specific pension contribution payments to be made on your behalf to the Musicians' Pension Fund of Canada. If a musician in Canada is to do a gig in the States or vice versa, they have to pay fees to acquire the appropriate visa: last I heard, for Canadians seeking to do gigs in the States, this fee could be as high as US$2,960 for expedited processing of a P-2 visa with a turnaround time of at least five months. I could go on and on. Somehow, the fee a professional musician will quote you doesn't seem all that high after all, does it?

The bottom line to all this is that a professional will take music preparation and performance very seriously, much more so than an amateur will. And if you hire a professional, you are pretty well guaranteed a top-notch performance that will make your event more memorable than someone less competent would. To the extent that the musicians you hire do their job well, that will attract more people to the next event you hire them for. But if you hire musicians that take a so-so attitude about the music, they may undermine the profitability, or at least the memory, of your event. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Guideline 2: Book early!

I can't stress this enough. The farther in advance you book me, the more likely I am to be available for your event, and the more preparation time I will have in order to be the most effective I can be at providing you with a top-notch performance. I've gotten calls for weddings, for example, that were to take place less than a month later, or sometimes even less than a week later. That says to me that some clients get so caught up in organizing the other aspects of the wedding that they tend to forget about the music until the last minute. I got a call once from a potential client on a Wednesday for her wedding that coming Saturday, and had to turn her down because my band had already been booked for months to play an out-of-town wedding reception. I don't know if she ever actually managed to find an available organist, but I do know that she was having a much harder time trying to find one than she would have had if she'd booked well in advance. It's like trying to call a telethon in its dying minutes in order to make a pledge—is it easier or harder to reach an operator at that point in the show? I think we both know the answer to that one.

I cited above the example of my sometimes getting requests to do special music, which in some cases I have to take the time to transcribe and sometimes even transpose to fit my vocal range. One such case involved a funeral for which one of the pieces I was to play was one that a member of the family had written. I was approached for the gig on the Saturday of the Easter weekend, and the funeral was scheduled for that coming Tuesday. Because I was given the material in an MP3 file, and because the composer's tessitura was lower than mine, I had to transcribe and transpose the material—but because I'd already had to do the Easter Vigil on the Saturday evening and an Easter Sunday mass the following morning, I wasn't able to start the transcription/transposition process until the day before the funeral. That didn't leave me with a lot of preparation time, and the result was less than satisfactory to me.

As a third example, I once did a wedding for which the bride and groom made change after change to their music selections all the way up to the day of the wedding rehearsal. I can't think of a better example of how disrespectful this is to a musician's preparation time. When you're planning the biggest day of your life, you don't want the music, or any other aspect of the event for that matter, to be a detriment to it. A good parallel to this situation occurred when Claudia Christian left Babylon 5 in the wake of a breakdown in contract negotiations. Series creator J. Michael Straczynski stated that she left the show of her own accord, but Christian avers that she was released when she requested a leave of a few episodes in order to do a film project and that she have something in writing to that effect for the benefit of the producers of that film. There had been some uncertainty as to whether there would even be a fifth season of Babylon 5. By the time the season finally got green-lit, the writers were in a logistical bind. In the event that Christian was not coming back to continue playing Susan Ivanova on the show, there was a new character, Elizabeth Lochley, being planned that would take over Ivanova's role in the series plot. But if she was coming back, Lochley would have to be written out. As Straczynski noted, "You can't whipsaw the writing back and forth—is she in, isn't she in, maybe she is, maybe she isn't—and hope to have anything in shape to shoot...Normally we have a longer lead time; this time we didn't, and this has already put the scripts back a bit. The script with [Lochley] is written and in; if I take it out now I have to replace it, and there isn't time." You don't want to put your musicians in a similar situation.

Nor should you be too rigid in your repertory requests, as these people were. As noted below in Guideline #5, I may have to make adjustments to the final program to accommodate circumstances that may pop up at the last minute, circumstances that are beyond my control and yours.

Keep in mind, too, that depending on the music market, a musician may have his hands in multiple pies. Except for those lucky enough to play in one ensemble that pays them enough to make a living at it, or who are performing music on the side while taking on a nine-to-five job, musicians tend to have to take on multiple gigs. For example, there was a time in my career where I was simultaneously working in four ensembles in addition to pursuing a solo career that partially involved playing the organ at two churches. And that's on top of the administrative aspects of being a business as a musician, not to mention squeezing in a personal life. You may be thinking about just your event, but don't make the mistake of assuming the musician you're hiring has more hours in the day than he really does. Though I am proactive in managing my time, something unexpected may still pop up that will cut into my preparation time for your event, and I want to keep such adverse impacts on my time to a minimum.

Guideline 3: Clarity is power!