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Copy for An Informative Guide I Created for Potential Clients
JAZZ BAND HIRING GUIDE
So you want to hire a jazz band for your event. If you don’t have a band in mind as of now, it can be a baffling process. Where to start?
See the band playing your event in your mind’s eye.
First, it’s vital that you have an idea of what you want to see and hear.
If you don’t, you could end up being lured into hiring a band that doesn’t quite fit (too big, too small, wrong style, etc.) so it’s good to give this a little thought before you begin your search.
Take a moment and think deeply about the event you are planning.
How many guests are there?
How are they dressed?
What’s the scene?
What is the mood?
Is there dancing?
Is there drinking?
Now, picture a band that you feel would be best for the situation.
What instruments are they playing?
Is there a singer?
How many people are in the band?
What songs do they play?
Are they old school or modern?
Do any bands, albums, songs, films, or any other reference points come to mind?
Once you have a pretty good vision in your mind’s eye of the event and the band that’s playing, it’s time to search.
Where to look?
Odds are if you’re reading this, you’ve already realized that there are useful tools online that can help. We like Gigmasters, but there are a number of other sites that solve the same basic problem of finding a band (Gigsalad, Thumbtack, etc.).
These sites allow you to search using a number of guidelines to find acts that can meet your needs. You can get a pretty good picture of their brand, background, style, etc., and you can read reviews from their past clients to hear what other people’s experience has been like working with them.
You can either request a quote from a single act or fill in your basic criteria—why it’s helpful to have a rough vision in mind first—and have a number of people be alerted that you’re looking for something, and they will each send you a quote.
The pickup band puzzle:
The kind of profile you will most often find on these sites is a band-leader who puts together a combo of musicians that they feel will best meet your needs. This is called a pickup band, or a musical group assembled for a specific event.
This is very commonplace in the jazz world, and while it is a means to an end and serves a purpose, there are some distinct drawbacks.
Why not a pickup band?
Since the group may have different members each time, the quality is variable. There’s no way to ensure consistency or smoothness in performance.
The musicians may be acquainted with each other, but a lot of the time they don’t rehearse and don’t know their music by heart.
Often they are faking (this is the technical term) their way through the performance by staring at sheet music, iPads, or their phones for reference the whole time.
Like, what if you hired The Beatles and the band that showed up was Ringo and three other random musicians looking at music stands filling out the rest of the band? It’s not the Beatles, right? That’s a pickup band.
Music takes you to a place!
Live music provides an atmosphere. It’s like a special place that doesn’t exist in reality, but rather in the hearts and minds of the performers and the audience.
When you hear your favorite song by your favorite band, it takes you to a special place, and the “place” that a band takes you to depends on their familiarity with each other.
If a band is under- or unrehearsed, they may fill the need for live music, but they won’t be able to induce a truly magical experience.
However, if a group rehearses and plays together all the time, the atmosphere they create is going to be much more refined, you will be taken there more immediately, and the experience of hearing them play will be deeper and more memorable.
What’s the alternative?
A band that is unchanging where the members don’t shift and the size and the instruments are always the same. These groups specialize in playing with each other, are very comfortable as a unit, know their music by heart, and have a defined, unique style.
What now?
We’ve hopefully given you enough insight for you to make an informed decision in your search to hire a live jazz band. Thank you for reading, and best of luck
So you want to hire a jazz band for your event. If you don’t have a band in mind as of now, it can be a baffling process. Where to start?
See the band playing your event in your mind’s eye.
First, it’s vital that you have an idea of what you want to see and hear.
If you don’t, you could end up being lured into hiring a band that doesn’t quite fit (too big, too small, wrong style, etc.) so it’s good to give this a little thought before you begin your search.
Take a moment and think deeply about the event you are planning.
How many guests are there?
How are they dressed?
What’s the scene?
What is the mood?
Is there dancing?
Is there drinking?
Now, picture a band that you feel would be best for the situation.
What instruments are they playing?
Is there a singer?
How many people are in the band?
What songs do they play?
Are they old school or modern?
Do any bands, albums, songs, films, or any other reference points come to mind?
Once you have a pretty good vision in your mind’s eye of the event and the band that’s playing, it’s time to search.
Where to look?
Odds are if you’re reading this, you’ve already realized that there are useful tools online that can help. We like Gigmasters, but there are a number of other sites that solve the same basic problem of finding a band (Gigsalad, Thumbtack, etc.).
These sites allow you to search using a number of guidelines to find acts that can meet your needs. You can get a pretty good picture of their brand, background, style, etc., and you can read reviews from their past clients to hear what other people’s experience has been like working with them.
You can either request a quote from a single act or fill in your basic criteria—why it’s helpful to have a rough vision in mind first—and have a number of people be alerted that you’re looking for something, and they will each send you a quote.
The pickup band puzzle:
The kind of profile you will most often find on these sites is a band-leader who puts together a combo of musicians that they feel will best meet your needs. This is called a pickup band, or a musical group assembled for a specific event.
This is very commonplace in the jazz world, and while it is a means to an end and serves a purpose, there are some distinct drawbacks.
Why not a pickup band?
Since the group may have different members each time, the quality is variable. There’s no way to ensure consistency or smoothness in performance.
The musicians may be acquainted with each other, but a lot of the time they don’t rehearse and don’t know their music by heart.
Often they are faking (this is the technical term) their way through the performance by staring at sheet music, iPads, or their phones for reference the whole time.
Like, what if you hired The Beatles and the band that showed up was Ringo and three other random musicians looking at music stands filling out the rest of the band? It’s not the Beatles, right? That’s a pickup band.
Music takes you to a place!
Live music provides an atmosphere. It’s like a special place that doesn’t exist in reality, but rather in the hearts and minds of the performers and the audience.
When you hear your favorite song by your favorite band, it takes you to a special place, and the “place” that a band takes you to depends on their familiarity with each other.
If a band is under- or unrehearsed, they may fill the need for live music, but they won’t be able to induce a truly magical experience.
However, if a group rehearses and plays together all the time, the atmosphere they create is going to be much more refined, you will be taken there more immediately, and the experience of hearing them play will be deeper and more memorable.
What’s the alternative?
A band that is unchanging where the members don’t shift and the size and the instruments are always the same. These groups specialize in playing with each other, are very comfortable as a unit, know their music by heart, and have a defined, unique style.
What now?
We’ve hopefully given you enough insight for you to make an informed decision in your search to hire a live jazz band. Thank you for reading, and best of luck
A History of A Musical Duo I Co-founded and Led
Sydney & Jake first played together at a jam session in their native Tulsa, Oklahoma in December of 2013. Sydney had been living in Tulsa after graduating college at The University of Oregon. She was co-founder of a street band called The “S” Band that played early jazz, swing, and folk songs in the historic Brady Arts District in downtown Tulsa. The “S” Band’s efforts resulted in the creation of a busking scene in Tulsa that thrives to this day.
Jake was in town for the holidays visiting from Denton, Texas where he was working as a bandleader, composer, and private instructor following his graduation from The University of North Texas. The two exchanged numbers at that fateful jam session and kept in touch.
Dester once again visited Tulsa in the summer of 2014 and the two met up to play tunes and bonded over their shared love for many of the same songs and recordings. It was then, too, that their feelings for each other began to emerge. They stayed in contact, and over the next few months traveled back and forth growing together both musically and romantically.
In the fall of 2014, Jake, following a series of personnel shifts in his band, Feat Sauce, determined it would be best to move away from his college town to a larger city with a more consistent pool of musicians and greater stability. Having a couple of friends in Chicago, drummer Luke Angle and guitarist Lindon McCarty, who would have a room available in their apartment the next June, Jake got dibs on the vacancy and decided that he would try life in the city for a change.
In February of 2015, Sydney visited Dester in Denton on her way to New Orleans where she was going to meet up with an old friend, pianist and accordionist Clark McMahon, to perform in the streets during Mardi Gras. Jake, in the midst of a professional dry spell, opted to tag along.
The two spent ten days playing music together and exploring New Orleans. Staying with punks at a squat house, filling their bellies with po’ boys and beer, and running all around town soaking up the sights and sounds of Mardi Gras, their bond became even stronger.
In March of 2015, Jake moved to Tulsa to be with Sydney and try life in the same city together. If their bond strengthened, then they would move to Chicago together; if it weakened, Jake would move by himself. It turned out that being closer yielded great results.
While they both lived in Tulsa during the spring of 2015, they practiced music together and were active in the local jazz scene. Jake and Sydney regularly appeared at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame’s weekly jam session, and they frequently shared the stage with the city’s finest jazz artists, namely saxophonist Mike Cameron, and bassists Jordan Hehl and Dean DeMerritt.
Jake and Sydney moved to Chicago in the summer of 2015. They tried many different strategies to get work in the scene--including busking around the city--both together and separately, but the opportunities which they pursued were largely unfruitful. The period spent in Chicago soon became one of reevaluation and transition.
The two embarked on a quest for self-understanding as well as the understanding of personal development, business, and entrepreneurship spurred by the writings of Napoleon Hill and an online course by serial entrepreneur Tai Lopez. This time was spent shedding attachments and seeking new information from a multitude of books on management, psychology, entrepreneurship, self-improvement, and a myriad of other previously unexplored disciplines outside of music.
During this period in Chicago, Jake quit playing sax and exclusively sang and played guitar while Sydney put down the guitar and began playing bass. In this configuration, the two artists explored new instruments and the “new standards” from the 1950s on (from Sam Cooke to ABBA to Radiohead, they covered the covers).
One evening at dusk, while eating pizza on a rooftop near the coast of Lake Michigan, a pair of bats flew over their table. A friend yelled, “pizza bats!” and Sydney & Jake officially adopted The Pizza Bats as their band name. Sydney & Jake's first gig as The Pizza Bats was a fumbling hack through alternative rock covers, but, in time, the duo would build a skillful set of songs representing the greatest works from the past six decades.
Utilizing social media, running a YouTube channel featuring a new cover every week, and refining a system for learning and rehearsing repertoire, The Pizza Bats began building a sound (albeit a crude one at first), an image, and a brand. They hustled and landed gigs for their new configuration, adopting and applying the concepts they were now learning from the indispensable nonfiction works that they were adamantly consuming.
In February of 2016, following their regular gig at Irish Eyes Pub in Lincoln Square, the duo decided it was time to move to a more advantageous location. Study of the music industry had led The Pizza Bats to find that Chicago, while its music scene was undoubtedly filled with amazing talent, was clearly lacking in business connections, particularly in publishing and the like.
It was time, they concluded, to move to either Nashville, New York City, or Los Angeles. The pair ultimately opted for NYC (being carless since moving to Chicago), bought one-way plane tickets, spent a month donating, selling, or otherwise discarding their personal possessions, and, in March, Sydney & Jake landed in the city with nothing but “one carry-on and one personal item” each.
When they arrived in New York, they slept on floors and couches, in spare rooms and music practice rooms, and in hostels. Constantly at the mercy others, living by the generosity of friends, and unsure of when they would be asked to relocate, Sydney & Jake concluded that, though it wasn’t ideal, they would quickly need to find consistent jobs in whatever industry would have them.
Jake had bought a secondhand dobro and had been busking some, but income from playing in the subway was scant so he went to work as a cook in a busy Manhattan café. Sydney got a job as a cashier at a liquor store. The two eventually had enough combined income to secure more long-term shelter solutions.
A pair of brief subleases followed shortly after they found regular work. For a couple of months, Sydney & Jake scraped together their funds and eventually had enough to make a deposit on a longer-term agreement in a windowless, lofted bedroom in Bushwick which they affectionately dubbed “these batcaves”.
When they weren’t at work, their time was spent planning, studying, writing songs, and rehearsing new material. The duo performed around the area at such venues as Bizarre Bushwick, Bushwick Public House, Legion Bar, Wayward Social, and Terra Firma. They also spent a good deal of time busking during this period, playing their hefty set of covers on subway platforms off the L line.
By late summer of 2016, they were picking up steam and had a little money saved up so Sydney & Jake agreed that they would quit their jobs and pursue music full time. For several weeks, they focused all of their energy on the project, but they ultimately failed to secure enough income to be self-sufficient, and they went back to working jobs again.
Sydney now found herself as the office manager at a real estate company in Bushwick, and Jake--after multiple failed attempts to secure work teaching music--was employed full-time as a breakfast cook in a Williamsburg hotel.
Dester’s position in the hotel kitchen was largely subordinate: he spent the first three hours of his days my himself performing menial tasks such as plucking parsley leaves, zesting lemons, or separating egg whites from their yolks. After some time, in the midst of the mindlessness of it all, he began hearing bebop saxophone lines in his mind.
Although he had, while living in Chicago, denounced his identity as a saxophonist for a number of personal and deeply psychological reasons, he felt called back to the instrument by the musical ideas which now nagged him continually. In October of 2016, he borrowed a horn from a good friend and hit the subway platform to see what would come out.
Growth was slow at first, but feedback was highly positive. In time, Dester was making more money per hour playing sax in the subway than he was working as a cook. After an existential conversation with his supervising chef, he took the leap and quit his job at the hotel to busk full time. Soon after, he was getting hired to play gigs outside of the subway, and it didn’t take much to persuade Sydney to join him singing and playing guitar.
By November of 2016, Sydney & Jake had come full circle; they were a jazz duo once again, but now possessed a fresh perspective on their reality and dreams, their musical journeys, on business, and on life. Starting with just six tunes, the duo began playing in the subway at every opportunity. Money was good, and the higher level of musical expression afforded by the standard tunes and Christmas carols they were now playing was deeply refreshing artistically.
In January 2017, Sydney quit her job at the real estate office, and The Pizza Bats--now wholly convinced that they were on the right path--fought through the rest of winter in the chilly tunnels of the subway, developing a new set of songs and cultivating their unique sound. They have since made considerable headway and are now performing events throughout the city.
In March of 2017, the duo performed a benefit for the LGBTQ organization, Kaleidoscope Youth Center. In April, the band’s music was broadcast live on NYC’s WBAI 99.5FM. This June, the duo will be featured as a part of Make Music New York’s annual city-wide concert.
This May, the duo released (as The Pizza Bats) a 7-track album of jazz classics called Live at Bill’s Place, which is available on iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.
In June, Sydney & Jake realized that The Pizza Bats had given birth to something new and that a new name was in order for their jazz duo pursuits.
They took the naming issue to social media, and after sifting through a long list of submissions, Sydney & Jake decided to call themselves Sydney & Jake for all jazz duo related matters.
Currently, the duo is focused on playing for private events throughout the New York City area, with the occasional public performances here and there
Jake was in town for the holidays visiting from Denton, Texas where he was working as a bandleader, composer, and private instructor following his graduation from The University of North Texas. The two exchanged numbers at that fateful jam session and kept in touch.
Dester once again visited Tulsa in the summer of 2014 and the two met up to play tunes and bonded over their shared love for many of the same songs and recordings. It was then, too, that their feelings for each other began to emerge. They stayed in contact, and over the next few months traveled back and forth growing together both musically and romantically.
In the fall of 2014, Jake, following a series of personnel shifts in his band, Feat Sauce, determined it would be best to move away from his college town to a larger city with a more consistent pool of musicians and greater stability. Having a couple of friends in Chicago, drummer Luke Angle and guitarist Lindon McCarty, who would have a room available in their apartment the next June, Jake got dibs on the vacancy and decided that he would try life in the city for a change.
In February of 2015, Sydney visited Dester in Denton on her way to New Orleans where she was going to meet up with an old friend, pianist and accordionist Clark McMahon, to perform in the streets during Mardi Gras. Jake, in the midst of a professional dry spell, opted to tag along.
The two spent ten days playing music together and exploring New Orleans. Staying with punks at a squat house, filling their bellies with po’ boys and beer, and running all around town soaking up the sights and sounds of Mardi Gras, their bond became even stronger.
In March of 2015, Jake moved to Tulsa to be with Sydney and try life in the same city together. If their bond strengthened, then they would move to Chicago together; if it weakened, Jake would move by himself. It turned out that being closer yielded great results.
While they both lived in Tulsa during the spring of 2015, they practiced music together and were active in the local jazz scene. Jake and Sydney regularly appeared at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame’s weekly jam session, and they frequently shared the stage with the city’s finest jazz artists, namely saxophonist Mike Cameron, and bassists Jordan Hehl and Dean DeMerritt.
Jake and Sydney moved to Chicago in the summer of 2015. They tried many different strategies to get work in the scene--including busking around the city--both together and separately, but the opportunities which they pursued were largely unfruitful. The period spent in Chicago soon became one of reevaluation and transition.
The two embarked on a quest for self-understanding as well as the understanding of personal development, business, and entrepreneurship spurred by the writings of Napoleon Hill and an online course by serial entrepreneur Tai Lopez. This time was spent shedding attachments and seeking new information from a multitude of books on management, psychology, entrepreneurship, self-improvement, and a myriad of other previously unexplored disciplines outside of music.
During this period in Chicago, Jake quit playing sax and exclusively sang and played guitar while Sydney put down the guitar and began playing bass. In this configuration, the two artists explored new instruments and the “new standards” from the 1950s on (from Sam Cooke to ABBA to Radiohead, they covered the covers).
One evening at dusk, while eating pizza on a rooftop near the coast of Lake Michigan, a pair of bats flew over their table. A friend yelled, “pizza bats!” and Sydney & Jake officially adopted The Pizza Bats as their band name. Sydney & Jake's first gig as The Pizza Bats was a fumbling hack through alternative rock covers, but, in time, the duo would build a skillful set of songs representing the greatest works from the past six decades.
Utilizing social media, running a YouTube channel featuring a new cover every week, and refining a system for learning and rehearsing repertoire, The Pizza Bats began building a sound (albeit a crude one at first), an image, and a brand. They hustled and landed gigs for their new configuration, adopting and applying the concepts they were now learning from the indispensable nonfiction works that they were adamantly consuming.
In February of 2016, following their regular gig at Irish Eyes Pub in Lincoln Square, the duo decided it was time to move to a more advantageous location. Study of the music industry had led The Pizza Bats to find that Chicago, while its music scene was undoubtedly filled with amazing talent, was clearly lacking in business connections, particularly in publishing and the like.
It was time, they concluded, to move to either Nashville, New York City, or Los Angeles. The pair ultimately opted for NYC (being carless since moving to Chicago), bought one-way plane tickets, spent a month donating, selling, or otherwise discarding their personal possessions, and, in March, Sydney & Jake landed in the city with nothing but “one carry-on and one personal item” each.
When they arrived in New York, they slept on floors and couches, in spare rooms and music practice rooms, and in hostels. Constantly at the mercy others, living by the generosity of friends, and unsure of when they would be asked to relocate, Sydney & Jake concluded that, though it wasn’t ideal, they would quickly need to find consistent jobs in whatever industry would have them.
Jake had bought a secondhand dobro and had been busking some, but income from playing in the subway was scant so he went to work as a cook in a busy Manhattan café. Sydney got a job as a cashier at a liquor store. The two eventually had enough combined income to secure more long-term shelter solutions.
A pair of brief subleases followed shortly after they found regular work. For a couple of months, Sydney & Jake scraped together their funds and eventually had enough to make a deposit on a longer-term agreement in a windowless, lofted bedroom in Bushwick which they affectionately dubbed “these batcaves”.
When they weren’t at work, their time was spent planning, studying, writing songs, and rehearsing new material. The duo performed around the area at such venues as Bizarre Bushwick, Bushwick Public House, Legion Bar, Wayward Social, and Terra Firma. They also spent a good deal of time busking during this period, playing their hefty set of covers on subway platforms off the L line.
By late summer of 2016, they were picking up steam and had a little money saved up so Sydney & Jake agreed that they would quit their jobs and pursue music full time. For several weeks, they focused all of their energy on the project, but they ultimately failed to secure enough income to be self-sufficient, and they went back to working jobs again.
Sydney now found herself as the office manager at a real estate company in Bushwick, and Jake--after multiple failed attempts to secure work teaching music--was employed full-time as a breakfast cook in a Williamsburg hotel.
Dester’s position in the hotel kitchen was largely subordinate: he spent the first three hours of his days my himself performing menial tasks such as plucking parsley leaves, zesting lemons, or separating egg whites from their yolks. After some time, in the midst of the mindlessness of it all, he began hearing bebop saxophone lines in his mind.
Although he had, while living in Chicago, denounced his identity as a saxophonist for a number of personal and deeply psychological reasons, he felt called back to the instrument by the musical ideas which now nagged him continually. In October of 2016, he borrowed a horn from a good friend and hit the subway platform to see what would come out.
Growth was slow at first, but feedback was highly positive. In time, Dester was making more money per hour playing sax in the subway than he was working as a cook. After an existential conversation with his supervising chef, he took the leap and quit his job at the hotel to busk full time. Soon after, he was getting hired to play gigs outside of the subway, and it didn’t take much to persuade Sydney to join him singing and playing guitar.
By November of 2016, Sydney & Jake had come full circle; they were a jazz duo once again, but now possessed a fresh perspective on their reality and dreams, their musical journeys, on business, and on life. Starting with just six tunes, the duo began playing in the subway at every opportunity. Money was good, and the higher level of musical expression afforded by the standard tunes and Christmas carols they were now playing was deeply refreshing artistically.
In January 2017, Sydney quit her job at the real estate office, and The Pizza Bats--now wholly convinced that they were on the right path--fought through the rest of winter in the chilly tunnels of the subway, developing a new set of songs and cultivating their unique sound. They have since made considerable headway and are now performing events throughout the city.
In March of 2017, the duo performed a benefit for the LGBTQ organization, Kaleidoscope Youth Center. In April, the band’s music was broadcast live on NYC’s WBAI 99.5FM. This June, the duo will be featured as a part of Make Music New York’s annual city-wide concert.
This May, the duo released (as The Pizza Bats) a 7-track album of jazz classics called Live at Bill’s Place, which is available on iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.
In June, Sydney & Jake realized that The Pizza Bats had given birth to something new and that a new name was in order for their jazz duo pursuits.
They took the naming issue to social media, and after sifting through a long list of submissions, Sydney & Jake decided to call themselves Sydney & Jake for all jazz duo related matters.
Currently, the duo is focused on playing for private events throughout the New York City area, with the occasional public performances here and there
Excerpt of A Memoir I Wrote In the Midst of an Existential Crisis
“I Don’t Play the Saxophone Anymore” (part 7)
Maybe it was delusion and maybe it was tenacity and probably it was both, but despite all the rejection I faced as a performer (and, actually, I was well-praised by my peers for my work, though I sincerely believed that until my thirst for validation was slaked by those who I perceived to be the guardians of the jazz-flame, i.e. the faculty--something that I realize now is quite illusory (that anyone could "guard" the flame, not the flame itself))--goddamnit I was going to finish what I had goddamn started and get my goddamn diploma. So I failed my barrier exams some more, and college became increasingly more like a prison sentence though, like a prison sentence, I could tell there was an end in sight if only I compliantly obeyed the guards and kept on my best behavior.
It was hard for me to accept that earnestly working to inject the spirit of jazz (as far as I understood it: individualism, deviance, "out"ness, an uncompromising drive to push creativity and performance, a refusal to bite other artists tastelessly, etc.) into my compositions and playing had been counterproductive to earning a jazz degree, but I was tired and I was broken and I wanted nothing more than to just get the fuck out of there. My penultimate semester, I was paired with a superb mentor who, for the first time, transparently laid the situation out for me, and as soon as it had become clear that the substantive spirit of jazz had, in truth, virtually zero to do with graduating from jazz school, the game became really easy to play, and I--like a cat with a sweater on it, warily poised for the camera--humored the faculty sufficiently enough to earn my degree.
But it was weird. The game was won, my sentence served, my dues paid, whatever; but the whole experience had been so traumatic that I didn't believe I had done it. It felt hollow like, "well, the guy's been here so long I guess we'll just give him his stupid diploma," and so much rejection for so many years had crippled my confidence tremendously despite all evidence suggesting otherwise: I had hustled my way into teaching private lessons and was grooming a little garden of students who did very well in contests and stuff, was mobilizing as an artist playing recurring paying gigs, and was commanding my own nine-piece orchestra packed with extremely talented players; but still, there was this nagging voice inside me that was all, "ur doing it wrong bro."
Maybe it was delusion and maybe it was tenacity and probably it was both, but despite all the rejection I faced as a performer (and, actually, I was well-praised by my peers for my work, though I sincerely believed that until my thirst for validation was slaked by those who I perceived to be the guardians of the jazz-flame, i.e. the faculty--something that I realize now is quite illusory (that anyone could "guard" the flame, not the flame itself))--goddamnit I was going to finish what I had goddamn started and get my goddamn diploma. So I failed my barrier exams some more, and college became increasingly more like a prison sentence though, like a prison sentence, I could tell there was an end in sight if only I compliantly obeyed the guards and kept on my best behavior.
It was hard for me to accept that earnestly working to inject the spirit of jazz (as far as I understood it: individualism, deviance, "out"ness, an uncompromising drive to push creativity and performance, a refusal to bite other artists tastelessly, etc.) into my compositions and playing had been counterproductive to earning a jazz degree, but I was tired and I was broken and I wanted nothing more than to just get the fuck out of there. My penultimate semester, I was paired with a superb mentor who, for the first time, transparently laid the situation out for me, and as soon as it had become clear that the substantive spirit of jazz had, in truth, virtually zero to do with graduating from jazz school, the game became really easy to play, and I--like a cat with a sweater on it, warily poised for the camera--humored the faculty sufficiently enough to earn my degree.
But it was weird. The game was won, my sentence served, my dues paid, whatever; but the whole experience had been so traumatic that I didn't believe I had done it. It felt hollow like, "well, the guy's been here so long I guess we'll just give him his stupid diploma," and so much rejection for so many years had crippled my confidence tremendously despite all evidence suggesting otherwise: I had hustled my way into teaching private lessons and was grooming a little garden of students who did very well in contests and stuff, was mobilizing as an artist playing recurring paying gigs, and was commanding my own nine-piece orchestra packed with extremely talented players; but still, there was this nagging voice inside me that was all, "ur doing it wrong bro."