How to Grow as a Musician: What All Musicians Must Know to Succeed

By Sheila E. Anderson

Professional musicians tell how they developed as artists, how they approach performance, and how they handle the business side of the businessoffering solace and heartfelt inspiration along the way. How to Grow as a Musician is packed with candid advice on everything from overcoming failure to the art of writing a song to doing that allimportant "ego check." It also covers such vital practical areas as the role of contracts, selfpromotion, getting and keeping gigs, and managing money. A special selfevaluation lets readers assess whether they have what they need to succeed in the music business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allworth
• Release date: Jul 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781621531098

Book preview

Part One On Development as an Artist

The mastership in music, and in life, in

fact, is not something that can’t be

taught—it can only be caught.

— RODNEY JONES

1

Getting Started

Despite the diversity of the musicians I interviewed, they all have one thing in common: drive and determination. Once music became a focus in their lives, they all worked hard to make it in the business. Each had what is called an Ah-Ha moment—or moments—when things just clicked. Those moments came at different periods of their lives, some later than others.

Music in the Home

Al Jarreau knew by the time he had sung a few gigs as a kid, around the age of fifteen, that he loved to sing.

I was hired by the dance band led by a guy in Milwaukee who had been a horn player with Duke Ellington. By the time I had worked in an organized band and a trio beyond church music—which was there for me before all of my growing-up life, and before that were the show tunes I learned in the high-school choir—I was beginning to get the sense that I would sing, even if I had to do it for free the rest of my life. If I could earn a little bit of money, that would be great. Then I began to dream at about eighteen or nineteen, when I was in college, that it would be a wonderful way to go through life. I began to look for opportunities.

It took Al some years before he would completely focus his energy on being a singer. Al chose to go to college. He enrolled at Ripon College in Wisconsin, graduated with a bachelor of science degree in psychology, and then moved on to get his master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation from the University of Iowa. He moved to San Francisco, California, in 1964 to take his state board exams. Al chose San Francisco because it was a hotbed of the new music at the time. It has an active jazz community … I had the best of both worlds. Although he tried to make a go of the career for which his education had prepared him, he found himself looking to music more and more:

"When I worked as a rehabilitation counselor, [I said] maybe I’d make some contacts and find myself with a recording career. It took some lack of success on the job for me to realize that I had to leave it at the state level and go to a small agency. I could not handle the case load that was expected of a counselor; I’m too slow. I was on my way to a smaller agency or I had to decide to give this music a real chance … I worked all day, every day on the music and on finding myself a record deal. It did not happen until seven years later. I left the job in 1968, and in 1975 the I Got By album came out."

Like Al Jarreau, Joe Grushecky also graduated from college, but with a teaching degree. I have a teaching degree, so I took a special-education job in a mental institution with total-care kids, and that is what I used to finance my musical ambitions. He was influenced by his father who played professionally: I grew up in a musician family, and there were always instruments in the house. My father had played professionally, but he gave it up when I was a teenager. There was always a germ, an idea in my head, like a lot of guys of my generation. The Beatles [were dominant]; we watched them on Ed Sullivan, and that was a pivotal moment that led me to buy a guitar.

Allan Harris was born in Brooklyn, New York, but later moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he got to know Joe Grushecky and play with several bands. Although he grew up with music in my family; my mother was a classical pianist, my aunt an opera singer, it was not until he got to college that the musician seeds began to germinate within Allan. Not sure which genre on which to concentrate, he simply started going to clubs. When Allan sang in coffee shops, he started making money playing