By Todd Bryant Weeks
Bassist Bob Cranshaw. Photo credit: Enid Farber.
Ask any jazz musician, especially one of color, if there is paradox involved with their work. They might respond by asking, “Where do I begin?”
Take as a for instance, the following:
In 2007, the organization Justice for Jazz Artists!, which has been championed by preeminent musicians such as Ron Carter, Jimmy Owens, Reggie Workman, Bob Cranshaw and Randy Weston; respected writers Nat Hentoff, Gary Giddins, Dan Morgenstern and Amiri Baraka (and politicos NYC Councilmember Diana Reyna, NYC Mayor David N. Dinkins and NY State Ways and Means Chairman Herman “Denny” Farrell, to name a few) celebrated what for all intents and purposes appeared to be a clear victory in their fight to get retirement benefits for jazz artists: the NY State Legislature passed a law allowing for a tax break on admission to NYC jazz clubs, paving the way for the clubs to redirect that money into the musicians’ pension fund. Sounds good, right?
The rub: The owners, who supported the bill up front, balked when they realized they might be deemed employers by the state, thus putting them on the hook for NYS statutory benefits like unemployment, social security, workers comp—none of which the musicians then enjoyed.
Four years later, most jazz artists still don’t have access to basic benefits like health insurance, social security, or unemployment. And for most people who work in this field, the notion of a pension is inconceivable.
Jazz musicians may appear to represent a small minority of people looking towards a career in the music industry today. However, the numbers tell a different story. In 2007, the group NYC Performance Arts Spaces, conducted a survey of area musicians to determine how when and where they made their living. According to the study, “Where Can We Work?” 31% of the NYC musicians polled worked in the jazz field. Many of these performers also worked in other genres, including the pop, Broadway and classical fields. The study quoted various experts, including the celebrated New Yorker writer Alex Ross, and the guitarist/activist Marc Ribot. It also looked at the availability of work: “Clubs that feature jazz in NYC are overwhelmed with musicians who want to play,” stated on respondent, “and they know they have a buyer’s market.” [1]
Ross commented on the flourishing experimental scene on NYC’s Lower East Side. “There’s more new music in the city than ever before,” wrote Ross in 2007, “and an exceptionally vital group of young composers is driving the proliferation of the new music.”[2]
The truth is that although there continue to be hundreds of young musicians graduating from jazz programs across the country every year—and that there is plenty of music to be heard—the majority of small club owners have opted to accept a structure which encourages younger players to assume the entire risk of putting on a performance by insisting that these musicians “pay to play;” that is, the performers are asked to guarantee that a certain number of audience members will cross the threshold of the club in order for the band to be eligible for their percentage of the door, which is often less than 50% of the total admission receipts. Further, musicians are asked to create their own promotional materials, and increasingly have been levied fees for sound checks and access to sound and light technicians. In one instance, during the summer of 2011, a musician was attacked by a club’s bouncer when he refused to compensate the club because he drew an insufficient number of paying customers to cover the bands’ expenses, a scenario which one musician called, “another example of rampant exploitation, now compounded with violence.”[3]
Most NYC jazz clubs are non union.
Despite an overabundance of players, and a deep reduction in the overall amount of money spent nationally and internationally on jazz, the music remains a healthy part of the NYC live music economy. While smaller club owners may have felt the recent economic crunch, tens of thousands of fans travel to New York every year just to hear live jazz in its home base.
Jazz has been recognized by the U.S. Congress as “America’s National Treasure,” and clubs like the Blue Note, Birdland, the Jazz Standard, Iridium and the Village Vanguard are still filling seats and charging healthy (some would say exorbitant) ticket prices for national and international acts. And although they don’t receive benefits, top tier band leaders and their side musicians often pull in decent money in these venues. Yet without the protection of union contracts that provide for scale wages that can’t be negotiated down (only up), and rules around the use of recordings, grievance and arbitration, and of course, benefits, these musicians are essentially on their own. When you factor in that they are generally paid as 1099 Independent Contractors, they are essentially being asked to carry the full burden of their Social Security benefit, rather than split the payments with the club owner. Not exactly an equitable arrangement.
In many instances, musicians are simply paid in cash, and remain open to audit by the state Department of Labor or the IRS.
Jazz performers are just one group among a larger body of musicians—made up of mainly African Americans—who have been exploited. From the days of traveling vaudeville and tent shows through to the Modern Civil Rights Era and beyond, black musicians have been subjected to second class lodgings and travel accommodations, and abject racism, particularly in the Deep South. Historically, jazz musicians are among the most abused of all professional performers in our history. Pit bands, especially ones made up of blacks, from whence many of the early jazz ensembles sprung, were often treated as a lower caste by more visible actors, singers and dancers.
There are myriad stories of jazz musicians being exposed to exploitation, harassment, racism and violence from the music’s beginnings. Some of the greatest figures of the last century were among the most exploited, or were effectively discarded when they grew old and could not earn a living. In 1938, an elderly Joe “King” Oliver, perhaps the most influential American jazz musician before Louis Armstrong, a renowned performer with an international reputation, was discovered in Atlanta, Georgia, destitute and working as a janitor.
With the advent of the recording industry in the 1910s, musicians were almost never fully informed of their rights regarding publishing and recording royalties. Managers, promoters, agents and producers regularly stole from artists by fraudulently adding their own names to recording contracts as composers, lyricists and arrangers. Artists’ royalties, when they were paid, were almost uniformly, grossly inaccurate.
During the 1930s and ‘40s, the deftly talented pianist-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams, an African American, routinely fought for publishing royalties for her original compositions, but rarely won. Without expensive legal representation, jazz musicians were easy targets for unethical, predatory show business “gadflies” who well understood the business of defrauding the artists, whose main concern lay in creating and performing, and not in accounting.
Racism was endemic, and even the most successful musicians were victimized. Stories of abuse are a routine part of the culture. Even Miles Davis, an iconic figure if ever there was one, was once savagely beaten by an NYC policeman in front of a major NYC club where he was headlining, because he refused to “move on.”
Although the racial climate is very different today, jazz musicians of all stripes are still uninformed as to their rights in the workplace. And there are innumerable stories of well known artists who cannot afford to keep their homes or are devastated when they become ill with no safety net. The issues are as real today as ever before.
Today, musicians still are subject to shady deals where promoters book bands into clubs, only to make promises to owners that they have no intention of keeping. Headliners will be promised and not produced at show time and then the owner will refuse to pay the promoter the promised amount. Gigs are cancelled without notice and guarantees are ignored. The musicians are always the ones to suffer in these situations, as they are invariably underpaid. Because band leaders are often the ones who negotiate the contract, it has become a standard industry practice for musicians not to know what their fellow band mates are receiving in wages. This generally works to the owners’ benefit.
And despite the fact that a club may often dictate proscribed house policies as to when the band should start and stop playing, what the musicians may or may not wear, and even, in some cases, what type of music the band is to play, the club owners themselves have never been liable for those obligations that most other employers assume at the outset—that they will pay each musician independently on a W-2, and help to ensure the musicians’ overall security by paying into unemployment, disability and workers’ comp.
Although the Employer-Employee relationship still remains murky (musicians are “Employees” in the eyes of NY State, but who the “Employer” is has never been legally set down), what is clear is that musicians have few if any real legal rights in the workplace, apart from those they insist upon through their own personal service agreements.
At this writing, there are arguably dozens of “retired” jazz performers here in New York who can barely make ends meet, living hand to mouth with little or no social security, and no other discernable safety net.
Truth be told, the union has not always been there for these performers. This represents an ongoing component of a larger problem. The musicians rely on handouts, or direct assistance from essential entities like the Local 802 Musicians’ Assistance Program or the Jazz Foundation of America. Because there has historically been a lack of advocacy, a culture of charity has sprung up. But there are far more cases than there are charitable dollars to ameliorate suffering.
Despite the fact that the New York City musicians’ local has always been integrated; despite the fact that over the years Local 802 has bucked societal trends by having integrated governing boards; and despite the fact that in recent decades 802 has reached out to jazz artists with the formation of a Jazz Advisory Committee – despite all this, the union is still learning how best to advocate for those who play vernacular music, and for people of color.
Jazz musicians have rarely, if ever, enjoyed union benefits while working in the clubs. Even when union contracts exist, no artist works at any one club with enough frequency to secure eligibility in either the union’s health benefits plan or the American Federation of Musicians’ pension fund from that employment alone.
Club owners have also found various ways to get around agreements, especially if they are conducting a cash business, which for years was the industry standard.
A fine big band trumpeter, Leo Ball, once related a story about how he had tried to come together with his band mates to organize a local venue, the now defunct Red Blazer.
“We got more than 50% of the musicians at the Red Blazer to agree to sign union cards,” remembered Ball, “and then we went to the owner to set up a negotiation. He said he was all for it, but he was forbidden by the state to negotiate with the union since he was in Chapter 11.
“I asked him how long he’d been in Chapter 11,” said Ball with a sad smile.
‘Since I opened,’” was the blunt response.
In order for jazz musicians to have access to benefits, more of their work (from different revenue sources, and from a wider number of venues) needs to be organized. The union has successfully organized some resident jazz orchestras, several tours and bandleaders, as well as teaching employment. Adding benefits from the clubs would be another important step towards meaningful benefits for all who work in this underrepresented field.
When the AFM was at its peak membership in the 1950’s, vernacular music like jazz took a back seat to the concert field and Broadway, and the union’s neglect of the jazz field was often perceived by musicians as being anti-black.
The bassist and educator Dr. Larry Ridley recalls, “I’ve been in the union since 1960. As African-American musicians, we always had to fight to get the respect we deserved, even within our own union. Black musicians back then looked at the union as being insensitive to our needs – even as locals in every town, big and small, still demanded union dues on every gig we played.”
This climate of indifference began to change in the early 1980’s, as then 802 President John Glasel, who was a Broadway musician (and a jazz trumpet player), worked to repeal the daunting cabaret laws that hamstrung musicians by prohibiting small venues and restaurants from hiring more than three performers at a time, and by excluding percussion and horn players from many gigs.
In the early 1990’s, Jimmy Owens, the late Benny Powell, Bob Cranshaw and Jamil Nasser (also deceased) formed the Local 802 Jazz Advisory Committee to address the inequities that had plagued jazz performers who were unionized – and those who weren’t but who wanted to take advantage of collective bargaining agreements and benefits programs.
Jimmy Owens remembers it this way. “It was a case of benign neglect,” Owens said. “That’s a nice way of putting it. The union and the musicians didn’t really look to secure the kinds of protections that should have been made available to all musicians. And, what was worse, the pension fund was kept a closely guarded secret.”
As rock became dominant in the 1960s, and jazz clubs began to founder, some jazz artists were able to make a living by working in studio bands, recording jingles, or playing in pit orchestras. Others sought refuge in Europe, where state-funded venues and a healthy appreciation for American vernacular music had created a vibrant, and expanding, jazz scene. Many musicians felt that both the country and the union had turned away from them.
Major jazz venues folded, but others sprung up in their wake. Clubs like the Blue Note and Birdland filled voids left by The Cookery, the Village Gate and the Half Note.
By the early 2000s, in an attempt to bring some equity to the New York club scene, the Local 802 Jazz Advisory Committee, with the help and support of New York City Assemblyman Herman “Denny” Farrell Jr. as well as upstate legislators George Maziarz and Joseph Morrelle, succeeded in getting a bill passed in Albany that allowed for an abatement of the sales tax normally charged on admission to small venues.
Like the earlier Turkus Award (the forgiven 1963 Broadway ticket tax utilized for Broadway union benefits and still in effect today) the door tax dollars from the clubs were now free to be contributed to the AFM Pension Fund.
But nothing happened.
Since the law as written did not actually compel the owners to do anything, the club owners were not violating any laws by refusing to redirect the tax. Even after the union successfully addressed the statutory benefits piece of the puzzle, allowing for a scenario where contributions could be made even as business in the clubs went on as usual, most of the owners have yet to agree to sit down and discuss a resolution with the union.
Again, the jazz musicians found themselves on the outside looking in.
In the coming months, Local 802 hopes to move hearts and minds on this issue with two simple words – “Justice” and “Jazz.”
At this writing, the Justice for Jazz Artists! has gathered over 3,000 signatures of prominent jazz artists and their fans in support of the campaign, and has put together a growing coalition of high profile endorsers.
For some artists for whom these efforts may be too little, too late, there must be continued advocacy.
If they are unable to access basic benefits programs due to past inequities, then we all have an obligation to these senior members of our musical community; at the very least we should do what we can to promote their music and their legacy and ensure their comfort and security in their later years.
For those younger musicians who work night after night in local clubs with no benefits, Justice for Jazz Artists! will have a real and lasting impact.
Parts of this article originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of Allegro, Volume CIX No. 7/8 . Allegro is the official the magazine of AFM, Local 802 in NYC.
[1] “Where Can We Work?” study completed in 2007 by NYC Performance Arts Spaces, page 38.
[2] Alex Ross, “Club Acts: New York’s vital new-music scene,” The New Yorker, (16 April 2007), 166-167.
[3] Margaret Davis Grimes, in an email communication with the author, September 20, 2011.
