Resurfacing an old chestnut, a piece entitled Careers in Jazz, by Seattle pianist Bill Anschell, which I visited briefly in the first year of the site, with a post called Making any money in jazz. Anschell is the author of Mr. P.C.’s Guide to Jazz Etiquette and Bandstand Decorum advice column, and the 2025 book Benched: Jazz Stories.
It begins:
Every year, university programs spit out thousands of highly trained jazz musicians sporting hard-earned diplomas and high hopes. But when these graduates hit the first formal rite of jazz passage—a desperate trip to the local pawn shop—they learn that the diploma is literally not worth the paper it’s printed on. Entering school, their dream was simple: To perform music they love for attentive audiences in jazz clubs, concert halls, and festivals, and to earn a fair wage for their efforts1. But set loose from the nurturing womb of the campus, they quickly experience the shock of an indifferent and often hostile new reality.
The world doesn’t take kindly to jazz artists, and before long these graduates find their ideals displaced by bitter cynicism.
I should warn you, the perspective here is a shave dark, with a depth of fatalism usually reserved for last letters from icebound polar explorers. Jazz musicians are prone to gallows humor, delighting in talking about their own careers in the bleakest possible terms. Here, the hiatus between the essay’s original publication and its update seemingly was dedicated only to plumbing deeper into the abyss.
I’ll give a significant excerpt of it here, for the full treatment, read it at AllAboutJazz.com. The essay is predominantly about the major economic categories of jazz musician— originally gig whores, epiphytes, and Chosen Ones, but Anschell has added a few categories in the later edition.
It may seem like needlessly cruel punching down, it’s more like self-punching, circular punching— much of this applies to most people, at different times, Anschell himself included.
Gig Whores
Gig Whores are the largest class within the jazz community, and are the easiest to find. They ply their wares in hotel lobbies, restaurants, private parties of all types, and anywhere else that jazz is degraded to an artless commodity and sold to the highest bidder. This is done knowingly and willfully, but not without self-pity; while a Gig Whore may claim to be working “in the trenches,” the jazz musician within knows that he’s really plumbing untreated musical sewage.
Identifying Signs
- Tuxedo
- Bad toupee or comb-over
- Tie emblazoned with stylized jazz instrument
- Overzealous handshake
Survival techniques
- Advertising in Bridal Magazines
- Moving abroad for hotel gigs in exotic countries, only to play the worst in American pop music for drunk American businessmen
- Alcoholism
Epiphytes
Named after “air plants,” which live without need for soil, these are the true heroes of the jazz world. They eat only out of necessity, seemingly nourished by the music they play, including their hours of daily practicing. Most varieties of Epiphytes thrive in subterranean environments, such as dank basement apartments, with little apparent need for sunlight. They move frequently from hovel to hovel after seemingly exhausting the available air that sustains them. Their skin is wan, and they blink uncomfortably in daylight, preferring to wear sunglasses around the clock.
Identifying Signs
- Low body mass
- Self-cut hair
- Unmatched shoes
Survival Techniques
- Migratory movement among communities and countries that are briefly tolerant of jazz
- Supplementary income earned from plasma banks and focus groups
- Narcotics addiction
Silver Spoons
The clearest path to survival in jazz is simply to have no need for money. And while many jazz artists create their music with little regard for listeners, those who are independently wealthy have the luxury of disregarding their audience entirely. As a general rule, the wealthier the artist, the less accessible his music and the loftier his rhetoric about musical freedom and innovation.
Subset
- Artists living on disability following psychotic episodes
Identifying Signs
- Torn second-hand clothes and neglected hygiene
- “Street” jazz nickname (replacing embarrassingly aristocratic given name)
Survival Techniques
- None needed
Career Professionals
Like Silver Spoons, Career Professionals have no shortage of money; the difference is that they work for it. Although they take their “straight gig” seriously—often earning advanced college degrees and struggling to climb the corporate ladder—they still self-identify primarily as jazz artists. This creates an inevitable disconnect between their day-to-day and stage personae.
Identifying Signs
- Air of dignity
- Pricey but inexpensive-looking new outfits for each concert
- Chronic fatigue
Survival Techniques
- None needed
Survivalists
Unlike the more highly trained and thoroughly moneyed Career Professionals, Survivalists typically bounce among unskilled jobs, taking them mainly out of desperation as their gigging income falls short. More often than not this sets off a perpetual cycle of gigging, falling into debt, washing dishes or working at a music store to get back ahead, quitting to gig full-time again, then falling back into debt. Few have the wisdom to leave the jazz world altogether; many are trombonists.
Identifying Signs
- Air of desperation
- Bad teeth
- Domino’s car-tops
Survival Techniques
- Pyramid schemes
- Selling cell phones and sunglasses in makeshift mall kiosks
- Drug-dealing
Working wives
Jazz musicians with working wives may be nearly as fortunate as the Silver Spoons, and freed to lead similarly privileged lifestyles. Or they may discover over time that their jazz career and the terms of their marital relationship are virtually incompatible. It all depends on a complex formula that charts the timing of an artist’s marriage against the progress of his career to that point. The results of this equation can be distilled into two subsets, with highly divergent outcomes.
Identifying Signs, Survival Techniques
- Artists supported by their spouses are better dressed, better fed, and better mannered than most of their peers. They have no survival techniques, as their fate is fully in the hands of another.
Jazz Educators
Jazz music, like philosophy, ancient literature, and other insular fields with limited real-world application, has created its own cozy home in the educational system. In secondary schools, it gives young musicians a relatively harmless introduction to a music they’ll later discard as outdated and irrelevant. But at the college level, jazz majors are irretrievably immersed in the music’s history, theory and—above all—performance. Once the real world shatters their performing aspirations, many flee right back to the university or conservatory where, safely ensconced in a tenured position, they perpetuate the vicious cycle.
Identifying Signs
- The aforementioned jazz disguise
Survival Techniques
- The university professor is fully bilingual, equally at home with the pinched, grammatically correct language of the academic, and the jargon-laced, “street” banter of the jazz artist. By necessity, he has multiple personalities to complement his linguistics: entering a music department meeting, he can readily swap out his loose jazz cool for the requisite constipated classical clench.
“The Industry”
These disparate industry segments don’t lend themselves to generalization, beyond their destructive effect on the jazz environment. However, those who reach the top of their profession— particularly the more highly paid record label executives— may share certain characteristics:
Identifying Signs
- Blood on their hands
- Blatant displays of excess, including expensive cars, single-malt scotches, cigars, and professionally reconstructed women
Survival Techniques
- The industry itself is a survival method for those drawn to jazz, money and power, which are otherwise never found in the same place
The Classes at Play, and at War
The jazz class system is both hierarchical and pliable. This enables an artist not only to interact with artists from other classes, but also to move from one class to others below it as his career inevitably declines.
Jazz Class Hierarchy
Chosen Ones
Epiphytes
Jazz Educators
Silver Spoons
Gig Whores
Working Spouses
Career Professionals
Survivalists
Industry
Sample interactions among classes
When musicians from two or more classes interact professionally, the results are both predictable and entertaining.
Example One: A bandleader, knowing an Epiphyte has fallen on hard times, invites him to play a wedding gig, along with the leader’s usual assemblage of Gig Whores. What happens?
The Epiphyte shows up for the tux gig wearing black jeans, black tennis shoes, white tee-shirt, dark navy blazer, and bow tie. He begins the gig playing in a correctly subdued, unswinging style. During each break, he eats frantically off the buffet, then stuffs more food—cocktail shrimp, brie cheese, spanakopita, and swedish meatballs—into his pockets. He also drinks furiously from the open bar. Each subsequent set, his playing becomes louder and more adventurous, and before long he’s embarking on long, angular, ear-bending solos, even as he’s swearing at the drummer for not digging in hard enough. The rest of the Gig Whores, caught between wanting to please the leader and emulate the Epiphyte, begin to similarly stretch. The bride’s mother complains, the Epiphyte storms off the bandstand, and the leader silently vows to replace his entire band.
Career Trajectories
Jazz career trajectories conform directly to the law of gravitational forces: Any and all movement is downward. One Gig Whore might marry a woman who financially supports but personally belittles him; another, when times get lean, might be forced to take a low-level day job for survival. An Epiphyte, finding his available oxygen supply running low, might compromise his musical ideals by becoming a Gig Whore, or stand on principle and join the Survivalists. A Silver Spoon, tired of playing inaccessible music for audiences of four to eight people, might instead enter the industry, founding a new record label that documents, for eternity, the same inaccessible music.
While this discussion of “Jazz Educators” focuses on university professors, jazz is also taught in the secondary schools and through private instruction. These lower-level teachers have one commonality with university faculty: They’d really rather be gigging. Beyond that, though, they have their own unique profiles:
Secondary school teachers: Although these teachers rank beneath university teachers in the jazz pecking order and in societal standing, theirs is the more noble calling. While university professors are largely responsible for the flooding of the market with aspiring professionals—highly trained and largely generic—secondary school teachers are more interested in building the future jazz audience. Their focus is on instilling an understanding of and appreciation for jazz among their students; unfortunately, this appreciation quickly fades with the students’ maturity.
Private instructors: Whether teaching in the back rooms of music stores or out of their own homes, these are individuals who tried and failed to make it as Gig Whores. Although most other musicians consider private instruction the final stop before suicide, society is kinder to these unfortunates, allowing them to hide their indignity behind “the importance of arts education,” “passing knowledge from generation to generation,” and “keeping youth off the streets.”
End excerpt. I can’t help but think of this line, from Slaughterhouse Five:
Billy predicts his own death within an hour. He laughs about it, invites the crowd to laugh with him.
And I couldn’t not include that last thing above, which reflects my own situation— and that of a lot of people now. I was ahead of the curve for failing as a gig whore, now everybody’s doing it. In fact there are some requirements beyond just being able to play, and willing to take any gig. Of course, if I thought about it in those terms, I’d be, I don’t know, jumping off a bridge someplace right now. As we all would, since the upshot here is that we’re all fractally screwed, eternally. You wouldn’t want to be around anybody who flat adopted that as their view on life.
For me, an optimist, the idea— other than to just be funny about how much our job sucks economically— is to brutally purge every last little bit of egotism and illusion about it. Everybody gets compromised sometime, on some level, you just accept it and keep working out how to continue.
Do follow Mr. P.C.’s Guide to Jazz Etiquette and Bandstand Decorum on Facebook, and buy Benched: Jazz Stories, my copy is on the way now.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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