Located in a low-slung beige and rust-brown building several yards from Mission Street’s overcrossing of Interstate 280, the Mission YMCA isn’t an obvious place to go looking for Cajun music. But on a recent weekday, some three dozen seniors gathered for lunch while the Creole Belles delivered a set of waltzes, blues, zydeco, and classic Cajun numbers like “Blues à Bébé” by the Carrière Brothers. As a few Chinese women got up to dance, guitarist Karen Leigh broke into a wide grin.
Led by Delilah Lee Lewis on fiddle, triangle, and vocals, with Maureen Karpan on accordion and vocals and Leigh on guitar and vocals, the Creole Belles came together in Berkeley in the mid-’90s, and the women have been a mainstay on the Bay Area roots-music scene ever since. It’s a scene that’s still recovering from the pandemic, and the YMCA gig is part of the ambitious but low-visibility program Music aLIVE, which aims to keep musicians working by bringing American roots music into nontraditional spaces.
Created by vocalist Hilary Perkins (who performs as Nell Robinson) and guitarist Jim Nunally under the auspices of their nonprofit Whippoorwill Arts, Music aLIVE is one of the more recent grassroots programs launched by musicians to reshape a landscape that’s increasingly hostile for independent performing artists.
The project was born out of desperation, when just about every in-person performance opportunity evaporated in March 2020. Irked by some of the blithe media coverage, “with lots of talk about musicians on ‘sabbatical,’” Perkins said, she saw her friends and colleagues forced to make life-altering decisions.
“There were these dreamy articles about how musicians were loving this, that it was a break from touring,” she said. “There was a grain of truth to that, but most musicians were really suffering. They were moving, being forced to leave homes because they couldn’t pay rent or the mortgage. Their calling was being made impossible.”
Working with an array of membership music organizations covering folk, bluegrass, blues, and other American roots and traditional music, Whippoorwill Arts commissioned a national survey of musicians about what they needed to thrive. The answer, more than anything, was living-wage gigs, and thus was born Music aLIVE (not to be confused with the similarly named New Music U.S.A. initiative or the music education publication).
With each musician guaranteed $200 for an hour-long set, “we’ve presented about 400 concerts featuring 500 musicians, reaching about 18,000 listeners,” said Gabriel Block, Music aLIVE coordinator, who joined Perkins on a recent phone interview. “We expect to present another 200 concerts by the end of the year.”
Using a team of community bookers who strive to reach a demographically diverse array of acts, Music aLIVE is currently working in California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Tennessee. The initiative’s website streamlines the booking process, facilitating communication between artists and venues and minimizing the need for revenue-sapping infrastructure. There are three chapters in the Bay Area, presenting a steady flow of gigs in settings such as low-income housing developments, underserved schools, shelters, and facilities for seniors and disabled adults.
Whippoorwill Arts launched the program with some private seed funding and has garnered support from community foundations and individual donors making periodic gifts. A recently hired grant writer is working on connecting with the Zellerbach Family and Fleishhacker Foundations, which have long track records supporting the arts.
The grant model isn’t always a good fit, however, Perkins noted. In writing grant proposals, “we’ve been told to focus on the communities we’re serving, not the musicians,” she said.
Music aLIVE alone doesn’t provide enough work to sustain a musician. In order to balance reaching a wide number of artists and providing a significant revenue stream, the program now caps the total number of gigs a musician can take through it at eight a year, which would provide $1,600. Community bookers, who are volunteers, can play up to 12 times a year, “as a bit of a perk for them,” Block said.
“It’s so cool to have monthly gigs,” Perkins added. “It can serve as a rehearsal and an anchor to prepare new material. It keeps the band employed. On the other hand, we want to reach as many musicians as possible. We’re limited only by money. [We] could be in every city and town.”
If Music aLIVE seeks to change the equation on the ground for musicians by bringing music into new spaces, Jazz in the Neighborhood is working to change the expectations of performing artists. Founded a decade ago by veteran trumpeter and clinician Mario Guarneri, the organization advocates for venues to pay musicians a living wage while itself producing concerts that cover the $150 minimum per player.
Guarneri works with venues around the region, from Keys Jazz Bistro in North Beach, which provides office space for JITN, to Bird & Beckett Books and Records in Glen Park to Mr. Tipple’s in the Civic Center and Mama Kin in San José. While he’s always looking to expand performance opportunities, Guarneri is working just as hard to build solidarity among musicians.
“It’s been an interesting journey,” he said. “From the beginning the motivation had a lot to do with musician working conditions and what was going on. As we’ve gotten stronger, my idea has evolved to put the focus back on musicians, really making an effort to get musicians to take more responsibility.”
At a time when writers and actors are striking in Hollywood over how to divide up revenue sources disrupted by streaming and the possibilities of AI, musicians face the age-old quandary of supply and demand. With a steady stream of young musicians entering the field eager to work, venues tend to hold the balance of power when it comes to setting wages. It’s not unusual to hear about restaurant and club gigs that pay $50 to $100 for a night’s work, the same pay scale that prevailed circa 1973.
“The problem in the community has been so deep people have totally given up,” Guarneri said. “They just show up and work for a little cash. Or some people emerged and created their own thing. The Jazz Mafia is great example of creating your own economy.”
One effort to build camaraderie is the Independent Musicians Alliance, a group launched in February 2020 by Guarneri and Eric Whittington, the proprietor of Bird & Beckett. With 160 members, the IMA is fighting against the complacency and deeply ingrained cynicism bred by stagnant wages and churning booms and busts that reconfigure the gig scene once or twice a decade. Meetings often include refreshments and a jam session; the next one takes place at Bird & Beckett on Aug. 28.
For Whittington, helping musicians get organized is part of a longstanding commitment to the labor movement. Before he took over Bird & Beckett, he was doing graduate work in labor studies at San Francisco State University. In the mid-’90s, an advertisement in the Bay Guardian about musicians organizing called for a meeting at Storyville, a short-lived San Francisco club run by saxophonist Don Pender.
Whittington didn’t make it to the meeting, but the musician who placed the ad, the late saxophonist Chuck Peterson, was active in the musicians’ union and would play the bookstore regularly for years. The IMA is in regular touch with the newly invigorated musicians’ local, but it’s still a steep upward push.
“People will play here and not even want to address the issue,” Whittington said. “But little by little people are joining. The association with Local 6 is growing. We’re having monthly meetings, mostly at Keys or here. It’s a challenge. Players who are in their 40s and 50s, they toughed it out this long and never joined anything before. They’re cynical, maybe rightly so, but little by little we’re reaching people.”
Guarneri and Music aLIVE’s Perkins are in regular touch with each other, sharing ideas and tactics. While she isn’t trying to organize roots musicians, Perkins is on the same page when it comes to getting players paid. Whippoorwill Arts recently drafted ethical pay guidelines that could help turn pro bono performances into income-making opportunities.
“The kinds of gigs musicians normally are asked to do for free, we’re looking at guaranteeing them pay,” Perkins said. “With roots music, it’s often acoustic and needs minimal amplification, and these gigs are private, and so they don’t conflict with ticketed gigs. The beauty of it is there are a lot of audiences who are not going to go to even a friendly neighborhood venue. Why? Disability, money, culture. Let’s bring music to the people who need it and not worry about marketing. Bring it to people where they are.”
