London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

You’re only as good as …

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‘ … your last gig,’ so they say. But it’s not necessarily as straightforward as that. Listeners don’t in practice tend to distinguish between members of a group, so unless you perform solo – really solo, regardless of what the credited act name is – then you’re only as good, for everyone in the crowd that hasn’t seen you do another performance quite recently, as everyone in your band. If one of your bandmates has a crisis of confidence in the middle of her feature solo, or messes up the words to a song he arranged, then that failing attaches to you almost as much as them.

In fact, to the average punter, there isn’t really a separation between performers and technical setup either. So if your guitar is cheap and has a nasty tone; or the PA at that gig has a duff level control on the channel that had your bassist going through it; or the guy riding sliders simply ran with typical guitar rock band assumptions and left the violin so low in the mix the solos were inaudible over the rhythm strumming; all of that still reflects back onto you, any one of the performers, more or less (partly because any non-human element, and almost equally the sound engineer in the dark at the back, is invisible and the performers are very visible).

And if you do a performance which you think didn’t sound good – or you reckon the audience didn’t think sounded good – regardless of whether you personally did anything wrong or could have done anything better, this can be disheartening.

But you’re ultimately not only as good as your last gig; you’re as good as your ability, dedication, stagecraft and experience multiplied together. And if you don’t consider that to be the objective truth, there’s no way to pick yourself up and try your darnedest to make your next performance better reflect how good you are.

This is what I keep telling myself anyway.

Can’t go over / under / round it, gotta …

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There’s nothing quite like seeing an advert you replied to – and got no response – has been reposted. Trying to decide whether to apply again is exquisite.

Another wonderful experience is practising an excerpt to making-significant-progress accuracy at what seems a reasonable speed – then checking the metronome marking and finding it’s much, much faster.

Or having so many things you want to practise that your left hand actually starts seizing up because you haven’t played at that intensity for about a decade.

First-world problems, true. But they still demand a lot to keep going through them (almost as much as sheer absence of anyone apparently looking for what you think you have to offer right now!). Here’s hoping for perseverance, or maybe – just maybe – for a few signs of results. That would be nice.

Agender

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A little while back I spotted a Facebook musicians wanted ad, which I think was already old then, for singers for a gospel choir – specifying they had to be black. There was an attempt at defending it with a clause number from the Race Relations Act, but the (fairly predictable) response was a storm of criticism and the impression you probably couldn’t do that without good non-musical reason (eg a Supremes lookalike tribute act, or perhaps a piece of historical stage or screen drama).

But here’s the unexpected bit. There are quite a lot of band member / dep / last minute freelancer ads that specify female performers. (In the interests of truthfulness, I have seen one I can remember, within the constraints I’m about to describe, that specified male.) Now I’m not talking about vocalists; male and female voices are for most musical purposes effectively different instruments and of course you may very well specify which you’re after. But I’m thinking of adverts for female drummers / bassists to join rock bands (presumably all-female groups) and saxophonists or violinists for one-off solo engagements or to fill spots in things like wedding string quartets.

And I kind of think that shouldn’t be OK, because in that context gender makes no difference to your musical ability, and I question whether it’s really ethical to say you want a woman instead of a man on visual grounds. I mean I know men are a lot less historically badly treated than people of African ethnicity (to put it comically mildly!), but what’s ultimately the difference between ‘I want my string quartet to be all women’ and ‘I want my gospel choir to be all black’? It’s a little bit ironic that in my observation to date a definite majority of the string players working outside long-term orchestral contracts or top-end solo careers are women anyway, but also irrelevant. No, I wouldn’t say it’s a major cramp on my career – I get more rejections from finding someone before I applied, or better, than I have to ignore ads because of my gender by some way – but it’s still closing doors. The principle of the thing seems flawed.

Time off from what?

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Have you seen About a Boy? Do you remember that scene where the rich waster (as I like to think of anyone who doesn’t have to work a lot to maintain life security, being essentially a Merseyside inverted snob) is trying to chat up a girl and she asks him what he does?

‘Oh, I’m taking some time off right now.’

‘Time off from what?’

‘From – nothing much I guess.’

(or words to that effect – I saw it once about 8 years ago and can’t remember exactly)

It feels a bit like that with freelance working. I mean, thanks to all the prep / promo / schmoozing stuff I’ve been doing, I probably really could do with a break in September. But September is when I’m likely to have done a lot of marketing and be starting to run down on ideas, I’ll only be in my desk job two days a week, and I’ll be very lucky if any significant number of bookings has started to arrive. So taking time off to rest and recover at that point seems a bit like ‘Time off from what? Checking your emails? Practising? Neither of those sound wise things to drop.’ But I know from much past experience that if you don’t rest, you break. The concept of a Sabbath – of days off and other breaks over longer periods of time – is one of the most perceptive things the Abrahamic tradition has to offer the world, and in the increasingly secular-materialist West, possibly the most counter-cultural. It’s just less straightforward when ‘work’ isn’t going to a specific place to do specific things there, and any viable definition of ‘work’ really has to include looking for and soliciting the actual paid activity.

Focus! ? …

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It’s a standard turn of phrase – so standard I’m sure I’ve used it of the current phase of my life, though I can’t remember a specific instance – to say someone leaves a job / band / company / area, or just reduces their involvement in some way, ‘in order to focus on [something, at its loosest the classic ‘other projects’]’.

It would certainly seem reasonable to say I’m going part-time in my day job to focus on music, specifically paid engagements as a violinist and violist. And I have been trying to reintroduce discipline and consistency into my personal playing, instituting a ‘play something every day’ rule and setting about some fairly gruelling engagement with scales and studies.

But focusing on this, in any sense of making it key priority, is being hampered by two significant things at the minute. The first is that, no matter how good you sound, no one will pay you to play if they don’t firstly know you exist as a musician and secondly hear something of you. So thus far, ironically, in terms of my musical ‘career’, if I have one, marketing and promotion have necessarily taken precedence over polishing my actual music-making, though not to the total exclusion of the latter.

Second is that some practicalities refuse to be deferred to a convenient point in the narratives that may engage much more of your attention. Last night I discovered the deadline for me to move out of my current house, which I had believed on the evidence of the last written contact about it to be 12 September, has in fact moved up to the end of the month. That knocked the house plan I had been wrestling with on the head, and now I have under three weeks to find a room. Because a paid gig, or even a killer Soundcloud demo playlist, won’t seem a very good tradeoff sleeping on a friend’s sofa with nowhere to store my possessions (not that much but certainly too much to carry on my back!). So music has to lose the ‘focus’ to combing through ads, emailing and ringing people, and viewings / interviews, except in as far as I can do both. Bleuch.

So near and yet so far …

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Quite literally this time. A nice little ego boost (after a lot of the inevitable unanswered emails lately) to be told I ‘sound ideal’ for a job playing fiddle with an Americana / Cajun / bluegrass etc. act – balanced by the fact that it’s in Guildford and the pay would probably be wiped out by travel costs. Still it might turn out to be practical, and if nothing else it reassures me that there is stuff out there that I’m equipped for – just that slightly too much of what I’ve found so far has been slightly too far ‘out there’ …

MP3ing the blues

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It would seem daft after the earlier post about the blues not to do a blues demo, so here it is. I’ve yielded to doing some vocals as well (largely to indicate the possibility of solo gigs in this genre). Check it out!

Rambling on

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Last night I tagged along with the second Roots Ramble – a ‘musical bar crawl’ taking in roughly one-hour unplugged performances at an independent record store (yes we have one!), a bar and three pubs around east Oxford. It’s a collaborative venture between rising roots/Americana band Swindlestock, much-lauded pure country singer-songwriter Ags Connolly, and no-holds-barred trad bluegrass outfit Francis Pugh and the Whisky Singers. So I went along, joined in on some of the Whisky Singers’ sets to general approval and mostly my own satisfaction, and got involved in the more collective rabble-rousing covers in the last couple of venues as the noise level went up and everyone (very much including the musicians!) tended to be drunker.

And it was fun. And it also at least supports a certain point about my ability to slot in and support, or even collaborate, effectively on very little preparation. My list of potential genres doesn’t actually even include country or bluegrass (maybe I should change that), but the genre specialists I was playing with certainly seemed accepting, particularly of my ‘chugging’ fast-wrist work on more bluegrassy stuff, which Pugh and his very gifted banjo fingerpicker applauded. And that with no more than being told the key, listening hard and the odd glance at someone else’s fretboard.

But, the key question in my current situation, how do I monetise that? There seems to be an almost unbridgeable gap between the musicians who all have day jobs and accept fifty quid between a four-piece if none of them have to spend too much on petrol on the one hand; and the real pros (not stars, ‘blue collar’ musicians, but very insistent on their commercial supplier status), who are unlikely to get on stage for under triple figures including expenses. And undoubtedly fun though jamming with the first group is, I’m starting to realise that networking with them does almost nothing to increase my contact with the second group – who are the only ones in possession of any profit margin to pay additional or dep players.

The final note I think comes from Swindlestock’s guitarist and key instrumentalist Garry Richardson:

If you’re going to try and make money out of music, form a ceilidh band. That’ll be your bread and butter.

Music: even in the individualist 21st-century West, you still can’t expect to go it alone.

Got the blues

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Last night I discovered a jewel in – not exactly the mud, but a highly unexpected place. The Jack Russell in Marston is a very unremarkable pub. I would be unlikely, frankly, to set foot in it without specific reason, especially armed with the knowledge I now have that the nearest to real ale they are serving may be either Guinness or the dreaded Greene King IPA. Based on observing other Oxford pubs, I would in fact guess it won’t be all that long before it either gets taken over and turned into a popular but slightly overpriced hipster gastropub, or sadly shuts altogether.

However, I had a reason to be there, namely an ad for an ‘electric blues jam session – join in with the house band’ picked up in Daily Info (the goldmine of things you would never have tried to find out are going on in Oxford). Playing (mostly playing, and mostly on violin) the blues is my guilty pleasure that I love but never really get asked to do, although pub open mic audiences seem to be happy to let me do it these days (I must have got better in the last four years). So an open invitation to more or less a licence to do so was something I was only going to resist for so long.

It was electric in more sense than one. Heavily amped up – Marshall and Ashdown stacks for lead guitar and bass, everything else through nearly equally impressive speakers of various kinds – and with a strong emphasis on dirty guitar solos and electric bass grooves. But also with a cracking atmosphere and a real sense of enjoyment of everything going on, and some startlingly tight playing for a jam session, even if it did rely pretty heavily on 12 bars in the key of A.

So I was given two songs to sit in on, backing the massively built and massively voiced vocalist / organiser keeping the whole night running. The only other non-fret musicians to show were one blues harp, two drummers and the sax and keys from the house band. I think I was the youngest guy there by 15 years; the average age was about my dad’s and the volume was always at the edge of me putting earplugs in. I duly plugged acoustic violin, through clean-sound folk-oriented pickup, into someone’s easily 100W valve Marshall, and prepared to follow rhythm guitar and cover any chord issues with flurries of notes and waving the instrument around the stage.

It was a blast. After one verse of the first song Mr Big cued a solo from me, and it felt great from there on. Possibly peaking with a ‘battle (sic)’ between me and the house band’s lead guitarist. I was very deliberately brought back for a version ‘Just another Cup of Coffee’ at almost the end of the night, and seemed to have both the guys I played with and the rest of the crowd (mostly also players) lapping it up while I pulled out all the stops I could think of on the spot. My favourite critical appraisal of recent times came from an American passer-through:

I’ve been hanging round blues clubs in Chicago for thirty-five years, and I’ve never heard anyone do blues fiddle … You should get yourself a blues band.

Which raises a serious question: should I, and would it make any money? There is a paying market for rhythm and blues in the UK, though there’s a lot of people out there playing it for free. And maybe, just maybe, on last night’s showing I can appeal enough to fans of the genre to get over the sense of gimmick of using a ‘wrong’ instrument. Doing solo or fronting a small band could give me the standalone act that is usually what commercial booking agencies want more than a musician to add to or cover for someone in an existing group; though it would be massively choosing stand out over blend in (see previous post). Well, it’s a thought anyway.

Blend in or stand out?

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So here’s a tricky question I haven’t got an answer to: for my line of ambition, should I blend in or stand out? I have a moderate reputation around Oxford for pushing the boundaries, particularly with doing blues and spirituals on violin or viola and voice alone (and also for, at unplugged performances, wandering through the audience and other somewhat stagey tricks … ), and playing solos which are lengthy and dynamic, not to say aggressive, beyond the usual range of gigging violinists. (Romantic concerto cadenzas are of course a different matter!)

And that’s potentially an asset – at least I’m memorable and usually well-received by average-joe crowds. But most people hiring a string player to dep, or record, or back a name act, don’t want them to stick out. They want someone who does the job and sounds as much as possible like the person who wrote the part expected (not strictly true in the complexities of pre-nineteenth century authentic or otherwise or somewhere in between performance, but generally a broadly valid concept). They don’t want an obtrusive musical or social personality, that just stands to reason.

So should my self-promotion, and what I do in the public sphere, actually aim to be very genre-faithful – to show that I can play ‘classical’ pieces in the accepted manner of the mainstream, insofar as there still is one for that genre, that I can do British folk dances like a native-born Shetlander (I only wish!), etc. etc.? It would certainly make me a safe pair of hands, but would it also make me immensely forgettable?

Perhaps the real problem is that even as a freelancer, there’s an element of trying to do two things at once. You want to be open to being hired both as a hired hand for someone else’s gig, but also as an act or a part of an act in your own right. And most of the time those things pull in opposite directions. It’s trying to prove you’re not just a jack of all trades but a master of all of them as well.