The care and feeding of a musical margin.

The productivity of new york city’s musical culture, even its more mainstream expressions, would have been impossible without the experimental jazz, new music, avant rock/punk/no-wave/experimental funk scenes which served as a type of research and development lab for the music culture as a whole. Since the mid 70’s, these loci for experimental music included private night clubs: the mid-late 70's cbgb's/max’s Kansas city, about 1/2 dozen clubs in the early 80's, late 80's knitting factory, tonic, etc etc,
But in the last several years, a sea change has taken place in the relation of experimental clubs to the market. This paper will argue that the market is failing as a means of funding downtown new music. It will examine the context of the recent downtown club bankruptcies, near bankruptcies, and closings, that result from that fact, and address the question of whether its possible for musicians and fans to intervene on behalf of jazz/new music and the people who make it, and if so, how.

Musicians working in Downtown new music and jazz have a history of self help, often turning to benefits when musicians died leaving family without a pension, or got sick without health benefits, or when a central venue hit a hard stretch and needed some cash to keep the doors open or buy a p.a.. I, like most others I work with, have played a number of such benefits over the years.

Lately however, the requests for donations or subsidies have been coming fast and furious. In addition to paying yearly dues to Roulette, which has been presenting new music composers and improvisers for years, I;ve had requests to play at several smaller new spaces for free or for less than I would normally be paid, to donate equipment to these spaces, and, in the case of Norfolk st nightclub Tonic, which has for the past 6 years has been nyc’s center for “downtown” music, to play in a series of benefits, which, combined with direct appeals, raised $93,250 needed to pay off the clubs debts. Another part of Tonic’s attempts to balance its books has involved a reduction in the amount of financially risky music they’ve been able to present. The desire to provide a venue for those excluded by this change was part of John Zorn’s reason for establishing the Stone Room, which he plans to subsidize entirely (100% of the door goes to the musicians) from recordings donated to his non-profit tzadik record label by relatively more established musicians. Suzanne Fiol’s non-profit Issue Project room is also serving a function in this regard, specializing in rare or premiere performances.

Not only has this new round of donations been different in quantity, it has also been different in kind. Over the past 25-30 years, there’s been an assumption that the condition of a downtown jazz/new music venue’s needing to be subsidized by benefits was an abnormal condition, a special situation necessitated by a particular emergency, after which the venue would return to its normal functioning; either as a market entity (the knitting factory, tonic, etc) or, in a few cases like The Kitchen and Roulette, as institutions funded by public and private foundations. I and many others played benefits for tonic when it first opened: but they were seen as a push to get the club on its feet, or buy a new pa, with the understanding that tonic would then function in the night club market place.

But a sea change has taken place in the relation of these clubs to the market with few really acknowledging it. The donated recordings that will subsidize the “stone room” are not envisioned as a temporary helping hand: john zorn plans to fund the room in perpetuity through this source. The $93,250 raised by tonic is being spoken of as a temporary measure, but the fundamental conditions driving the club into such massive debt remain the same, and, unless they switch to a more commercial music format, will almost certainly become insupportable when their current lease is up.
Fiol’s ‘project room’ does eventually plan to pay musicians through grants, but whether and to what extent these plans can be realized remains to be seen.

The fact that Tonic has for now, thanks to the benefits, managed to stay in business is masking a deeper truth: the market is failing as a means of funding downtown new music venues. the venues have either abandoned new music booking priorities (like the knitting factory did at the end of the 90’s), switched to being subsidized by musicians (like tonic and the above mentioned new venues are doing now), or both.
Musician benefit concerts and recordings, once a “special” situation, are being normalized as a means of funding.
Those caught up in the immediate task of opening new spaces, keeping older ones opened, and scrambling for funding tend to explain the situation in terms of its details: this or that club was poorly managed, this or that club didn’t appreciate new music. They tend to see themselves uncritically as “helping the musicians” or “doing something good for the scene”. And there;s no reason to doubt the sincerity of these hardworking and deeply committed people. But subjective details don’t explain the wider phenomenon of club failures, and subjective good will won’t keep the music and the people who play it alive if the system now being put in place fails.
I don’t regret participating in benefits for any of the venues discussed. But these benefits have at most bought time. If we don’t use that time to discuss the options and act on them, the options will eventually act on us.
To do this, we need to put what’s happening to us in a longer historical and wider industry perspective.

I. What’s Happening?

For complex reasons, including downtown rents approaching 9000 a month for a club the size of tonic, market funding is no longer feasible. This idea feels shocking and strange, but historically speaking , its our expectation that new music ever could be successfully funded through the market that;s strange.

New music composers of the 40’s through the early 60’s didn’t expect to make money through the live performance market: many taught to earn a living. john cage’s income wasn;t based on packing a nightclub with door fee paying, drink buying customers: many of his history making premieres were attended by fewer people than attend an average gig at cbgb’s. He was supported mainly by commissions and performance fees, by grants from private and public foundations. In experimental jazz, things were much the same, although less generously funded: avant-gardists through the 70’s played a ‘loft’ scene not known for generating big bucks. Cecil Taylor worked as a dishwasher while developing his history changing style. And when he was able to quit his day job, it was due to the backing of mostly European, subsidized festivals.
The idea that new music could be supported by the market was born in the downtown nyc in the late 70’s, when ‘no-wave’ artists influenced by punk rock, john cage, and thelonious monk started drawing first very hip, and then very large crowds at the nascent nyc ‘downtown’ club scene. Bands like DNA, the Lounge Lizards, Defunkt, Elliott Sharp’s ‘Carbon’ James Chance, and various John Zorn projects were often double billed with groups from a jazz avant garde such as James Blood Ulmer or ‘downtown’ new music minimalists such as Glenn Branca.
The new music experimentalists shared, at clubs like the Mudd Club, Tier 3, Danceteria, Hurrah’s a club scene and audience with rock, pop, reggae, punk, dance music, and even soul/rb artists (I actually played the mudd club with Rufus Thomas: everyone loved his plastic cape and yellow knee-high pants).
By 1988, the marketability of the ‘downtown’ experimentalists was so strong that the music could support a 7 night a week club of its own, the knitting factory, with main acts playing on weekends, and new projects (often solo projects of main band members or sidemusicians) playing the weekdays. As the market continued to expand, so did the club, moving in the early 90’s from its original Houston st. space into the much larger 3 performance space building it now occupies on Leonard st., launching a European booking agency, a record label, and opening an L.A. branch. In addition, other LES nightclubs booked new music experimentalists: cbgb;s gallery, the cooler, and others.

The Knitting Factory’s expansions, however, were based on an overestimation of demand. By the late 90’s The Knitting Factory European booking agency closed; and the club began to redirect its booking policy toward indie rock. The Cooler closed, and cbgb;s gallery returned to a singer songwriter format. At this point, some knitting factory performers, led by john zorn, took the position that the knitting factory was no longer committed enough to new/experimental music, and jumped ship to support the then brand new tonic. Tonic, however, already represented a downsizing in the new music audience: its room capacity was 180, compared with over 300 at the Knitting factory’s main space.

By 2005, even this downsizing was not enough, and as yet another club faced the choice between bankruptcy and moderating or abandoning its new music booking policy, Zorn again downsized, this time to the “stone room.” a space with a maximum capacity of 80-100.

Our peculiar belief that new/experimental music can be funded through the market had a beginning in the late 70’s, and a middle in the late 80’s early 90’s.

It now has an end. what we are seeing- at tonic, in the repeat requests for benefit concerts, in the rash of closings and moves to Brooklyn- is a failure of the market as a means of sustaining new and experimental music.

In truth, our belief that the market could fund new music was always at illusory: European touring, heavily state subsidized, has been the real economic motor of experimental jazz/new music for decades, the light at the end of the tunnel of months of scarce and/or poorly paid nyc gigs. The fact that access to europe was easier and cheaper for nyc musicians than for their LA counterparts is an important factor in the historical productivity of the nyc new music scene as compared with the West Coast.
European public subsidies have funded cutting edge US music since the time of Louis Armstrong, they’ve been a part of the landscape for so long that US musicians have come to take them entirely for granted, seeing them as natural a part of Europe as the alps or snotty waiters. Unfortunately, they’re neither natural nor guaranteed: they were created by people through struggle, and they are in the process of being challenged and to some extent dismantled by European neo-liberals.
The idea behind European public arts subsidies, the reason why NYC jazz/new music artists for at least the last 40 years have played Paris, Cologne and Zurich many more times than they’ve played Hartford (and how many have ever played Des Moines?) is a doctrine called “the european cultural exception," a set of government policies based on the concept that, even within a market economy, art/culture is to be treated differently from other commodities.
This concept asserts that some music deserves to exist even if the market says it doesn’t. That the best string quartet isn’t necessarily the one that plays the most tv commercials. That the best composer isn’t necessarily the one George Lucas picks to score his film. That the best band isn’t always the one most favored by a large radio network’s advertisers.
Proponents of the “cultural exception” have argued that there’s a social good being served here that goes beyond simply providing jobs to the individual string players, composers or bands: society derives benefit from having access to this “best”.
That enough Europeans have chosen to value this social benefit, to codify these values into law and fund the laws into being… is why about half the music I care about exists.

Musicians are often happily unaware of the subsidies and institutions whose borders shape our creative lives. However, many of the institutions once supporting jazz/new music have been reduced or eliminated, washing away much of the artists’ livelihoods: rent stabilization and other housing subsidies ; union scales and benefits ; government arts programs and private funding; and the European subsidies mentioned above. That this has coincided with a market crisis in the wider record business and the network of related clubs has created something like a perfect economic storm which is already effecting the ability of many musicians to earn a living. While unconsciousness is always a pleasure, I would question how much of it we can afford at the moment.

I don’t want to exaggerate: European arts funding is still many times higher than in the US. But the effects of the general decline have been increased by the fact that US musicians have less access to what subsidies remain than they once did. When I started playing Europe regularly in the 80’s, festival rosters read like lists of US, mostly New York musicians. Today, we are included less frequently, if at all. The reasons behind this are complex: long overdue recognition of excellent European artists; attrition of the “jazz/new music” market by “world music;” euro/nationalism ; political antipathy to the US; and the gradual fading of the historical conditions that produced the enormous popularity of US jazz/new music in the first place.

At the rock/pop border of the experimental margin, another type of subsidy is now in short supply. Major record labels once were willing to invest in critically respected music, even if it wasn’t as lucrative as mainsteam pop. Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, The Lounge Lizards, and this author were all signed to majors at one point, and received the relatively large recording/advertising budgets that accompany this. the majors are now limiting their spending to safer projects. The reasons for this are complex: they are in part responding to income lost due to illegal downloading, as well as the challenge from indie labels. These latter, among whom can be found entrepreneurs willing to release almost any artist’s work, very rarely subsidize and often barely invest in production, the cost/risk of which they prefer to shift to artists/musicians.

To summarize

Experimental jazz/new music people once occupied a margin delimited and fed by both market and european state funding. As both of these sources contract, we ;re facing the consequences of a lack of US public funding. As the expressed will of the american political majority, this radical market liberalism seems hard to oppose: nationally, “we’ve” made our choice, “we” will live with the results: during the next ten years, America will finally get the culture its paid for.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic. some believe the scene will reconstitute itself outside of manhattan. a number of interesting venues have opened in Brooklyn: Zebulon, the new Issue Project room, Barbes. None of these clubs has the room capacity of tonic or the knitting factory, and my own experience has been that its harder to draw a crowd at these than at the manhattan clubs. this is hardly surprising: downtown manhattan’s preferable market location is what caused the high rents that have driven clubs out in the first place.

Another optimistic idea is that the music will actually benefit from a defunding in which its true believers, now purified of base financial motives, will be driven back to the catacombs, and things will return to the much romanticized period of the mid seventies, when john zorn performed for 5 people in his apartment and the loft scene was at its height. But the catacombs this time will not have open passageways to funding institutions like the 70’s underground did, or much possibility of major labels seeking out critically acclaimed avant gardists to boost label prestige. While the independently wealthy, the extremely committed and those with no choice would remain in a scene without hope of money, the reality is that musicians tend to drift towards those scenes which pay. John Zorn for example, draws on a pool of side musicians with strong connections to the rock/pop/c&w and ‘uptown’ classical worlds, and, through a combination of market success, good (self ) management and extremely disciplined and economical use of everything from musical notation through production technique, has been able to compete successfully with rates of pay in those worlds. Would the music sound the same if the pool was drained? Would it sell the same? I doubt it.
While small may sometimes be beautiful, there’s a critical mass below which it becomes difficult for a scene to replenish its audience. Tonic and the Knitting Factory were both large enough to run ads in the nyc weeklies. The smaller venues mostly aren’t. These latter may hope to make up for this lack by presenting artists likely to be previewed in the critcs’ choice sections. However, they’re likely to find the editorial offices located closer to the advertising dept than they might have imagined, particularly at advertising-dependent free-distribution weeklies like the Village Voice.
For musicians playing for door percentages,
the increasing fragmentation of venues, the splitting of an already small audience; has resulted in lower rates of pay. While in one sense multiplying opportunities for performance, the resulting lowering of rates of pay limits opportunity to hunger artists, the already connected, and the independently wealthy.

II What’s a Mutha to Do?

Musicians response so far has been doing benefits to subsidize failing venues or to start venues. Not only does this fit in with a tradition of self help discussed at the beginning of the article, it also dovetails nicely with a certain punk DoItYourself ethic.
Although ostensibly linked to a leftist/anarchist anti-corporate politics, “DIY’ has also served quite well to foreclose discussion on state subsidy, and fits quite comfortably with the free market/ neo-liberalism which will, sometime soon, install some very corporate chain stores and condos where favorite venues once stood.

“DoItYourself” is a lovely idea, one which leaves its believers with a comforting sense of control over their destiny. the only problem is that when the “It” is running a business capable of treating musicians fairly, and the “Yourself” is the musicians themselves, it doesn’t work, for the same reason that kibbutzes haven;t globally replaced private farming, food co-ops haven’t replaced supermarkets, housing co-ops haven’t (as their original proponents theorized) provided massive havens of low income housing, and workers co-ops haven’t replaced private industry:
Businesses need capital. People who work gigs for a living, by definition, don’t have it.

Does this mean the dream for fairness and freedom at the heart of these efforts is empty? No: but the idea of a ‘separate peace’ with capital is.
In 1990, when the Berlin wall came down, the 85 year old debate on whether socialism was possible in a single country or group of countries was ended, finally, with a fairly definitive no. The question of whether its possible in a single night club isn’t really intellectually interesting.

Without capital, venues either eventually fall back on the old strategies of musician exploitation, abandon new music priorities, fail, or all three. If those venues are ‘artist run’, the only difference is that we get to exploit ourselves. Hooray for progress.

Is there an alternative to this situation?

Where real capital is provided, a musician friendly business, co-op/non-profit or not, can succeed. I’ve spent c/a two months a year on tour in Europe since 1984, playing over 1000 gigs. For years, I;ve asked presenters how their funding was structured. I was often surprised at the answers: even some of what I thought were private clubs were in fact administered by jazz or new music societies or co-operatives. The european gigs were almost always subsidized: usually by the city or state government completely donating the performance space itself. Were tonic subsidized in this manner, the yearly subsidy would be equal to the amount they raised this year through benefits: but they would have received it EVERY year of their existence.
This is real subsidy, coming from those with access to real capital: not peanuts from a bunch of musicians half of whom lack health coverage, pension or savings.

III Ideology and Funding

Tonic will not be able to pull off raising $93,000 dollars (as it did in March 2005) on a regular basis. It will either reduce or abandon its commitment to new music, or spiral into debt again as constant demands for support exhaust musicians and fans. Were the city to do what many European cities have done, and give them the club space or one like it, this situation could be different.

The possiblity of winning such funding may be small, but small becomes zero if we aren’t willing to fight for it, either because we’re invested in fantasies of rescue by DIY ‘artist friendly clubs’ or because we’re immobilized by ideologies which deny the existence of anything outside the market to exist.

Boring State Venues

Its necessary at this point to acknowledge a counter argument to public arts funding. Even those of us with no taste for “magic-of-the-market” rhetoric will admit that competition at clubs forced to live off door receipts has sometimes produced a dynamic energy we (and our audiences) like, while the lack of competition at some large or very long-term well funded public institutions has sometimes produced a lethargic, self satisfied ‘in-group’ that books its own friends for its own friends, with little incentive to reach out to new musicians or audiences. In addition, the funded ‘institutions’ can be slow and bureaucratic while the ‘private’ can be less so.

This argument is important to address: no one’s going to fight very hard for a future they don’t really want. But there are exceptions to the above cliché, and they may provide a way out.

European squat venues suggest a ‘third way’ between a market whose innate drive for profits tends towards the least common denominator and a state whose innate bureaucratic insulation from market dynamism tends towards lethargy. Although often preferring to imagine themselves as enemies rather than beneficiaries of the state, and presenting a funky opposite image to the well funded public institution, Euro squat venues are also subsidized: there’s no European city or state lacking the military capacity to shut down even the most militant squat. Government decisions to not exercise this option allow squats/autonomes to exist without paying rent or taxes. This is a subsidy.

What prevents city governments from shutting down squats is their political popularity. Government officials who could put in revenue producing private businesses on squatted property don;t do so because it would cost them votes. Those squats which survive know this: they MUST at all times keep a large enough group of people passionate enough about their survival or they will be shut down. Many do this by becoming cultural centers.
A system of dynamic social Darwinism is operating here, but it’s political, and NOT market Darwinism. Dynamic tension is maintained by a competition for numbers of people and depth of passion, NOT for how much is in the till at the end of the night. The competition is for who can generate the most support among audiences and critics, not who can sell the most expensive beer and tickets while paying staff and musicians least.
This model combines the best of both systems: the dynamism of the private, and the nurturing material support of the public. And its no coincidence that some of the best scenes in Europe have been squats in politically contested areas like the berlin oranienburgstrasse squats (such as tacheles) in the 90’s following re-unification.

One of my favorite venues ever is in just such a situation.
The llublyana club gromka, run by a collective headed by cultural activist miha zadnikar, is part of the larger akc (cultural society) metelkova squat, started when a bunch of activists took over a former Yugoslav National Army barracks shortly after Slovenia’s succession from Yugoslavia. The city government has other plans: they want to turn the area into a shopping mall. The level of programming there is as high quality and cutting edge as anything I;ve ever seen. And the vibe is great: great enough for the people who play and hang out there to fight for. The minute this isn’t true, the city will send in the bulldozers.

IV Strategy

To state the obvious, the current national government will not be sympethic to arguments for increased nyc arts subsidy. But if the popular support exists to raise over 90,000 in 3 months to keep one club (Tonic) open, then the possibility exists for a serious political fight at the city or state level.

A coalition of restaurant and hotel workers, union musicians, and highly militant Eloise fans recently prevented Elad Properties, the new owners of the Plaza Hotel, from shutting down the hotel’s Grand Ballroom, Palm Court, and Oak Bar (along with hundreds of guest rooms), for a condo conversion, preserving hundreds of union jobs (and my 9 year old daughter’s favorite historical landmark) in the process.

Another positive outcome could include the city providing subsidy and/or an alternate venue on a city owned site.
How would the pitfalls, discussed above, of state funded venues be avoided in this scenario? How could venues and the art they present be kept responsive the needs of artists, art, and audiences rather than those of the funders? I;ve sketched one theoretical answer- perhaps there are others. Its a serious problem demanding serious thought. But the idea of subsidy shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand for ideological reasons, particularly not by already well connected downtown musicians living in subsidized housing and playing subsidized euro gigs at many times market value.

Deep support for the survival of the downtown cultural scene is there. But deep support isn’t going to translate itself into effective action without a conscious decision to act. I’m not suggesting a moratorium on benefits. But if we’re all bailing water so fast we can’t take time to fix the gaping hole in the boat, we’ll soon all be very tired and very wet.

V Summary
As markets decline, rents rise and and European subsidies contract, things are changing. Since there’s no state mechanism for protecting those whom the market fails, those changes may be ugly.
Experimental musicians aren’t the only ones the market occasionally fails: children, old people, the sick, the unemployed: all consume without producing. The market says if cbgbs can’t afford 20,000 a month rent, then bye bye. And when it applies that logic to grandma or the former population of New Orleans?

Music and art were always supposed to provide a firewall from the horror of that question, a protection from those greedy or ideologically brutal enough to answer it: we were supposed to be, remember?, the ‘canary in the coal mine.’

Well, news from the mine: the canary is on the bottom of the cage wheezing. For those who can still value what the market doesn’t, “attention must be paid.”