Comments (3)

[1] 2 3 4 | Next Page

By Marc Ribot

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 PA. 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 Tonic, which had been for the past decade NYC's center for Downtown music, before closing unceremoniously last month, to play in a series of benefits, which, combined with direct appeals, raised $93,250 needed to pay off the club's debts. Another part of Tonic's attempts to balance its books involved a reduction in the amount of financially risky music they presented. The desire to provide a venue for those excluded by this change was part of John Zorn's reason for establishing The Stone, which he subsidizes entirely (100% of the door goes to the musicians) out of his own pocket and 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 (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 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 was spoken of as a temporary measure, but the fundamental conditions driving the club into such massive debt remained the same and became insupportable.

The market is failing as a means of funding downtown new music venues. The venues have either abandoned new music booking priorities (like Knitting Factory did at the end of the '90s), 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.

For complex reasons, market funding is no longer feasible. This idea feels shocking and strange, but historically speaking, it's our expectation that new music ever could be successfully funded through the market that's strange.

[1] 2 3 4 | Next Page

Marc Ribot at All About Jazz.
Visit Marc Ribot on the web.

Post your comment on:
Marc Ribot: The Care and Feeding of a Musical Margin

Andrey Henkin wrote on 2007-06-09 10:39:16: SUBMITTED ON BEHALF OF MARC RIBOT I greatly appreciate that you published my article, but had been under the impression that the version incorporating my edits (see attach) WAS the final version. its water over the dam now, but the version actually published contains a paragraph “at this point, its neccesary to consider a counter-argument...” etc. In the original, I rebut the counter-argument by presenting euro-squats as an alternate model of subsidy to boring fully state funded venues. Presenting the counter argument without rebuttal weakens the article’s main argument (in favor of subsidy). I appear to be admitting that subsidy doesn’t really work, whereas in fact I attempt to demonstrate the opposite. here are the paragraphs which followed the paragraph you left in, which begins “its necessary at this point to acknowledge a counter argument”. The following paragraphs provide a rebuttal of the counterargument. I know its a lot- certainly the last paragraph (which I placed in brackets) could be omitted, and any other edits you could think of would be welcome. Alternatively, you or I could just post the section on a website, and you could publish something saying that several paragraphs omitted from the article can be viewed at ..www. Whatever. Again, I know it was a stretch to include as much of the article as you did, and hesitate to ask for even more space, but the paragraph you included did appear to cancel out much of the central argument of the article, which is that people should reconsider the idea of subsidy, and my reason for publishing, which is to encourage activism in that direction. Nobody is going to fight very hard for a future they dislike. Best regards, marc ribot “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...” But there are exceptions to the above, 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 dynamic system is operating here, but it’s political, and NOT market based. 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.]   Andrey Henkin wrote on 2007-06-09 10:44:15: SUBMITTED ON BEHALF OF ALAN LICHT, MUSICIAN/FORMER CURATOR OF TONIC As a New York-based experimental musician I read Marc Ribot's "Megaphone" piece with interest in your May issue; but as I am also the person who handled booking, ticketing and other duties at the club Tonic from 2000 until its closing April 13 I feel I have a unique perspective on many of the issues raised in the piece. The facts are these: Tonic operated at well under 30% of its capacity (240, not 180 as the piece states) most days of the week. Jazz shows would generally draw about 30 people, (or less) even rock shows would often not draw much more than 2 or 3 times that. If a hotel, for example, was operating at less than 30% capacity, even less than 50% capacity, week-in and week-out, it simply wouldn't last--and so it was with Tonic. As Ribot points out, the benefit concerts two years ago were very well attended, and raised a considerable amount of money for the club. So where was the audience before and after those benefits? That's the question we need to be asking. The audience is not at the Stone, or at Issue Project Room, where attendance is much the same, or worse. In fact it was not musicians who "subsidized" Tonic but the long-running Friday night Bunker series in subTonic, which had techno DJs. The Bunker was routinely packed, and made a considerable amount of money at the bar--more money, in one night, than the shows during the week made. The New York club scene is not in crisis, as far as I can tell, but is certainly in transition. "Downtown" is slowly but surely being replaced by "Brooklyn", and that is where more and more people are going to be headed for nightlife, just as that is where they are now heading for more affordable housing that simply is no longer available in lower Manhattan. It may be "harder to draw a crowd there" now, but that's going to change, as surely as it was hard to draw a crowd at CBGBs at first when the Bowery was still just one flophouse after another.   Timothy Gauhan wrote on 2007-06-11 15:59:20: Nor did waiting tables, teaching school kids, roofing houses or playing on TV jingles. If one wants to play music that isn't commercially viable, is it really too much to ask that he get a "real job" and subsidize himself? I'm a fan of Ribot's and my politics are generally very left leaning. But this city and country have a lot bigger fish to fry than to provide subsidies to experimental musicians and venues that host them. After we've got universal health care for all Americans, fix our deplorable public schools, provide adequate, affordable housing for all and wipe out hunger world-wide I might be a little more sympathetic to this cause. Then again, do I really want to hear cutting edge music in a government sponsored, antiseptic venue instead of some out of the way, edgy loft space? I'm not so sure.

Signup & post a comment!
Read more comments (3)

More articles by AAJ Staff

November 2009
Creator vs. Interpretor
Take Five With Jair-Rohm Parker Wells
Take Five With The Britton Brothers
Louis Armstrong: The Complete Louis Armstrong ...