I. A Parable of One Mortgage
About a year ago, Rudresh Mahanthappa and his wife — a two-income couple in their 30s — bought a nice house in Brooklyn, NY. Mahanthappa holds a master's degree from DePaul University and runs his own business. He's the kind of guy — the son of college professors who raised him in a privileged American suburb near Boulder, Colorado — for whom buying a house would not seem to be a stretch.
But there's a catch: he's a jazz musician.
This particular new home is what you might want to think about when you're listening to Mahanthappa play the alto saxophone, which he does with tingling skill and daredevil originality. Thinking about his new home is instructive because what you hear coming from the bandstand of, say, the Jazz Standard on E. 27th Street in Manhattan, is music that is decidedly not calculated to pay the mortgage. Every tune is an original composition — no "Body and Soul", no "In the Mood", not even a fleeting thought of something snappy like an instrumental version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" — and they are precise but harmonically obtuse melodies played by musicians hunched over non-electric instruments. In short, it's jazz — and even the 100 or so people who paid good money to get into the Jazz Standard are still trying to decide if they dig it. With every angular phrase from Mahanthappa's sharply vocalized alto, you realize just how risky that Brooklyn home truly is.
"The first time my name showed up in the Downbeat Critic's Poll," Mahanthappa tells me (referring to the highly respected poll of top talent in the nation's most august jazz publication), "I couldn't afford to buy the magazine."
But on the Jazz Standard stage he looks prosperous: a nearly Marsalis-level suit, a hip hair style, a gorgeous horn, and an A-List band featuring the explosive pianist Vijay Iyer and the on-the-way-up drummer Elliot Kavee. The club is immaculate — all metal and leather and expensive beverages, with effortlessly hip young New Yorkers seated around small tables. To my right, toward the back of the club, a couple seems to be making out with as much vigor as the band puts into its improvisation, embarrassing a normally unflappable waiter. It would seem that, since Mahanthappa first came to New York in 1997 and recorded his poorly distributed debut, Yatra, he's come a long way.
Yes and no. "I'm making more money now as a musician than I ever have," Mahanthappa says. "But I'm older now, too. The dream is that in the future I spend more time playing music. Right now, I spend most of my time hustling: emailing, on the phone, applying for grants. I don't have a manager or an agent. I have 12 students who I teach for about ten hours each week. But I am working more now, and my fees are starting to go up faster."
There isn't any regret or angst in Mahanthappa's voice when he says, pretty straight on: "I worry less about money now than I used to. But I still worry."
In short, after the couple at the back of the Jazz Standard has gone home and Rudresh Mahanthappa has shed his Marsalis duds, there is still a mortgage to pay.
II. The Case for Why This Matters to You
OK, cool — so a jazz saxophonist isn't going to become Donald Trump or Bono. Even Mahanthappa himself will tell you that he has it pretty sweet: "I get paid to do what I'm most interested in", he tells me when he's explaining the grant he received to record music with an Indian percussionist. (Mahanthappa is Indian-American and, though his schooling and music is jazz through-and-through, he is interested in how jazz intersects with Indian music and culture.) Life and that mortgage may be worrisome, but they're also good.
But what I suggest we all should be asking ourselves is this: how long will he be able to keep this up, and at what ultimate price?
Forget jazz for a second. It's like that band your friend was in during college, the one that could lift a party off its feet. Maybe he's still in a band in his 20s, you know — writing songs, practicing on Wednesday nights after work, getting people in the crappy little bar to sign the band's mailing list and paid $180 (split five ways) for a night's work. Your friend does this because he loves it (reason enough) — and maybe because he imagines that something could happen. Lightning could strike. After all, his band isn't all that different from, say, Dave Matthews Band or They Might Be Giants. Why shouldn't your friend be writing the theme song for Malcolm in the Middle?
The economics of the local rock band are plain and at least semi-favorable: for a modest investment of time and talent, a bunch of friends can make a whole lotta noise and roll the dice — at admittedly long odds — on the untold riches of rock stardom. That's why there are thousands of bands like this; one day they're covering "Hard to Handle" at the Grog & Tankard, and the next day Pitchfork thinks their demo is "lo-fi alchemy" and Conan O'Brien's producer has their e-mail. Can a duet with Michael Stipe be all that far in the future?
In jazz, of course, the economics and odds are worse and longer. And this is why Mahanthappa's mortgage is something that should matter to you. We want a world filled with the sounds of local rock bands and we need a world filled with what Mahanthappa plays, too.
For a jazz musician, the investment of time and money just to be able to play a few standards during a restaurant's "jazz brunch" is huge. If you want to do more — to be a meaningful and original jazz artist — then the investment has to be life-altering. Mahanthappa attended Boston's Berklee College of Music in the early '90s, then moved to the University of Chicago for a master's in music and composition. In jazz today, Mahanthappa told me," everyone goes to school." At Chicago, "there was a jobbing mentality — people were there to get a steady gig."
And what is the potential return on that investment? There are maybe 10 legitimate jazz superstars (folks like Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins) these days, and — no matter the accolades they may receive — they can't exactly afford to move to an Irish castle and take up the Kabbalah like Madonna. With all that practice and schooling and no hope of a rainbow-capping pot of musical gold, the jazz musician faces a fundamentally tougher economic voyage.
"The summer after my first year at Berklee, I got a cruise ship gig that was a big eye-opener. Almost every musician on the ship had forgotten the reason they started playing," Mahanthappa tells me. "No one cared about music any more. They were just drinking, living the life on the ship. And I thought, if that's what making a living as a musician is about, then I want no part of it."
So, to be even a moderately aspiring jazz musician is to be a poster-child for struggling artists everywhere. You have to love what you're doing and forget about the money. Arggh! Pesky mortgage!
For the rest of us, the folks sitting around the hip little tables at the Jazz Standard (making out or just listening), Mahanthappa's love of the music is palpable. The drums and bass lock into a nervous, whip-crack pattern while Iyer and Mahanthappa testify in the foreground. The pattern of the song seems uncountable — though I'm a music teacher and saxophonist, I can't even find the downbeat, not even close — even while Kavee's snare-snap brings the tune into R&B focus on every 17th beat. While Iyer solos, Mahanthappa peers at his friend through the window of the piano's upraised lid like he wants it to never stop. And the question inevitably is: how long can he keep playing this unvarnished, uncompromised music despite the plain truth that it is likely never to sell tons of copies or to pack even modest summer venues in the US? Will his teaching pay the mortgage forever?
III. Another Man Who Pays the Bills
At the back of the Jazz Standard that night, there is another guy taking care of business, literally. Seth Rosner is standing behind the inevitable "merch" table, hawking CDs by Mahanthappa, Iyer, and some other major jazz artists — some of them being the kind of "big names" that you only know if your taste runs deeply toward the eek-onk of free jazz or maybe someone who hung out at the Knitting Factory in the late '90s: Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Marc Ribot. Rosner is wound up and unreeling, talking a mile-a-minute to whoever wants to know more about this music. A CD or two gets sold, sure (mostly to me and my friends; none, to my knowledge, to the romantic couple), but mostly it's a chance for Rosner to talk about his passion, his record label.
The musicians, as it turns out, make little or nothing from their records. Jazz recordings, for the most part, are calling cards; demo recordings to get you into a club and advertisements so the small but dedicated batch of jazz nuts knows what you're about. The money — for Mahanthappa or Rollins or even Keith Jarrett — is mainly in the fee the musician can charge for his hardest work: playing gigs. Still, even if your disc is only going to sell a thousand copies, tops, you need a record label to get your name into the stacks at Barnes & Noble, Tower, Virgin, even the Downtown Music Gallery. And so maybe Rosner is your man.
Rosner started Pi Recordings with a partner in 2001. Can you do that? Can a kid who's hacking around Manhattan and working his way through music school just start his own record label without having any serious money or any kind of distribution deal? As it turns out: yes, if you're willing to pay the price, much like a musician would.
Rosner was working at the Knitting Factory, living the life of a True Believer; spending four dollars a day on food and scamming drinks from the bar while soaking up the rich stew of creative music that was available. Rosner grew up a hip indie-rock kid; Stereolab, Tortoise, not really much jazz. But at the Knitting Factory, a 20-something kid could get educated about what "independent music" was really all about.
"I liked left-of-center rock, and I knew there had to be an equivalent in jazz," says Rosner. "Jazz is already a left-of-center musical force, but every music has its even more vanguard elements. And when I heard Henry Threadgill play at the Knit with his Make a Move band — I was hooked."
Threadgill, like Mahanthappa, is a precise but deeply adventurous alto saxophonist and composer. Unlike Mahanthappa, however, Threadgill, in his early 60s, is one of the most acclaimed musicians associated with the jazz "avant-garde". As a veteran of Chicago's renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a refugee from a short-lived record contract with industry bigwig Columbia, can it really be that Threadgill had no record label as the millennium turned? But that, you see, is jazz economics: the chance of making a killing on Henry Threadgill records is precisely zero.
But where others saw nothing, Rosner saw a calling. "I was really attracted to Henry's music, which was so unique, so vivid and colorful. His electric band was just blowing my mind, like no band I'd ever heard before. I became kind of obsessive."
As I'm staring at Rosner's table of Pi Recordings merch in the Jazz Standard, I recognize two simultaneously-released albums by Threadgill (Up Popped the Two Lips and Everybody's Mouth's a Book) that I'd bought years earlier. And there's Rosner, the scruffy "record executive" who put them out, making change for somebody buying the latest by Mahanthappa. I've gotta find out how this guy — this really young guy who seems at first like he might just be somebody's roommate — became the digital guardian of one of the greatest US composers of the last 30 years.
"When I was working at the Knit, we'd put out 15 or 20 albums every year. And I thought, if I did this, I could do it a lot better." Rosner and I are hunched over mugs in the Hungarian Pastry Shop at 110th Street on Amsterdam Avenue. "Technology has made it so anyone can release albums. But if I was going to do it, it would have to be great music." Like Threadgill's.
At the Knit, Rosner met Velibor Pedevski, Threadgill's manager, and a historian of and advocate for uncompromising out-jazz. "Velibor knew my work ethic, and Henry trusted Velibor." And so, by 2001, Rosner was paying Threadgill and two separate bands of musicians to practice and then record two albums that became the first in the Pi catalog. "Releasing them simultaneously was not orthodox, but that's Henry," Rosner explains. "In retrospect, the decision was beyond right — as a new label, Pi was seen as gutsy." The albums were reviewed in Entertainment Weekly as well as Downbeat, and Rosner used his hip-hop instincts to get the discs distributed with a company that mainly does indie rock. "My records don't go out in the jazz catalog — they are in the cooler bin. And I knew that Henry had a certain devoted following, so I knew I had a pretty decent chance to make some money."
But what does "some money" really mean in creative music? Not all that much. As in: Rosner, who is spending a weeknight selling CDs one at a time at the back of the Jazz Standard, runs a commercial real estate leasing office by day. Pi Recordings' only office is his apartment, not far from the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Its warehouse? The apartment, too: "When you come into the hallway of my apartment, the wall is lined with boxes that wind around all the way into my living room." Some of these boxes presumably contain multiple unsold copies of Mahanthappa's most recent album on Pi, Mother Tongue. This fact is later verified for me by Rosner's wife, a social worker, who smiles and laughs at the mention of the walls-lined-with-boxes in the way that very nice and tolerant wives will smile and laugh about something that is really pretty annoying.
IV. How Do They Do It?
I ask Mahanthappa and Rosner the same questions. How can you afford it? How long can you keep it up?
"I breathe a sigh of relief," Mahanthappa says, "when young people don't ask me about how to make a living in the music. But I have never had to compromise my music to pay the rent. I had a sweet private teaching gig for years, and grants have been good. I'm working with more groups and even traveled to Ireland recently."
Rosner also sees taking this music far into the future, but he's well aware of the trade-offs. "In December of 2000, I had to figure out my life. I had been going to school for my own music. Was I going back? I was about to release two albums by Henry Threadgill, and I'd made a commitment to Waddada Leo Smith. How do I balance that with a commitment to myself and my own music?" Five years later, Pi Recordings has released 18 superb albums, including a recent stunner by Steve Lehman, Demian as Posthuman, that features bass player and R&B star Me'Shell NdegéOcello. "As long as I don't stay in one place, as long as I keep moving forward, then it's worth it. And not just worth it emotionally a spiritually, but I'm going to keep growing this."
But is that realistic? Is there likely to be an avant-garde jazz commercial renaissance that finally gets those boxes out of Rosner's wife's hallway? "I'm leery of ever using the word 'avant-garde'," Rosner says. "It pigeonholes the music. There are a total of 10,000 people who might buy 'avant-garde' music, and I don't believe the music should be limited that way."
Mahanthappa sees a similar strategy. "Younger people are the market for this music," he says. "I don't really identify with labels — and my music isn't 'free jazz'. It's very structured. But I'm not interested in selling out at all." At the same time, Mahanthappa would love to have the chance to record for a major label jazz imprint, like Blue Note. "I know a deal like that wouldn't last, but the promotion would boost my future career away from a major label." In jazz, even dreams of success are leavened with hard reality.
For a guy running a small, independent jazz label, there is at least one model of huge success: Manfred Eicher, the man who created and runs ECM Records, the home base of Jarrett, Dave Holland, and (for a while) Chick Corea. "When I open my closet," Rosner jokes, "there's a little shrine to ECM, with Manfred sitting there and staring at me, saying 'What have you done today that's of any worth?'" At the same time, Rosner is well aware that "the landscape is littered with the India Navigations", referring to one of the 100 small jazz labels that burned bright then fizzled out. Which path will Pi Recordings take?
The quickest-selling Pi recording has been In What Language?, a 9/11-related collaboration between Iyer and spoken word artist Mike Ladd. So the future of the music would seem to be both "out" and young — as Rosner and Mahanthappa prefer it. Things are on track, at least for now.
I ask Rosner and Mahanthappa not only about their rent or mortgage, but also about the possibility they may have more mouths to feed at some point. And here they have much less to say. "I'm sure every artist has that moment," Rosner suggests, "when they look themselves in the mirror and say — is this really the life I've made for myself?"
Let's hope it is a life they can maintain. While Mahanthappa teaches or hustles for composing commissions, while Rosner stamps and addresses Pi Recordings promo envelopes all by himself, you can't help but cross your fingers and pray a little bit. If you like this music — or if you just like living in a US where artists are able to take these kinds of artistic risks and make these kinds of commitments to individual creativity — then you've got to be thinking about Rosner's hallway and Mahanthappa's mortgage and pulling for them both.
And, it goes without saying, you also might catch a gig or buy a record. It's the least we can do.
