Artist and Powerhouse: An Interview With Erica von Kleist
Erica's story of building a financial life and a LIFE life in the arts
Hello again, friends. A warm welcome to those of you dropping in for this post.
In February, I put out a social media call for artists willing to talk about moving from cultural capitals to smaller, more affordable cities. That reporting turned up valuable information for Hard Truths for Poor Artists: O Pioneers Parts 1 and 2.
Multi-instrumentalist Erica von Kleist sketched her story over email. A prodigious musical talent, she diversified into teaching while she was still a kid, starting her own studio in high school. After becoming the first graduate of Juilliard’s jazz program, Erica had top New York gigs with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Sean Jones, Chris Potter, the Diva Jazz Orchestra, Darcy James Argue, and on Broadway. She moved to Montana in 2012, making a fresh start and diversifying into music booking, comedy, and online music business videos. A teaching invitation took her back to New York in 2022.
I had to know more about this entrepreneurial artist who seemed to embrace every challenge as an opportunity. We spoke over Zoom in February. Erica opened up about her working life with humor and candor: the early need to work, the successes, the burnout, the fresh possibilities, and the money in real numbers.
This conversation is too long for email, Substack warns me. Mahler's Symphony No. 3 long, we might say. Erica’s story warrants the length. She’s an inspiration. (Erica had a chance to make a few minor edits to this transcript for clarity)
For readers unfamiliar with Erica von Kleist as a musician, let’s get the “Okay, but how does she play?” question out of the way. The answer, as this TikTok video makes plain, is however she likes.
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Artist and Powerhouse: An Interview With Erica von Kleist
Michelle: You were kind of a prodigy in your working and earning life as an artist. You started teaching music when you were very young. How did that come to be?
Erica: So typical five-year-old, six-year-old, I took piano lessons, but didn't really get into it very much, never practiced. And then one day, I was nine, I was just bored at home. And of course, there's no internet, there's no phone, it's like 1991 or whatever it was. And I was just snooping through our cabinets looking for something to play with. And I found my mom's old flute from high school. There’s this old Bundy in one of those rusty brown sort of like fake leather cases. And I figured out how to put it together. And I learned the first couple of notes of “Part Of Your World” from The Little Mermaid, cause that was the big movie that was out at the time. And so I taught myself that and then I was hooked.
And I took to the flute very, very quickly. I mean, I was doing gigs by the time I was in fifth grade, playing classical flute in the corner during the PTA luncheon, you know, that kind of thing. My band director would be like, I got a gig for you, Erica. And I ended up teaming up with some other talented flute players my age. There were three of us. We got together and like, instead of going to the town pool, we would go and play flute trio music together and eat Cheetos. So that was like my exposure to being young and being a musician-minded kind of person.
My Dad left and it was just me and my Mom and Mom wasn't making enough money. I thought, what can I do to make money? And I thought of private music lessons because there were so many fourth-grade and fifth-grade starting musicians in our town and our town had a huge music program, a public school program. So I talked to one of my band directors who gave me some really good advice on how to get started. And before I knew it, I had 20 students a week and I was 16 years old. And they were all like fourth graders just learning the saxophone. It’s pretty easy to teach “Hot Cross Buns” and have a good time with this little kid who's younger than me. Anyway, so that's kind of what started me just sort of being gig and professionally minded.
And then of course I went to Hall High School [in West Hartford, Connecticut], which is known for its music program. We participated in Essentially Ellington. And I hooked up with amazing local musicians. I don't know if you're familiar with the Curtis brothers, Luques and Zaccai. I grew up with them and we had a kid band together in Hartford and we went to Cuba, we toured jazz festivals. We were sort of like this Latin jazz kid phenom band that was on the circuit for a while before we all went to college. So that was sort of pre-graduation from high school for me.
Michelle: That’s interesting. So you were—I mean, first of all, phenomenally talented—but also going full-tilt as a working artist by high school. Where did you go to college and what kind of work did you do in college?
Erica: So I went to Manhattan School of Music for one year and then I got recruited for the Juilliard program. And so I left MSM and finished my bachelor's at Juilliard. And that's a whole other story, performance or education or both. Jazz Studies. I actually received the first bachelor's degree in jazz in the history of the Juilliard School.
Michelle: Seriously? It was a new program when you started?
Erica: Yep. I had one year at Manhattan School of Music under my belt so I was able to finish Juilliard in three, and my colleagues had a fourth year. I finished in 2004.
Michelle: And you must have been gigging in New York all the while, I’m assuming?
Erica: I started doing some gigs here and there. Arturo O'Farrill came to Juilliard and did a workshop, met me, and heard me play. At the time he was sort of in talks to start the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which was going to be a part of Lincoln Center, loosely, you know Wynton was sort of like overseeing. Right out of college, I had a gig with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and we started touring around and doing shows at the new opening of Rose Hall [Lincoln Center].
So I started full tilt, and I was also getting into education work as well. As a working musician, you get asked to teach or hey you want to do these lessons here and so there were several teaching organizations I was a part of. I started doing Broadway, subbing in the orchestra pit a few years later. I started doing some recording with Chris Potter, Sean Jones, the Diva Jazz Orchestra was touring with them and a host of others. With Darcy James Argue. So that's like my sort of 20s right there.
Michelle: So, obviously on the level of working musicianship, you're totally making it with all these prestigious gigs. What was your income, your cost of living and your standard of living in those years?
Erica: Well, it was pretty much breaking even. I called myself “Big Band Erica,” cause everyone would call me for big band stuff. And you know how little most big band stuff pays. Unless you are in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s band, and I toured with them as well. Still, I was sort of pigeonholed into this type of work and I wanted to do small group stuff. I wanted to stretch out and be more creative. And I had released two albums myself in the hopes of becoming known more for that. And those, you know, when you're self-everything and you have no clue, you've had no business training at all, you have no clue what marketing is or PR or anything, you're just literally shooting in the breeze. You have no idea what's going on. And so that was me releasing two albums and burning myself out. Meanwhile, keeping up this illustrious big band career.
But Broadway was great. I mean, I was making really good money. At the end of the aughts, I did The Addams Family on Broadway for two years when it was my chair [this means a musician is guaranteed a certain number of performances or services]. So, I mean, I was pulling in pretty much six figures doing that, which was the most money I had ever made at that point in my life. And it was great to kind of have a little bit of savings. But until that point, until like 2010, I was pretty much just breaking even with money.
Michelle: Yeah, that sounds like you were doing pretty well, making money on Broadway, which would have enabled you to start choosing which gigs you took and maybe finance your career as a leader of smaller groups. So if you’d been doing well as a musician and were starting to make real money, what motivated you to move to Montana?
Erica: I actually got married when I was 26 in 2008. And in 2011, my husband and I separated. And at that moment, I was also really seriously burning out. I was burning out from having this lack of a creative outlet. Doing a Broadway show for two years was amazing for the financial stability, but doing the same music every single day, you know, takes a number on you creatively. I mean, there were calls from Chris Potter and Wynton Marsalis and all of this stuff. But I was like, I am so unhappy. I got the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra call. That's the biggest call, the one I’d wanted since high school. And I got to go on the road with the band and do the thing. And it's like, great. But I'm just not making enough money. And the amount of energy that it takes to live in New York City when you don't have much money . . . And all my out-of-town gigs were the best-paying things that I had. So I was like, I could live somewhere else and make that money and just travel from somewhere else. I don't have to live in this city.
Michelle: Did you have a gig out in Montana before you moved?
Erica: Yeah. In the summer of 2012, I got hired to do an orchestra pit gig for a theater company in Whitefish, Montana. And I flew out to Whitefish. I was supposed to be there for a month. I had never been away from the East Coast or anywhere for more than a week or two in my life. And so a month was a big deal for me. So I go out to this beautiful mountain town in the northwest corner of Montana, right near Glacier National Park. The air was so fresh. There’s no traffic. You can push a grocery cart down the aisle and it will fit and put the groceries in a car and drive them somewhere into a full-size refrigerator. I mean, it was the little things that were blowing my mind. And not only that, the people there were just, let’s have a beer and talk about life. Like there was no such thing as like the jazz conversation. You know, like you go and you go to a bar in New York and you see musicians, you know, it's like, so what are you working on? What are your gigs? Like that's always the conversation that happens, which is fine, but it makes you feel like your whole self-worth is wrapped up in the gigs that you're doing, as opposed to: Let’s talk about life. Who are you as a person? So I kind of was gobsmacked by this feeling of freedom. And I decided I needed to leave the city. It was a visceral feeling. And so I got back to New York, packed up all my stuff and within seven weeks I was gone.
Michelle: That’s so abrupt! What did your New York friends say?
Erica: My friends were completely supportive. At first, I purposely didn't tell a whole lot of people that I moved to Montana because I still wanted to be getting the bigger calls. And it was only after a year or two, people were like, we see a lot of pictures of Glacier National Park on your Facebook. What gives, Erica? And I'm like, okay, cat’s out of the bag, you know, but whatever. Eventually, it was cheaper to pay half the rent in each place than it was for me to live full-time in New York, if that makes sense.
Michelle: Oh, it does. How much time were you still spending in New York?
Erica: At first I was going back every three months, every few months or so for like, a bigger call, you know, a week doing something, or like I had to travel out of New York to go do something. Then it got more infrequent as I kind of got my heels deep into Montana and all the things I was involved with there.
But it was like I became a new person. I was so happy. I was just like, I don't know, it's hard to describe. It was like this visceral happiness. I think it's because it's such a culture of like, let's jump in a lake. Let's just go skiing. Let's just drink some beers around a campfire. There's such this, I mean, you can probably relate in Colorado, I'm sure there's similar vibes. And I just never had that experience. I was the band kid who was going to band camp and doing band things in the summers when I was in high school. I didn't have summer camp. I took AP freaking physics in the summer so that I could get ahead with my GPA. Like I was never the summer camp kid and I finally had a taste of this freedom and I was just drunk on life.
And I was like, this is amazing. So anyway, that was the difference between this pre-Montana Erica and then the new Montana Erica was just like, screw it all, I'm going to jump in a lake.
Michelle: So I'm getting the sense that you were so happy with all the new lifestyle possibilities out there and with who you could be out there that maybe missing the arts and culture scene in New York wasn't so painful for you. Also, you’d return and get a taste of it occasionally.
Erica: Yeah, and I was traveling enough. So I was going to other places, but my focus was not like, input. Like I didn't need culture and input. Like I've done that for 10 years. I needed quiet just to be like, okay, who am I? What am I doing on this earth? What do I really want to do? What makes me feel good as a person? And to just shed the whole like jazz persona, jazz life, jazz expectation bubble that I was brought up into that I had no idea I was in in the first place. And then just having that silence and that space to just literally be super objective and just be like, what am I doing? And that's, yeah, that's, that's kind of where that was coming from.
Michelle: It’s beautiful that you found those possibilities there. And how did some of the costs of living compare for you?
Erica: So when I first moved, I was paying 650 bucks in rent for a three-bedroom house. Yeah, and like dollar beer nights. And I keep saying beer. I wasn't like drinking a ton of beer, but like, you know, just, it was very, very, very cheap. Groceries were cheap. I mean, obviously flying in and out of Kalispell was the biggest expense because it's like at the time round trip tickets to New York were like 600 bucks. Now they're like $1,100, it's insane. But like the payoff, the benefits outweighed that kind of once-in-a-while expense. But the cost of living was super low. The pressure was low. The steam level had decreased significantly.
Michelle: I’m curious about how some of the locals in Montana and Whitefish felt about you being from New York. How did they receive you as this New York person or musician in their midst?
Erica: Whitefish is full of transplants. So you have people from New York, LA, Chicago. A lot of people had the same story, and these were not necessarily musicians. These were writers. These were surgeons. These were people from all different types of backgrounds. And so we all had a similar story as to the reason why we ended up there.
The music scene was like, why are you here? Like, you want to play blues gigs down at the bar? I was like, yes, I do. Like, do you want to play in this little community flute group we have? I'm like, yeah, I do. I just want to have fun doing this as opposed to having it be like, okay, you know, got to play the jazz and play all the changes. It was just like, let's just enjoy ourselves. play music. And I really started to understand just the joy of doing this as opposed to having it be such an obligation kind of thing. And it was very nice to be so well received by the community. I started playing keys, you know, I started playing other instruments. I started playing bass in like an all-girl rock trio that we had. It was just exploration and everybody was all up for it. I had so many collaborators. It was amazing.
Michelle: I'm so happy to be talking to you. I love this story. So different from my story of moving West. So, you were in Whitefish when the pandemic hit. And this is when you began to find some new direction. Performance for a while was problematic on the whole. How did you adapt?
Erica: So the adaptation happened before that. So I'll give you a little backstory. After spending a year in Montana . . . I didn't pick up my horn for six months, like I used all my Addams Family savings and just lived off of it and just protested work. And then I realized I needed to make money. I need to figure this out. So I started a teaching studio for high school. I was the only game in town, teaching alto sax, flute, piccolo, clarinet. I started doing beginner piano too, because that's all the rage. So I developed my teaching studio. And, you know, that was like a little bit of a nest egg or bread and butter kind of situation.
I saw, man, there are so many wealthy people and tourists here. I'm like, how can I capitalize on this? So I started a music booking agency for private events and weddings and started working with the local bands and I became a booking agent. I’d talk with the local venues, like the wedding venues and the wedding planners. I started this agency where I would be the go-between for the artist and the venues or clients and get music happening for their weddings and parties and all those types of things. At the same time, I also started a nonprofit organization that booked live music for nursing homes and care facilities.
And so I started this sort of like biodome ecosystem of music economy where during the day I would book the artists for the nursing homes. They'd get paid maybe 80 bucks to do a one-hour thing, but it's 80 bucks. And then at night, I would be wheeling and dealing and negotiating with clients. Like, I'll get you a string trio for this thing. I'll get you a jazz duo for this, solo guitar for this. I ended up starting a wedding band called The Mac Band, like a full-blown wedding band. Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, all of the shit that jazz musicians don't want to play. I did that. And that blew up, like in a good way. And honestly, within the first three years of business, to talk about money, within the first three years of doing this, I'd run almost three-quarters of a million dollars of revenue through the art scene, through a town of 7,000 people. Because of all these private events and all of the money and the generosity towards nonprofits. And there's a very quickly aging population that wanted to make sure there was like live music at their, nursing homes, you know, so I just kept building these projects, I mean, one year I had like 50 independent contractors working for me.
And honestly, within the first three years of business, to talk about money, within the first three years of doing this, I'd run almost three-quarters of a million dollars of revenue through the art scene, through a town of 7,000 people.
Michelle: Impressive. So I think it’s important to pause and get a sense of this culture. When you say there's a wealthy culture in Whitefish, we're talking about celebrities having homes in the area. I mean, tremendous wealth, right?
Erica: Yes. And people coming to Montana wanting their Pinterest wedding in the mountains and willing to spend $200,000 on their wedding. And when I heard that they would spend $30,000 to fly a band from Chicago to play music at a wedding, I'm like, I'm starting a wedding band. And I'm going to make it so local musicians get the gig. Not to kick anyone out of a gig, but supply and demand is supply and demand. It was just understanding how much money there was to be made and how much people would be willing to spend on the Montana experience, like a couple coming from California wanting that perfect wedding experience.
Michelle: So the way you've characterized your background, you've always been entrepreneurial. You move to Whitefish and your entrepreneurial spirit finds new expression, finds new opportunity. When artists think about moving, they usually think about kind of taking the artistic lives that they have in a big glittering cultural capital and moving them to a smaller, more affordable place. They maybe don't think so much about new opportunities.
Erica: Yeah, a lot of people move for a teaching job, move from New York or the Bay Area and move to a smaller city or a smaller town and teach at a school, which is a great thing to do. But I literally had zero work prospects when I moved to Montana and I just, I built them. I just helped connect some of the dots to make things more fruitful for everybody: more gigs, more money, a higher level of professionalism, and that sort of thing.
Michelle: So, you seized upon the market to create opportunities in Whitefish. All of this activity is going pretty strong when the pandemic hits and then you adapt again.
Erica: We’re almost to the pandemic. I was doing all of these projects and in 2018, 2019, I pushed myself a little too hard. I was rocking the wedding band business, also doing a ton of out-of-town gigs, and that year my nonprofit’s educational component started an all-star jazz ensemble in the Flathead Valley called the Flathead Ellington Project, kind of like based on my Essentially Ellington experience where the kids learn the music of Duke Ellington. It was a very involved program I didn't realize would get so tricky, because I'd never done anything like that before. But it culminated in me and my team taking the kids on a trip to New York to perform at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. That was a huge undertaking, on top of which I recorded an album in New York the same week live at Dizzy's and then the wedding band was in full swing. So I basically burned myself out again.
I was super passionate about what I was doing, but I was not writing any music. And so I was like, I need to step down from my nonprofit. I need to sell the wedding band. I can't do this anymore. So I did both of those things.
And right around this time was #MeToo, the whole #MeToo movement. And so I'm transitioning back into being creative and I'm sort of reminiscing about my life as a young creative musician. And #MeToo happens and all these women start coming out about all of these stories of what they've dealt with. As someone who was often the lone female in countless situations, Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, like everywhere, I started realizing how much of the bullshit that I had dealt with without realizing it at the time.
I realized through the #MeToo movement that I had been groomed when I was 18 by a musician. I realized that I had been talked down to and ridiculed in certain situations and marginalized. It had been one of those things where it was like, it’s jazz, I’m one of the guys, we'll just play the gig, it's fine. Yeah, dude, killing, killing. And I just didn't realize my womanhood had always been a factor and it never connected until I started hearing all of these stories. Maybe other women you've talked to have had that same experience where they realized, oh, shoot, that happened to me.
Michelle: Yeah, I wrote a piece on that subject that went viral just in advance of #MeToo. Women were coming to me with stories and asking me to share their stories. So you were having these epiphanies and realizations around what you had been dealing with as a woman in jazz.
Erica: Well, I started getting really angry. And that coupled with this burnout that I was experiencing. I was just raging at that point. And I thought to myself, I'm going to go on Facebook and burn a bunch of bridges, which is going to make me look like a crazy person and not be helpful for anybody. Or I need to write some music. And I was like, okay, I'm going to write some music, but instrumental jazz is just not going to cut it. I need words on this stuff. I started writing a song about mansplaining based on an experience I'd had in Montana. And it's called “You're the Man.” It's not a jazz tune. It's like a musical theater kind of vibe, a song.
I had some friends over at my house one night. And I was like, Hey, guys, I wrote a song at the piano. Can I sing it for you? And they're like, sing? I was just getting used to playing piano and singing because it's like coordination to do. And they're like, Erica, you're funny. I said, am I friend funny? Or am I actually funny? And they're like, you're actually funny.
Michelle: You are. Even that question is funny.
Erica: This is when I started journaling. And I bought a journal and I love taking myself out. I sit at a bar, have a glass of wine and a personal pizza. So I started taking this journal out on my nights off and I would write song ideas and song lyrics. I tell you, it poured out of me.
I started writing all of these songs about women's issues, from two guys talking about my boobs behind my back, like I experienced when I was on tour once, to a musical play-by-play of what happens during a pap smear to menstruation and how we're not allowed to talk about it. I started writing all of these songs and they snowballed. I wrote an entire musical and I ended up doing a reading at my house because I had a piano and I got a bunch of people together. I ended up bringing the show to New York with a cast and did a reading at The Tank on 36th Street. A couple producers were there and said this show potentially has legs. This is really good. And I was like me, no, I'm like the band chick. I'm supposed to be in the orchestra wearing all black, underneath the stage. Nobody looks at me. They're like, you should consider doing some of this material as a one-woman show, but also cultivate this musical you have. So I ended up dividing it into two things. The musical in a nutshell is about this woman in corporate America who has giant boobs and keeps getting ridiculed. She's really good at her job. The theme is that she's like always apologizing for herself. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So sorry. You know, anyway, that's the musical, but then I ended up cannibalizing some material and doing this like one one-woman show. And so now I have these two projects.
So we're here at COVID time now. I have these projects in limbo. Everything's in limbo and I'm like trying to figure out what's my next move, basically.
Michelle: Okay, so this hits and everybody's struggling in the beginning. There's a lot of isolation. Obviously, for performing artists, there's a special struggle because you find meaning and income in performing among other people, to other people. And so what did you do? How did you adapt then?
Erica: So I wrote another musical.
Michelle: So was it online? Or were you working on something for the after times?
Erica: So there were these two writer actors that I have always been really close friends with and we'd always talked about writing together. All their stuff got canceled and we're all sitting at home. So they're like, why don’t you come over? We're going to get one of those giant magnums of wine and let's like write something. So we started joking about the different personalities in COVID. Like you have the extrovert who can't leave the house. You have the guy who just got his unemployment and is blowing it on everything on Amazon Prime. You have the person who's obsessed with COVID protocol. And so we started writing all of these songs based on these different personas of COVID. And of course, this snowballed into a whole musical that I ended up co-writing with these amazing writers. And we got to a point in June of 2020 where we were like, well, we have a show. What do we do with it? And I was like, we could do this. We could film it and like do it remote, like do a movie of this. And they were like, okay. And so we ended up getting some sponsorship. We ended up getting a little bit of a grant to do this, but we got an almost all-Broadway cast and an entirely Broadway orchestra to record all of the orchestrations that I did for all the songs. There was a whole script.
It's a 90-minute feature film. It's called Your Musical. It's called Your Musical, Canceled the Musical. I swear to God, this was the little COVID project that could because within basically nine months of starting this, we had released it. We submitted it to a bunch of film festivals. We won Best Comedy and Best Feature at the SoCal Film Awards. We won the best comedy cast at the Toronto Alternative Film Fest. And then in June of 2021, we flew out to New York where they premiered it at the New York Independent Film Festival.
And it was like this little COVID project got legs and it's quite brilliant. Honestly, it's one of the things within the last several years that I'm the most proud of. This little movie. And it was so much fun.
Michelle: Did you make any money on the movie? What was the pay structure for it?
Erica: We had sponsors. The two local theater companies stepped up to chip in, and several members of the community supported us, too. And we got a grant from the state of Montana. But it was just enough for us to pay our costs and a little bit to pay for some of our trip to New York. But we didn't make any money off of this. We put it on Vimeo for rental because we knew our friends in town would rent it and support us. But like after maybe three months, we just ended up putting it on my YouTube channel. So it's there for free. But, you know, I think that this is a very good proof of concept for a future staged project or maybe a calling card for some other work that the four of us who worked on this together can do because we're a really great team of writers.
Michelle: All right, so you did all this writing during the pandemic, and then at some point you decided to move back to New York. It seems like you'd been finding a lot of creative joy in Montana. So why did you move back to New York?
Erica: So I had purchased a condo in Whitefish and when the market went crazy during COVID, I decided to sell and I did really well. It was great, but the real estate economy decimated Whitefish because all of the money moved in. All of the rents went up like crazy. Lots of people had to leave. So the town really changed a lot. And it wasn't the same vibe: venues were closing, restaurants were getting so expensive, traffic was up.
I was like, I can't see myself here long term, because I don't know what's going to come out the other end. At the same time, I had been releasing a music business web series on my YouTube channel, that had kind of been making the rounds.
And I was like, I needed one call, one reason to move back, I couldn’t just move back to New York for no reason. And one of my colleagues said, hey, we need someone to teach music business at Manhattan School of Music. So once I got that call, that was in October of 2022. I was like, yeah, it's time to move back. And it really felt right this time. And so basically, between October and the end of December, I had sort of made my transition and found an apartment. And basically, about a year ago is when I got back to New York to start teaching at MSM. And then more stuff has come in. I'm working for Jazz House Kids, I'm teaching there. I'm also working for Carnegie Hall, I'm teaching their music educator program and NYU and a bunch of other things.
But it was the music business stuff that I had done, the nonprofit for profit, that has given me the acumen and that objectivity to understand the other side of the business, to the point where I can teach it to a bunch of jazz students who were like me when I was 18. You know, teaching them about 1099s, all the stuff I never learned about.
So that's where I'm at.
Michelle: You’re back in New York. And you're in a very different place financially and in terms of career direction. You’re now living in New York on more of your own terms. So Erica, what would you suggest? I mean, I know so many artists are in a position where they can't afford to live in the glittering cultural capitals anymore. And so they're thinking about moving. And they're looking at smaller, more affordable cities. What would you tell them? What would be important for them to think about when they're moving and to consider when they move?
Erica: A couple years ago, my answer to that question would have been find a place with a scene, with some venues—find a place with a nice community you feel like you can relate to. All that's still true. But with the skyrocketing cost of living to the point where we're at apocalyptic levels? Now I'm just like, dude, go where you can live as cheaply as you possibly can. I don't know what that means to you, where you're thinking of living, but figure out a way to not get yourself into trouble financially. Have that be your number one concern. The cost of living is so high.
Michelle: Do you have friends who are moving overseas as a solution, to more affordable overseas cities?
Erica: Opportunities, you know, are plentiful in some places. There's several of my colleagues who have moved overseas. I sort of half-jokingly had conversations with people about how in ten years, I'm gonna be in Sweden or something. Things are not as crazy as they are here.
I don't know I really just don't know what I would tell someone at this point other than just like keep your cards close to your chest. Don’t spend too much money and just look at the bigger picture. And also, you don't have to be in New York to have a career doing this anymore. You don't have to be in a big city. It’s really helpful to start off in the city and get that culture, get that network together, you know, bust your chops. But that doesn't have to be the be-all end-all. I literally skipped town and moved to Montana for ten years and I'm okay, at least I think I'm okay. I'm better off for it.
Michelle: So you teach music business to young musicians. What would you say are some of the biggest blind spots that they have about a career in music?
Erica: That there is a much bigger world out there than what meets the eye. And what meets their eye right now is their practice room and their current scene and the bubble that they have. And that's normal for anybody. I mean, I'm in my own bubble too. We're all in our own bubbles. But understanding there's a huge, huge world out there, that’s what I learned in Montana. Having friends who were surgeons and massage therapists, people who are not musicians, understanding there's all these different universes out there that you can be a part of that you can interact with and integrate with. You don't have to just be hanging out with just musicians. Get out there.
And also one of the big things I talk about in my class is objectivity and seeing yourself as a product. Like, how are you presenting yourself to people? What are you wearing on the stage? I literally gave this class yesterday and we watched a video of Bootsy Collins. And I'm like, just because he's wearing a sequined jacket and the star sunglasses, did that make him any less of a bass player? No, you can be a badass musician and look great on stage and wear the fun, funky things and you'll just stand out even more. So, you know, getting those kids out of their shells to really think of themselves as a commodity is another one of my things.
Michelle: My sense is that that might be getting easier. I’m Gen X, and so I grew up with this prohibition on selling out, right? Anybody in the early 90s who started to make money as an artist was selling out. There was just this fear and loathing of commodification. Millennials still have a little bit of a fear of selling out, but less so. My sense is that Gen Z came up thinking of how to position themselves for the marketplace at the same time they were learning their art practice. There is no opposition for them at all. Would you say that’s the case for your students?
Erica: It’s funny because I literally had the selling-out talk with my students yesterday. I remember being around the water cooler and being like oh god you know we hate Kenny G because he's making a ton of money. But the students seemed a lot more aware of the fact that like you got to make money and that artists who are making money are not necessarily selling out. Unless you're doing like something nefarious and underhanded, I think if you're just playing music for people and making money doing it, there’s a lot worse things in this world to be complaining about. So let a person play piano backwards and like let the crowd go crazy. You know, Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, the sax player, I put on a video of his like 251 exercises and the minute I clicked the video, they were like, ah, ha ha ha, Chad, oh, good old Chad, and I was like, okay, where's this minimizing tone coming from? I'm like, he can play circles around all of us. And he's commodified his teaching curriculum. What's the problem here? You know, and the students were like, it's because he's being successful. I said, this is a mentality we have to be careful of because you don't want to stop yourself from being successful because you're worried about what other people are going to think.
Michelle: Yeah. Authenticity and success are not mutually exclusive. There are a lot of different expressions of authenticity as an artist. You’re an inspiration, Erica. I'm in awe of your entrepreneurial spirit and of all the directions you’ve pursued in your career. And there’s still so much to come for you.
Erica: I mean I feel like I'm just maybe a couple steps ahead of life at times. I really kind of go on what feels good in the moment which has been to my benefit and also at times my detriment. I’m trying to figure out where my real path is right now, especially being in my 40s. I definitely have not settled back in New York yet. So we will see what the future holds.
This was and is amazing.
Erica sure has a lot of ideas and gumption! Thanks for speaking with her, Michelle. Does she know pianist Ann Tappan, who moved to Bozeman/Manhattan, Montana from the Bay Area in '93? The JJA celebrates Ann as a Jazz Hero (https://jjajazzawards.org/2024-jazz-hero-ann-tappan/) along with 33 others, many of whom live in places we don't think of first for jazz -- Akron, Brattleboro, Charleston, Charlottesville, Hilton Head Island, the Baja California/San Diego borderland, Tucson.