links for 2011-01-23

This article deals with live jazz performance focused in the Midlands of the UK. The figures I quote are from personal experience and may vary from the experience of others.

I am a professional musician meaning I earn my money from music. These days it is from teaching, performing, composing and conducting. I run bands of my own including a 5-piece jazz quintet called the Andy Derrick Group – you can find out more here www.andyderrickgroup.com

The members of the ADG all derive their incomes in a similar way to me and most of the gigs we do on a freelance basis pay around £110 with some as low as £60 and others as high as you like. At the moment I am trying to secure new gigs for the band and the barriers and frustrations I have encountered have left me questioning the composition of the work scene for jazz.

It has been said that Los Angeles and San Francisco were the last major metropolitan cities in which punk music scenes developed and once it hit California, punk changed shapes numerous times, spread to every corner of the United States and became a permanent fixture in popular culture.

In 1984, a teenage Dave Travis decided to capture punk rock in Los Angeles on video tape, a fascination and hobby that he would continue until 1997, logging in hundreds of hours of Los Angeles area shows and interviews. In "A History Lesson Part 1, Travis presents live footage filmed in the spring of 1984