Bill Tapia & Embraceable You

On Being A Full Time Musician

Thu, 11 May 2023 21:41:37 GMT

Tips, Tricks & Stories of how I did it & what NOT to do

I’m a full time female musician with a small entertainment company in Hawaii playing and singing jazz four days a week. I don’t have a “real” job or another daytime gig to rely on if there’s another pandemic or I get myself fired. I make my living as a musician and entertainer.

I think I might be the only female musician in the world playing/singing jazz four nights a week and getting paid for it! Mind you, I’m not living extravagantly and I’m glad my “other half” has a job that pays for our health insurance. But I have enough to take care of me and the ones I love in warmth, health and comfort. I travel several times a year to visit family, friends and pacify the gypsy in me. When I’m at home my mornings are filled with gym or yoga and practicing on whichever instrument I feel like playing that day; guitar, ukulele, bass, piano. Some mornings I drive down to the beach, ten minutes away, and float staring up at clear blue skies. The life I lead is a dream come true.

It wasn’t always like this. My father, a musician himself, actively discouraged my sister and I from becoming musicians or pursuing music with the warning, “It’s a hard life.” Ours was a severely religious family encouraging women to become teachers or nurses - never musicians, even though everyone in our family had musical ability. I put myself through college, and tried NOT to be a musician but the lure, and a little bit of romance, got me to move home to Hawai’i in 2009 to pursue music full time.

It’s A Hard Life

Note to my father: Being a musician is NOT such a hard life, but getting there IS.

No one would probably guess but at the age of forty seven I did not know how to play an instrument and sing at the same time. My strength is my voice and all I had ever done musically, up until I moved back to Hawaii, was sing…in church, in choirs, fronting jazz combos and swing bands. My second husband, one of the most naturally gifted musicians I know, had been making a living at being a musician since childhood on drums, bass, then guitar; a long seasoned musician. When we met he promised a lifetime partnership of music and artistic fulfillment but then balked at being my accompanist while I got the limelight as the singer. And I balked at not getting paid as his vocalist. I was naive and presumptuous when I left my comfortable, jazzy life in Los Angeles for a place in his world. And then, later, I was angry about how unfairly things had turned out between us and how little I actually knew about making a living as a musician.

I learned, the hard way, that to be a full-time, working musician here in Hawai’i, you need to play an instrument. While my second husband partied with his friends, made bad investments and slept past noon I was down at the beach every morning forcing myself to learn to play the only instrument I owned at the time - a six string cut-away Lanikai that I’d bought on eBay. I knew that in order for me to have my musical freedom I needed to be able to depend on myself as my own accompanist. I celebrated every new chord progression, every new strum pattern, every successful picking pattern and every song I finally sang all the way through while I played that damned ukulele..

And I listened to what people were playing, watched audience’s faces and tried to gauge what they were thinking and what they liked. I listened more and learned and copied and practiced until my fingers hurt and blistered and peeled and blistered again and finally calloused over.

Musician versus Artiste

By the time my second divorce came through I owned a small music company of my own and established relationships with major corporations and entertainment partners in my area. I’d learned to take care of the business end of things because, make no mistake, music is a business, not just a calling. Here, at this critical juncture, is where we need to make the distinction between MAKING A LIVING being a musician and BEING AN ARTISTE.

Making a living as a musician means you’ll need to show up and play what you’re being PAID to play even when you dread it, don’t like it, don’t feel it and think you might hurl at an audience you can’t stand. A professional musician adheres to the terms of the contracted gig and delivers an agreed upon product. Your success as a musician depends on it.

In contrast, the artiste will not compromise their own aesthetic value and musical ethics regardless of the outcome, positive or negative, to oneself and others. Staying true to ones artistic convictions is what counts. In my experience, a blend of both yields the greatest success both personally and professionally.

If you’re thinking about diving into the business of being a full time musician here are some things to think about:

The best paying musician gigs are the ones at the big hotels. If you think working at big hotels means you’re “selling out” you’re wrong. Working at a hotel means you will have opportunities to educate and share about the things that matter to you because you have a microphone in your hand when no one else does.
Steady gigs are just that - STEADY. Steady income, steady hours, steady crowds. For this “insurance” you will be paid less than casual gigs. Most importantly, steady gigs will offer you the incredible gift and opportunity to experiment musically and test things out - new arrangements, new gadgets, new set lists, new songs, new genres. If you don’t take advantage of these opportunities, your steady gig could well become a nuisance, an inconvenience and perhaps even a creative drain.
Casual, one off or convention gigs pay a lot more but are NOT steady, require deeper pockets in terms of resources, equipment, personnel and cash. They’ll require more lead time, more follow up and getting paid will sometimes take longer.
No one wants to pay more money when they don’t have to. That goes for big hotel corporations and everyone else. Ninety-five percent of music gigs will only pay for a soloist. If you want to take your soloist gig and split the pay with your bass player like I did for years then go ahead. But know, also, that those venues will learn to expect a duo when they’re only paying for a soloist.
Answer your phone promptly EVERY time, sound halfway professional and you will get jobs. This also means that you’ve developed a successful pitch for yourself or your company and have met face to face with the decision makers that actually hire the musicians.
Show up to the gig prepared, on time and looking smart. An attractive appearance goes a long way and can buy just about anything - including forgiveness.
The broader the range of musical genres and styles you’re familiar with the more valuable you are as a provider of entertainment. Listen to EVERY kind of music even if it doesn’t appeal to you and listen long enough to find out what others like about it. What you will be doing is building your own valuable database of creative material.
There is no substitute for personality, a sense of humor and the gift of gab. Those three things CAN be developed in anyone.
No matter how flawed or ugly you think you are, your audience craves the real you. Tall, short, skinny, fat, BBW, BBC, B BE YOURSELF! They want the you that thinks and says the things they wish they could say. They want the entertainer that takes them to places that exist only in their dreams.

The Hungry Hunter

A lot of famous and successful musicians have had daytime jobs while pursuing a career in music. And if you have a family, children to raise and responsibilities that cannot be placed on hold while you pursue your musical dreams then having a steady job might be the right course for you. I do believe it’s true, though, that hunger makes a better hunter.

I was very hungry. Hungry to regain my freedom to choose the kinds of music I would play and the people I would play with and learn from. I was hungry to learn and grow and become a better musician. My pride was hungry NOT to be defeated and have to go back to a job where I’d be taking orders from someone else and punching in at all hours of the day and night.

I had to take chances playing with people I didn’t know. I had to make calls I didn’t want to make and take gigs working for less pay than I thought I deserved. I made an ass of myself many times over and got up, made changes and got back out on stage again. Even today, thirteen years later, if I have to play at a venue I’m not familiar with or play with musicians I’m not familiar with I get nervous, sometimes despondent, am very self critical and have a tendency to get depressed and self isolate. It’s the way of the entrepreneur, the self starter, the musician or artiste. And going through it is the only way to get better.

I’m a better musician now than I was thirteen years ago but I will always know there are so many other musicians better than I am, more talented than I am, more refined than I am, more worthy than I am of the gigs I have. I will always feel as though I didn’t start early enough, that I have so much more to learn and need so much more time to practice. In spite of those feelings, I am happy on this journey and am refreshed daily with new musical discoveries. I’m doing what I want to do, I’m growing, my work brings me joy and, best of all, my music even occasionally brings joy to others!

Be what you want to be. And if what you want to be is a musician then go for it. Be strong, be disciplined, be courteous, be observant, be humble, be prepared, be kind, be brave, be you. Being a musician, full time or otherwise, isn’t the end game. It’s just the prelude to your own symphony.

Aunty Kanoe & The Martin Guitar

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 08:18:54 GMT

This weekend I’m flying to San Diego for my Aunty Kanoe’s celebration of life. She passed at her home at the ripe old age of eighty-four from cancer less than three weeks after her diagnosis. I had three aunts and my grandma on my father’s side who, at various times, played the role of “Mom” in my life. Now they’re all gone. My uncles and father as well as my grandfather; Aunty Kanoe was the last of them.

My Aunty Julie was the big sister, caregiver to all and a hard worker. Everyone benefited from her familial loyalty and self sacrifice. Her thirty five years of kitchen service at White Memorial Hospital created in her a love for cooking and baking that, again, we all benefited from. When my grandmother contracted Alzheimer’s and dementia Aunty Julie insisted we would care for her at home and that’s where my grandmother passed after ten years of progressively worse mental health - in Aunty Julie’s bedroom. Aunty Julie was about action.

My Aunty Mae was the youngest sister who rocked me to sleep as a baby and was my bedmate until I was four. She clicked her nails in my ear before leaving to work in the macadamia nut fields at dawn and I waited for her return daily on the front steps of our house in Keaukaha. A much older gentleman from church for years wanted to date her. To my grandparents dismay Aunty Mae stubbornly refused all of his advances and instead waited for joy and true love. She was rewarded with a loving marriage and a happy man and family. Aunty Mae was about fun.

And then there was my Aunty Kanoe, the middle sister, the China doll, the dancer. She was about progress.

I wish I were more like my Aunty Kanoe. Although I would consider myself progressive I don’t think I have quite the foresight or lifelong steadfastness she did. I don’t think I have quite the fortitude she did either, or the drive to make tasty food or iron mountains of clothes. I definitely don’t have the patience she had to create albums of photographs documenting the international travels and adventures and interests that she lived and loved and enjoyed all her life. Aunty was an excellent markswoman, wielding rifles and shotguns with ease and confidence. She was a fisher, a hunter, a prospector, a miner, a leader at work and mother in the most dedicated and loving way. She was an entrepreneur with her husband of sixty-one years, Uncle Bruce, and together they bought and sold over one hundred properties during her lifetime. Aunty’s Jazzercise class compadres gave her special recognition as their oldest and longest active member attending classes into her eighties. Aunty Kanoe made sure she lived, regardless of the prejudices of her era, regardless of the injustices women in her time faced especially as minorities and, in her own humbly joyful, sometimes kolohe way, made a difference as a living example of practicing what she preached.

The last time I made a trip specifically to see Aunty Kanoe she gave me a Martin guitar. She’d mentioned she wanted me to have it a few years back and I’d been making plans to go to California and fetch it when Covid happened. It was the guitar I’d heard my grandfather play when I was a girl living in Maywood, California attending Heliotrope Elementary school.

In between his daytime painting gigs, painting being a trade he learned from his father-in-law, and his night job as a janitor at Vornado, grandpa would come home, eat his dinner, help me with my math homework (those fractious fractions) and pull out the Martin to play for a bit.

picking, never strumming. He was methodical about getting it out of its case, careful and respectful as he’d been taught as a youngster. In his time musical instruments, in Hawaiian households anyway, were prized and revered; treated with respect, as one might treat an elder. Never touched or played with by children as if it were a toy. The instruments were pulled out at night, after the cares of the day had been put to rest and children settled. It was the time of day one waited and longed for, when the quiet sounds of night, moonlight and kī hoʻalu soothed the aching world. Stars appeared and troubles were forgotten. We were in California, more than two thousand miles from Kapaʻahu, Kalapana, Puna, but while he played the Martin we returned for a moment to the lava fields and ocean sounds and smells of home. Grandpa returned the Martin to Aunty Kanoe when he, reluctantly, moved back to Hawaii after fourteen years of living and working in California. That was all I knew about the guitar until Aunty Kanoe shared more of its history.

The guitar was actually originally purchased by Aunty’s older brother Joe when his Merchant Marines company made a stop in California. Before his company left the west coast he gave the Martin to my Aunty Julia who’d gone to California for college. When Uncle Louis’ Merchant Marines company made a west coast stop he went to his favorite sisterʻs house and played that guitar and, as the most musically gifted of my grandmother’s six children, made it sing. When my father, Clarence, joined Aunty Julia on the west coast to attend college he took the guitar and used it to play Hawaiian and tiki bar gigs to support and put himself through school. It took near fifteen years for my father to get his degree in music and art but that Martin guitar helped my dad become the first in his family to graduate from college. Once he was done with California life, he gratefully left the guitar with my Aunty Kanoe and hightailed it home to Hawaii.

Several years later, when I was four and Aunty Julie insisted we go to California to find better doctors for my grandmother, my grandfather, ever an opportunist, decided to extend his visit. He liked it there in California and he enrolled me in Kindergarten at Humphreys Elementary school in East Los Angeles. On the mainland grandpa was free to go where he wanted and do what he pleased without small town meddlers in his business and extended family making him a cosigner. The extended visit lasted fourteen years when he got a job, started a painting company and enjoyed the newfound freedom California afforded him. And with that newfound freedom grandpa decided to borrow the guitar from his favorite daughter, Aunty Kanoe, who, by then, had moved to California, married and inherited the guitar from Aunty Julie. Grandpa decided to play the music of his childhood and youth - ki ho’alu, traditional Hawaiian slack key - until, finally he too had to bend to my grandmother’s wishes, give the guitar back to Aunty Kanoe and move back home to Hawaii at the age of 79, less than a year before he passed.

The old Martin sat in my Aunty Kanoe’s house for forty more years; the scars of life as a loved part of our ohana etched into its back with belt buckle marks and into the front below the sound hole with strum patterns. Its neck was slightly twisted and the original tuners beyond saving when Aunty passed it on to me, still in its original cardboard case. I carried it on the plane with me back to Hawaii in 2021 and took it to my friend, a musical partner and luthier, Terry Warner.

Terry’s an interesting fellow. A lanky and jocular artist of sorts himself, Terry’s been tinkering with instruments, his own and those of his friends, for decades. Never formally trained as a luthier, Terry, nonetheless, has a natural rapport with stringed instruments. He’s a guitar whisperer. A retired carpenter and contractor by trade, Terry’s quest for creating works of art with wood can be seen in various structures and facades around the island, but I suspect that the legacy he leaves will be in the instruments he creates and fixes, always leaving them in better shape than when they came to him. I left the Martin in his safekeeping and told him I wanted it in playable condition, not all dolled up and refinished shiny, but capable of carrying a tune and being a working member of my family again. I wanted its story to remain and its character kept intact. “It’s an old girl,” he said, “but I think sheʻs got a good tune or two left.”

According to Terry’s wife, Lisa, Terry and that Martin bonded. He’d take her out of her case and keep her in his workshop while he worked on other, less confounding, instruments. She mellowed in the Hawaiian sun and took in the tradewinds while he fidgeted and tapped and meticulously drew out her story. Things worth doing well take time. They shared their secrets, as a luthier and a guitar do, and when they were finished he called.

I played her this morning out on my big shady lanai overlooking the kai mālie of Kawaihae. A whale waved her thanks for the old kī hoʻalu tune and I smiled thinking of my grandpa, my Aunty Kanoe and the preparations we are making for her services this weekend. I will be picking crown flower this morning for her lei and the fresh laulau will be frozen this afternoon for transport to California tomorrow. Life has a funny way of bringing things around when you least expect it.

Aunty Kanoeʻs last visit home was for a family reunion. She stayed on with us in Kawaihae, did the sakura card smack down and heatedly debated the validity of Keali’i’s “super yaku.” We played family songs, sang himeni and laughed at stories of family members who were gone long ago. We put flowers on the graves and shopped for fresh fish and she made her famous chow mein and beef stew. Aunty Kanoe knew my story, she knew my history and some of the sad choices that I’d needed to make in my lifetime. Aunty Kanoe’s counsel, always offered with love and support, was true and pure. Aunty Kanoe was always in my corner rooting for me, always reminding me of the love and care my grandparents had raised me with, and always cheered me with her sing-song voice on the phone for our birthdays, just a day apart. I will miss her. But I have the Martin, the best gift ever, with which to remember my Aunty Kanoe and my family. Whenever I play her, she will sing to me of times and places and people past and I will pass that on to my children and theirs and create stories to remember as well with that old Martin guitar.

BILL TAPIA & EMBRACEABLE YOU

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 08:21:26 GMT

I met Bill Tapia for the first time at his 100th birthday party. Living to be a hundred years old gives you plenty of wow factor. People listen. Your stories get recorded by the Grammy Museum and documentaries get made about your life, which is what happened to Bill. Basically, Bill lived long enough for the rest of the world to finally wake up and take note of his eight-decade-long musical career. I’d seen him on stage a couple of times and heard stories and rumors of performances with legendary greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. So when the invitation came to attend his centennial birthday party in Orange County I said yes immediately and put in a request for the day off from work.

Girl Singer

I was seven when I first heard Glenn Miller’s recording of “Moonlight Serenade.” It was a moment of lightning bolt beauty, an epiphany in the dappled afternoon sunlight of my grandparent’s living room. The floppy plastic 45 rpm demo I’d dug out of my father’s trash can and played on a portable phonograph I’d borrowed from my cousin was a moment I never forgot. For the rest of my life I would long to be enveloped again and again in the lush sound and feeling of swing, big band, a tight sax trio and American standards born by the Jazz Age.

Decades later, after I’d read every book and listened to every jazz recording in our small Hilo library and then moved to Los Angeles where they actually had a radio station dedicated to jazz, I discovered an Ella Fitzgerald recording of George Gershwin’s tune, “Embraceable You.” I must have played it a million times in my car driving to and from work each day for months. It was the perfect song for me and reinforced my (still present) belief that George Gershwin and I are soulmates. I, his muse, and he my Jewish Adonis. I’m certain it was a previous lifetime of ours that inspired him to pen those teasingly racy lyrics, “Don’t be a naughty baby…come to Mama do…” George, although not known for it, was a showman, a composer, a playwright, an entertainer.

When you’re an entertainer it’s not enough to have musical skill and talent. You can be a top notch musician but suck as an entertainer. A good entertainer makes their audience feel included, appreciated and emotionally involved. A grea t entertainer does all of that and then creates a path for the audience to be inspired and to take action. An encounter with a good entertainer is never forgotten. An encounter with a great entertainer changes and alters your perception of life. You will never be the same or think the same after that encounter.

The Duke of Uke

What Bill did that day, on ukulele and guitar at his own hundredth birthday celebration for more than three hours, was entertain. He wove stories of love and painful memories between rich instrumental solos and poignant melodies. His extra slow rendition of “Little Grass Shack” wasn’t the jocular tune of a carefree tourist but the lament of a man reminiscing of a youthful time and place to which he could never return.

At a hundred Bill dressed like a dapper gentleman out on the town, his red leather shoes keeping time with the present and celebrating a flaming past, like a comet. Street musician, lover, fighter, teller of tall tales, romancer, innovator, explorer and chronicler of the human spirit; at one hundred years of age Bill was alive.

There were rumors he’d fallen in love and proposed to a woman fifty years his junior and was heartbroken…at the age of one hundred. It was also rumored Bill tried to buy a condo and applied for a mortgage loan. With a stellar credit rating and a solid downpayment Bill was incensed by the bank’s reticence to enter into a thirty year mortgage loan with a hundred year old man.

Though he started playing ukulele on the streets of Honolulu at the age of eight, Bill didn’t record an album of his own music until he was ninety-six years old, in 2004. As fate would have it, a new ukulele boom, the third in Bill’s lifetime, was just getting started and, after almost more than eight decades as a relatively unknown musician, Bill was inducted into the Ukulele Hall of Fame and crowned, “The Duke of Uke.”

Dozens of musicians, some of whom had traveled for many miles and hours to be at his birthday celebration, considered it an honor to play any song, just one song, on stage with Bill Tapia. I was no exception. At 45 I was at least a decade or two younger than most of the other seasoned musicians there and with relatively little stage experience when it came to singing jazz. They were all pals and I was a newbie, nervous and frightened about how badly I might screw up even though I’d already started singing with a couple of big bands and swing bands around town when they’d have a “girl singer.”

Bill blew out every last candle on his cake and it was clear he was eager to get back to the business of music before it was time to say goodbye. I’d seen a couple of other singers get on stage so I cranked up my courage and timidly asked the emcee if I might be able to join Bill on one song; George Gershwin’s beautiful ballad, “Embraceable You.” “Key?” he asked as he looked me over doubtfully. “E flat,” I replied in my bravest voice.

My palms were sweaty when they called my name and I tried not to trip walking out to center stage. Bill’s eyesight wasn’t what it used to be and after giving me a serious sizing up he apologized then asked my name. I don’t remember ever giving him my name as, right then, the emcee decided to let Bill know what song and key I’d requested. I thought I saw a sparkle in his eye when he heard “Embraceable You” and he asked again what key I wanted. By this point I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole - there was no going back to the safety of the curtains once Bill started counting off the tempo. I heard him lead in with an eight bar intro on guitar. Then I closed my eyes and slipped into that slice of heaven to sing George’s ballad. Bill was the birthday boy, but I was the one that received a gift that day.

It would be years before I’d come to appreciate the richness of Bill’s innate sense of timing and the humor that put his audience at ease and on the edge of their seats at the same time. It will be years again before I can approach his mastery of a simple four-stringed instrument his Portuguese forefathers brought to Hawai’i over a century earlier. I only regret having missed the slim window of opportunity I had to record a tune with Bill before he passed in his sleep at the age of one hundred and three.

The handful of times Bill and I met each other on stage after his hundredth birthday party he’d greet me with, “Embraceable You, E flat,” and a wry smile under his pure white moustache. I’m not sure if Bill ever really knew my name. It doesn’t matter, really. It is enough for me to know that to Bill Tapia I am “Embraceable You, E Flat.”