C#
Wholesome Allison Burik / Mili Hong trio, Nebyu / Cole / Dean, attendance, funding, Patreon, and inside baseball
Back to the 10 things format, except a few of them deeper in are different angles of one particular thing that stole my attention yesterday. Inside baseball? Maybe. Batter up!
1
At Fabrique on Wednesday, I got to observe and enjoy a funny, wholesome bandstand moment between visiting saxophonist Allison Burik and our own Jodi Proznick. During their first set billed as drummer Mili Hong's trio, the chordless group launched into John Coltrane's "Equinox". Now, you may recall from me that I heard Proznick play this tune a few weeks ago. Back then, she called it in the key of concert C minor. However, the tune's standard key is in C-sharp minor, up a halfstep.
Here's what I think happened, keep in mind I could be misunderstanding. Jodi set up 12 bars' worth of bassline, again in C minor. Burik entered with the melody in C#! The moment seemed to last only a millisecond before Burik slipped down a halfstep; the only reason I noticed anything is because they both started laughing, otherwise it'd be too fast for me. I hope they'll forgive my joining in the ear-to-ear smiles quite visibly.
The rest of the set with Hong's typically vibrant drumming and the standards they chose was also enjoyable on the busy night, despite Fabrique patrons on both sides of me talking loudly to their significant others throughout.
Burik is in town with musical partner and spouse Claire Devlin to play as the band Bellbird, whom I wrote about below (and also had their bandmates, Eli Davidovici & Mili Hong, on the podcast for). Bellbird played Jazz at the Bolt last weekend and were one of the bands I got the most positive feedback about from passersby who hadn't heard them before.
Tonight, we have two Infidels shows featuring three Bellbird members each; a New Thing at Zameen Art House with Burik solo plus a Devlin / Hong duo, and a Frankie's After Dark where Devlin, Davidovici, and Hong join our own Chris Fraser. Tomorrow night, Bellbird plays All-City Athletics for Infidels. Sunday, Burik and Davidovici partake in a workshop experience at ARC Studios.
2
The trio of Nebyu Yohannes, Dean Thiessen, and Cole Schmidt – billed as nebyoha for Brentwood Presbyterian Church's Jazz Evensong also on Wednesday – wasn't one I had on my bingo card. Dean and Nebyu are both longstanding friends, and I'm getting to know Cole better in recent years, with him currently being immersed in booking the 2025 jazzfest. You can see me in the second row on the stream's initial wide shot and catch my attempt at stoic reaction to Brian Fraser's guitar joke.
Nebyu divided the two parts of his Evensong into a first jazz-oriented part with trombone, Stevie Wonder, and Mingus followed by a second part where he sang his own songs and played alternatively-tuned guitar. It resembled his previous performance with the same instrumentation that I wrote to you about, but with no spoken word. A candid, emotional artist who doesn't flinch, Nebyu spoke about the events that inspired his songs, including the Charleston church shooting and the arson and vandalization of a church in Mississippi. The piano and electric guitar accompaniment was ambient and avoided getting noisy in favour of washes and vamps, with few out-and-out solo sections on the arrangements.
3
I did a Jazz at the Bolt postgame again this year, like I did last year – except this one won't get crossposted to the Rhythm Changes Podcast, so it'll be on Instagram for a while to watch back.
4
I've been wondering for a while about out-of-town artists who make their tour stop at Tyrant Studios. Russ Macklem, the Detroit/Windsor trumpeter with whom I still have an interview in the can that I need to edit, was one last year. No Codes, from Montreal, was another.
None of these shows have been well-attended, which stands in contrast to some of the packed local shows at Tyrant. Being on weeknights doesn't help. To go back further last year, I remember getting an email offering discounts and please-come encouragement for Scott Amendola's SticklerPhonics in May.
There's another artist coming in March who pitched me for coverage, and I can only imagine that the reason he tracked me down and reached out personally is because of concerns around this situation. When you look at the venue's peers, Frankie's has big organic marketing and Infidels also has strong marketing. Tyrant doesn't have as much of that infrastructure, relying more on word-of-mouth, which skews local.
5
An undated letter to Premier David Eby and Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert titled "Open letter to Premier David Eby and Spencer Chandra Herbert, B.C. Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture & Sport" got covered by Emily Lyth of Stir Wednesday. Here's the original letter:
"We’re writing to seek the urgent renewal of the B.C. Fairs, Festivals and Events Fund (BCFFE) — or a replacement — in order to provide immediate and meaningful support to arts, cultural, community, and events throughout the province," the letter begins.
The BCFFE began in 2021 as an explicitly one-time support for post-pandemic events "to resume safely". The more relevant Stir article about it is probably this one by Janet Smith, though, which quotes Nina Horvath of Coastal Jazz and Fiona Black now of the folk fest:
Janet Smith
This article from Amir Ali of the Daily Hive quotes Paul Runnals, executive producer of the Celebration of Light, who claims that the BCFFE saved the folk fest.
A BC government news release from this time last year – which announced the most recent BCFFE intake, the one that threatens to be the last – uses the phrase "one-time" three times.
6
Patreon just published one of those slick, one-off websites that tech companies make nowadays for PR purposes, State of Create. I wrote back in April 2022 about what I called the Patreon problem, at the time noticing how the entire field of music creators on Patreon had stopped growing in terms of dollars received. I've been proven right by the numbers, which show that the pie has shrunk by about 25% since then. If you know a musician friend who uses Patreon, they're probably swimming upstream trying to attract and retain patrons. (Not that anyone else's experience away from Patreon is any different, of course!)
Will Chernoff
7
Now it's time for some still business-focused but much closer-to-home news. This will get nerdy, but you have a stake in this project, so I'm extending an offer to nerd out on it with me. Check out these folks!
From what I can tell, ShowHub launched around January 25th. They have no dedicated social media accounts yet, just like me when I started. One of the two co-founders sent me a personal email yesterday to tell me about, among other things, this sentence on the homepage – try traveling back in time and repeating this first half of the sentence to your favourite local musicians:
"Vancouver has an incredible jazz scene that is already well-promoted (see Rhythm Changes for that list), so we’re focusing on other genres for now."
To paraphrase, they told me in the email that they'd rather point toward us for jazz than try and match the localized intensity of the gig list.
My immediate reaction to a new entrant is joy. I wish them all the best. Some parts of doing Rhythm Changes are quite lonely: when you play an instrument you have hundreds of co-conspirators to talk shop with, but I hardly know anyone else doing this stuff. I often talk publicly about my dream for another person to spin up a folk and country version of the list. The about page mentions "live roots, blues, folk, and country music". Could be a dream come true!
8
Do I feel threatened, anxious, like they're encroaching on my territory or overlapping and cramping my style? No. First of all, the success of me or ShowHub or anyone else is entirely downstream of the work of artists in our orbit and those of us who pay to enjoy their music. We rise with the artists' tide and sink as the scene struggles. You can chalk up the entire Rhythm Changes story to just the (re-)organization of our scene in the past three years, a wave I or anyone could surf. I do it because you and I are both interested in these artists.
But I want to look at the nuts and bolts, so here's how they describe their business proposition on the about page:
"[M]any smaller venues struggle to keep their websites updated, leaving potential audiences unaware of incredible performances happening right in their neighbourhood.
A centralized hub where music lovers can discover events at local venues or find out where their favourite bands are playing, feels like a much-needed service. While social media pages have attempted to fill this gap, they often fall short—posts get buried quickly amidst ads and other content, making it hard to keep track of the information. Once a post disappears from view, finding it again can be nearly impossible.
I think this passage dodges the task at hand. Out-of-date websites aren't the thing leaving people out-of-the-loop; merely updating the info doesn't direct people's attention to it. The ShowHub folks surely know that. You'll either need social media – warts and all, with the caveats at the end of that quoted passage, as done pretty well by This Week in Van – or email. ShowHub have an email product as part of the launch (I signed up and will see what they send me on Monday), but just offering email doesn't mean people will sign up, boy howdy do I know that.
So how are they going to get people in the door? In general I see them wanting to rank on Google search via a ton of venue and artist pages. Let's set aside the question of whether AI will make that type of strategy ("SEO") outdated: it's insufficient. Check out this chart of all-time recipient count for the free weekly email at Rhythm Changes:
The big 'knee' in the graph is when I finally started spending on Meta ads in October 2024. The previous 2.5 years are the plodding no-budget growth of SEO and a gig list, but also album reviews and interview features and a small podcast and word-of-mouth in a tight community. We're also leaving out two more meandering years before the chart starts where we're under 100 people the whole time.
How on earth can a new entrant catch us, let alone pass us, on a web-only strategy? They don't even have any editorial/content/features that people can consume and that artists will share after being covered – I did that stuff for over a year before the gig list. And it was a tight group of us consuming the Rhythm Changes stuff: real-life people who know each other and see each other.
9
They continue:
"Over time, we aim to monetize to cover costs through government grants, limited sponsorship opportunities, and special promotional placement for venues or concerts."
We have a philosophical disagreement on grants, for sure. Sponsors and selling placements to presenters? Okay, now we're back to the question of how to get your traffic. Sponsors need to know they'll get a return on their spending. Even though our free weekly email gets over a thousand engagements each week, that's still not large enough for me to sell a sponsorship/placement and be confident it'll return a good outcome to the sponsor. (Which is why I place just my own gigs in those spots these days: I won't fire myself as a client if only 8 people click it. All the original podcast sponsors and such were my friends who didn't need to evaluate the outcome, and it was very, very cheap.)
Again, the path at ShowHub to reach even our amount of traffic is ambiguous. I'd love to know how much they plan to spend on ads, or which scene they're out on the ground meeting new people in multiple times a week. Speaking of which...
10
I'll leave you with one more reason why I think I got lucky enough to make it this far: my face. It's not pretty, it just needs to be out there. Even people who come up to me to say, "Hey, you're the guy from Facebook" – how wonderfully absurd and delightful a statement yet I know what they mean – can recognize me at a glance. That has been a cylinder firing in my engine, and I don't know how you'd do any kind of media without it.
To close, I wish them the best, know they've got a long road ahead of them, and encourage them to show their faces around town!
11
Speaking of This Week in Van, are they starting a venue guide? I'd happily defer to theirs.
