How I got my first Vancouver jazz festival show

My trio played the jazzfest on Wednesday; it was my Vancouver International Jazz Festival debut. This Update is not about that performance itself but rather how I ended up doing it:

• How do you apply to your local jazz festival?
• My story of a few years' worth of submitting weak stuff
• The first submission I made for the trio, which failed
• What made the second try successful

Then we'll consider if I'm nuts in how I've evaluated all this, and what I've learned going into a 2024 festival submission.

Applying at the jazzfest: how it works

To play at your local jazzfest (ones in the rest of Canada are another deal), you can apply in the winter, about seven months ahead of the festival. Coastal Jazz gives the following as "Metro Vancouver & BC Artists Submission" guidelines:

– Contact details: Name and contact information: phone / fax / e-mail / web site / mailing address of contact person
– A brief synopsis of your music
– A press clipping (PDF if available)
– A list of all group members’ names and instruments
– A link to your electronic press kit (EPK) if available

[...] Only those selected will be contacted.

For several years in my early twenties, I was pretty bad at doing this.

My no good, very bad submissions

I first submitted in December 2015 for the 2016 festival, right after I had recorded my music in a studio for the first time. At age 20, I sent some rough bounce tracks – not even mixed tracks! – from what is now my quartet album Aim to Stay and heard nothing back. I wasn't surprised.

For the 2017 festival I had new rough bounces of what would later become the second half of Aim to Stay, so I submitted my quartet again. Nothing. Once again, unsurprised.

On my third submission for 2018, I pitched my new folk band: not a great genre fit but worth a try, we thought. We didn't have an album recorded yet as a four-piece, so we sent in some tracks from our demo project Back to Back Bay. It's clear to me now that this would've been one of the worst genuinely-intended submissions they'd have received this year, so being 0-3 came as no surprise. We didn't submit our album Unrelated for 2019 after we finished recording it, not to this festival at least.

An important bit of context for these years is that I had already dropped out of CapU a few years prior and was too insecure, in various ways, to participate much in the jazz scene. I thank my lucky stars every day that I ended up participating again via Rhythm Changes since covid.

But in 2019, I rallied. I reunited my quartet for a recording session with Dave Sikula, got the tracks mixed and mastered, and even said on stage in May 2019 at a sold-out Lynn Valley Legion self-produced jazz gig, "If you don't see us in the mix to play at the 2020 festival, something really bad must have happened." I'm sorry for causing the pandemic with this quote.

Regardless of whether or not my submission was any good, by the time the 2020 festival's cancellation led to the 2021 festival, I certainly fell out of contention. I didn't have the quartet active or make a submission at all in late 2020.

However, I did play a gig with a new trio at 2nd Floor Gastown, which was booking gigs through the thick of the pandemic. And for the 2022 festival, I decided to finish some studio tracks by this trio and apply, believing that I'd be able to play by then no matter what the rules would be.

The first trio submission

This was my submission on December 9, 2021:

Hello, here is my submission for VIJF 2022:

Contact details
William Chernoff | [phone #] | email@williamchernoff.com
https://www.williamchernoff.com

Press clipping (PDF):

Group members: William Chernoff Trio
William Chernoff (bass)
Francis Henson (guitar)
Carson Tworow (drums)

Link to EPK: https://www.williamchernoff.com/epk/

You might notice that I actually forgot one of the things that Coastal asks for: "A brief synopsis of your music." Oops, I guess it was dead on arrival! Another lukewarm signal: the press clipping is for a different band than the one I'm pitching.

The EPK didn't look too much different from its current form, except for one key thing: it didn't have any live photos and videos of my trio.

To just take it one level deeper, another factor is that I don't really play as a side musician: it's my own gigs as a leader or no gigs, with few exceptions. While that's not necessarily a strategy I chose – it's just where I've been at – it changes things, because some of my friends are playing three or more times at this year's jazzfest due to being in different groups. I'm sure it's easier to work toward playing as a leader after you've done that for a few years; indeed, that's a big part of how this music itself has unfolded over the course of a century.

The second try

Despite the lack of surprise at each individual rejection, being 0-5 (counting the submission for the ill-fated 2020 festival) as of the summer of 2022 felt bad, especially because I finally felt comfortable enough to be out in the community again, having the gig list, podcast episodes, and articles to do.

Under the guidance of a few things including my podcast with Cory Weeds, getting a new job, and talking to people much more experienced than I am who were on the scene and kind enough to chat, I made a quick plan:

• I would release, in October 2022, the trio music we had recorded, mainly just as an impetus to play some gigs (as opposed to getting sales and streams)
• The trio would play as many local gigs as possible before December, which is when I'd need to submit for this year's festival
• We'd ask one friend per gig to take a video of a full tune from the gig, and by December we'd have at least one good live video

We played a few gigs that fall; at this one, Vince captured the winning photo, and at this one, we got our video.

On December 5, 2022, this was my submission:

Hello,

I'm William Chernoff. I've just released an all-original, FACTOR-funded album of mainstream jazz guitar trio called Maybe Eventually, which draws on both swinging hard bop and from ECM, particularly Steve Swallow and Bill Frisell. Reaching out to submit this trio for consideration at the 2023 VIJF.

Contact details
William Chernoff: [phone #]
email@williamchernoff.com
https://www.williamchernoff.com

Press clipping (PDF): find attached, or visit https://dominionated.ca/newsletter/a-four-way-in-the-heart-of-the-west-end-february-2022/ (attachment is in case the live link stops working for some reason)

Group members: William Chernoff Trio
Francis Henson (guitar)
William Chernoff (electric bass)
Carson Tworow (drums)

Link to EPK: https://www.williamchernoff.com/epk/

On my sixth attempt to-date and re-applying with the same group, it worked.

I think the reason is that I finally had... all the standard things that you'd expect an artist to have. I just never put it all together before, sometimes not even close. This year was the first time I actually had live photos and footage of the group on the recordings.

Is my thinking baseless?

Maybe I'm nuts for thinking about it this way. Here are some alternate theories of why I happened to get the opportunity at Ocean Artworks this year:

• Name recognition from Rhythm Changes. Sure, it may be a factor, but it's not like I know festival programmer Cole Schmidt personally. I've talked to him only once or twice.
• The festival needed a bigger component of emerging (read: cheaper) artists like me than usual because it was smaller than its TD-sponsored, pre-2020 size. Also probably a factor; I wouldn't be playing the David Lam Park stage or the Roundhouse.
• Someone put in a good word for me somewhere down the line for some reason. If that was you, thank you and please don't tell me – I need to keep up my fiction...
• It's all just random chance at this level. In Jazz Office Hours episode 4, Cory and I embrace this theory in terms of grant applications: submitting basically the same thing multiple times and getting wildly different assessments due to different adjudicators and applicant fields.

But I think having the bare minimum of "video that actually has the same people playing as the names in my email" made it work this time. Sure, I bet that many other people don't have to fret as much about their materials because they're established musicians in our scene, but I'm not one of them.

What have I learned, for submitting to the 2024 festival?

First of all, hopefully I won't feel bad again for not succeeding with submissions. That seems like an immature reaction style to be left behind as a relic of my twenties.

I won't be ready to submit again for the 2024 festival; I won't have new material yet, and maybe it'd be ill-advised to resubmit after playing this year. There's a newer ensemble I just broke the ice on, but I don't know when I'll be ready with that one. I want to add a bit of side musician playing, even if just in one other group, into my mix first. It seems at cross-purposes to how our music works, for me to keep avoiding that aspect.

There's one bigger, hairier thing that I took away from reflecting over almost a decade of submitting to my local jazzfest, though: I'm neglecting my musicianship to a scary degree. It's like not doing physical exercise. If I look myself in the mirror and think about how little I practice my instrument – and in my own thoughts how little I've developed as a player over those years – I realize I might be taking it for granted, falling off from what you expect, and being at a level of commitment below my friends who display such dedication to their craft. Having now submitted, succeeded, and played once, I don't know if I can get away with that for too many more years.