Introduction
For as long as I have been playing there have been people asking questions about that. I am sure that many musicians were asked these questions long before I came along too, but this post is about my experience with those questions and later, yours.
It was almost as though everyone had received a pamphlet or a primer: "Things to ask a musician". Because the questions were almost always the same, and almost always in the same order. In no time at all, just being asked the questions was enough to start shaping my perception of what it meant to be a musician.

Here are the questions

Oh, you are a musician...
Do you sing?
Do you write your own songs?
Are you in a band?
Are you playing anywhere around town?
Do you have an Album? (later... do you have a CD?)  

---

What the questions might have meant

Let me add what might have been behind the words in purple
Oh, you are a musician...
I like music. This is good, we have a reason to talk. I am interested.
Do you sing?
I like music. I like the sound of someone singing. I like to sing sometimes. Do we have that in common?
Do you write your own songs?
I like music. Music is creative. Are you creative in this way? Maybe you can tell me more about that.
Are you in a band?
Most of the music I hear is from bands. Do you fit with my understanding of how it works?
Are you playing anywhere around town?
Is there any place where I could come to hear your music?
Do you have an Album? (later... do you have a CD?)
If I can't come to a show, can I get your music to hear it at home?

---

What I heard

After hearing these questions a couple of hundred times (I'm slow), and never having been in a position to simply say "yes" to all the questions, (having always been a side-man), I started to hear something different at an emotional level.
So here are those questions and I've filled in what I was hearing with my emotions in blue.

Oh, you are a musician...
Oh, so you think you're a musician? Well let's see if you pass the test
Do you sing?
When I listen to music, I listen to the words. Do you sing the words? Are you the one I listen to?
Do you write your own songs?
Musicians create music, create songs. Are you a musician?
Are you in a band?
Real musicians, good ones, have other musicians who want to play with them. They form bands. Are you a real musician?
Are you playing anywhere around town?
You're not a real musician unless you are playing for real money in front of real people in real live venues. So are ya?
Do you have an Album? (later... do you have a CD?)
Real musicians record their original songs and perform to support the albums. So do ya?

---

So over time these inevitable questions became challenges: Challenges to my fragile perception that I *was* a musician.
It seemed as though there was some common belief that the ultimate goal of a self-actualized musician was:

• to be a singer-songwriter
• with a band that toured
• and had lots of albums.

The band, the tours and the albums all attested to the legitimacy of the singer-songwriter role. All of it together seemed to be the big mold one had to fit and fill to be 'a musician'.
Please understand... this is not my personal definition of what it means to be a musician. Instead, it is these conversations with the audience that contributed to the struggle to define myself within the music.
How about you? Do any of these questions ring a bell for you?
How did they influence your choices?
How do they affect your goals?

 

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"Recording is fundamentally wrong. Playing live is what it’s all about. "

-- Jeff of Cowboy Junkies from “Cowboy Junkies:  The Trinity Session Revisited”

I just saw this documentary, heard the line, and it resonated.

This is pretty representative of Cowboy Junkies

• Sweet Jane
• Blue Moon
• And decades later
  Trinity Revisited and Trinity Revisited

What do you think?

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Knowing that you can be heard and understood from the stage opens some doors to conversations with the audience. I find that I do that more with the L1® than ever did in the past. But that is not the subject today.

Today I want to consider the conversations we can have with the audience that start before we arrive, and continue long after everyone goes home. I am not sure what the audience is thinking, so I thought I would ask them.

To explore that I recently posted these questions on LinkedIn a business-oriented social networking site with some 24 million registered users*.

Do you attend performances of live music?

• Was the live music performance the main focus of the event or background.
• If you went out specifically to hear live music, why did you choose to do that instead of staying at home and listening to recordings?

I was really encouraged to have received 7 answers almost immediately.

See what people had to say.

The question will remain open for another week.  Let's see what turns up.

Questions for you.

• Do you talk with your audience?
• How?
• What do they tell you?
• What do you do with the information?

Join the conversation

Over the weekend I was playing at one of my regular haunts. It is a small place in a little village like community within the larger city.
This was the first weekend for a new owner of the place and she was excited to be welcoming a whole new crowd. She told me to expect a big turn out because she had invited lots of the people in her social circle.

Strangely it was very quiet when I arrived a little early for my Sunday afternoon gig. But it turns out that she had told her friends that the show started promptly at 2:00 and sure enough the place was nearly-full at 2:00.

This was a completely different crowd for this place. All were speaking a non-English language, chatting and enjoying the food, the ambiance and, each other's company.

The place is normally quiet when it is bright and sunny out, and it was bright and sunny and a Sunday of a long holiday weekend. There was a huge parade going on in the centre of town so I wasn't expecting many people. This crowd was a surprise. There were some but not many of the regulars who took it all in stride. We also had street-traffic, people looking in to see what was going on and some came in and filled the last remaining seats. Others looked in, stepped in the door, turned around and left.
Between songs we (the audience and I) congratulated the new owner, enjoyed the local holiday spirit and we figured out that if we totalled the ages of all the kids in the room, they were still younger than my duo partner's Violin. Sadly, between the two of us, our ages exceed that of the Violin.

Partway through the afternoon, partway through a set, there was an odd shift. About a third of the people in the room moved to the back of the space and the people back there moved forward. This probably occurred over five minutes.

The background noise level dropped significantly although from what I could see, the overall activity level was unchanged.

This was probably the weirdest thing I've seen in some time. A self-organizing organic audience. I mean, I have seen people rearrange furniture. That happens all the time, and it happened as people were arriving that day too. The individual tables for two and four were rearranged in groups of eight or twelve here and there. But this thing of groups of people visibly flowing around was new.

During the next break I wandered among the people at the back of the room, just chatting.
"How are you?"
"Did you come far today?"
"Did you bring other people or plan to meet them here?"
"You all appear to know one another, how is that?"
That kind of thing.

Then I asked one person with whom I had struck up a rapport, "Was it too loud up front for you?"
She apologized on behalf of all of the people who had moved. She said they were sorry if they disrupted things and that they had tried to be quiet. Indeed they had been. If I had not been watching them, I probably would not have noticed because the whole transition was very quiet.

I assured her that it was not a problem, but I was just curious what had happened.
"Oh, they all speak a different language", she said gesturing to the front. "We all moved here so we could talk, and they could talk and not have to talk over each other".

She went on, "We can hear you just fine,... (more nice compliments here), and it was good over there too".
By the end of the afternoon, the new owner was exhausted and happy. Her friends had left en masse immediately after the show was over. On the way out, someone from each table came to me, introduced him or herself, asked for a business card, offered me one in return and as they gave me the card they pressed a tightly folded bill into my hand.

It was a very nice way to break-in a new crowd in an old venue.

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