CHAPTER 8

Self-Assessment

No man has a chance to enjoy permanent success until he begins to look in the mirror for the real cause of all his mistakes.

—Napoleon Hill

What is self-assessment and why is it important to one’s growth? In order to move forward in anything, in life, we must look inward to determine what to discard and what to develop. Digging deep is not easy, but it is necessary. If you are not getting desired results, the earlier you reflect, the better. Be honest about your positive and negative attributes, who you surround yourself with, if you need more training. . . . I was a precocious child and seemingly scattered and unfocused about my life. My mom cautioned me to “sit down and take stock of yourself.” A man of many talents who lived to be eighty-four, Benjamin Franklin demonstrated honesty and integrity throughout his life. It is he who allegedly coined the phrase “Honesty is the best policy.” Perhaps his reference was to people to be honest with others, but the most honest relationship should be with ourselves. Apply that personally to be honest with yourself about everything, including your talents and the most effective way to use them. Conversely, it is incumbent on those whose advice is sought to be truthful with those who seek information. Yet too often, those who claim that they want to hear the truth are really looking for validation. Richard Smallwood shared a story about a woman who wasn’t open to his assessment of her. Having been sensitive to others’ cruel comments (when people sought help), he tried to be fair with one woman in particular:

People come to me all of the time with demos. Some time ago, a singer with bad pitch gave me her demo, but she could not carry a tune in a bucket. She had a problem with her intonation, so I suggested that she get some voice lessons and ear training. She came back to me and said she had done what I had told her to do, but she was worse than before. (Can’t people hear themselves?) She told me that people said that she was no good, but until I said that she was no good, she would not listen to them. I told her that she was not up to par; she got mad and did not speak to me again, but I had to be honest.

From birth to death, we travel a jagged road, not a straight line. “Life is full of little triumphs. People don’t stand in line to hear the truth! People will pay for BS (the truth hurts),” Eric Reed lamented. Set benchmarks along your way. Stop, then evaluate. Jeremy Pelt was clear: “Self-assessment is necessary! Be honest with yourself, especially when you hit a plateau. How to get to the next level? What do you need to do to improve and get better? Have a goal for what you want to get out of your career. Always have something new to work on. Pinpoint your weaknesses if you need to. Or turn your weakness into a strength. Have to go forward with positivity. Be honest that it might not happen.” You will know when you are “there.” At thirty-six, Ulysses Owens has always been introspective; he continues to do the work toward personal and musical improvement. “Be honest with yourself. Self-assessment is being real. Have a hunger and desire to be better. Know when you’re ready for things, to go to the next level. Be open to others’ opinions of you. Talk to others who’ve done what you want to do. Be open to advice.” Also, Dorothy Lawson considers the opinions of her peers to have importance. “Oh, yeah. For me, my long search was to take all of those opinions to try to understand what the relationship between their responses and my own perceptions was, and to get a consistent idea of where their point of view might be coming from.”

When life’s challenges take their toll, step back and remember your goals. Tia Fuller set goals very early in her career. Every few years, she would revisit her plan and affirm if she was reaching her marks. In 2005 she, like Camille Thurman, had gone into a deep depression. The events that led up to her funk helped her “let go” and realize that she had to control it. Years later, she hit another low. She’d begun teaching at Berklee College (2015). Both her booking agent and manager dropped her. Tia needed a break. Work had slowed down and she was working less, so they let her go. “I had to rebuild a team and that’s why it took me six years in between recordings. (Both parents were sick, and I was going back and forth).” In the Trenches came out of that experience.

Motivation is also a source to draw from when faced with adversity. A spiritual and contemplative man, Andy Bey uses that as his driving force:

How you become motivated, and how you lose motivation, is a choice. You can make excuses and judgments; they are understandable, but if it affects you, it is about you. There are a lot of disappointments and a lot of pain. It’s the purpose, me making music, what I was put here for. It can’t just be about music; it’s about the person dealing with the music. You must take care of all aspects of your life. I must take care of my health, my spirit, my consciousness. If I don’t, then I’m not supporting the music because I’m not taking care of myself.

REDIRECT/SHIFT GEARS

Learn to know thyself. Learn to own up and accept your limitations and find a way to create within those boundaries. Disappointments can turn into triumphs. What appears to be your biggest challenge may be your most valuable strength. Be careful how you process information to avoid becoming a victim. Are you one to determine that others are to blame for your circumstances? Do you often tell yourself that “others just don’t get me”? Are you one to spend more time looking outward than inward? The reality is: all of these scenarios can be true at the same time, but if you are the only constant in your stories, you may want to point your finger back to you. At a point in my life, I felt that I was going in circles. Frustrated, I talked to my friend Harvey Wise, who simply said, “Sheila, if everyone says that you have a tail, you should turn around.” Those words resonated with me. They were the push I needed to on my path of self-discovery.

At the height of Living Colour’s success, they were selling sixty thousand units a week. Thanks to the Rolling Stones’s giving Living Colour the opportunity to open for them, the industry came knocking. Sony signed them, and they recouped their money early, so they continued to invest in the band. For the most part, Will felt that they’d been honest brokers, though he confessed that when they didn’t want to sell CDs in South Africa (because of apartheid), three times they caught Sony moving that clause (that they would sell in South Africa) to another part of the contract. For eight years, Living Colour had a great run. Their third record was a huge success, so when Vernon Reid abruptly broke up the band, it was a shock to everyone, including the label. Will says,

It was a difficult time for me, I was still young. I left the States for a year and went to Australia to be around [Aboriginal artist] Michael Nelson Tjakamarra because I was attracted to him and his art. I stayed out in the bush, stayed with about eight different families. What was great about that time away was it gave me a chance to look at myself. It was also the beginning of me looking into any future relationship that I’d get into, I learned that I needed my own space, my own private Idaho. It was five or six years of me being down and bitter, brooding.

When Eric Reed found himself at a crossroad, he was shaken. His dream was to be a world-class, working, jazz pianist making records and touring the world and to work with his heroes. One January night, in 2006, he went home after a gig and began staring at a wall in his apartment. “The sun was coming up and I was still staring at the wall. I hadn’t slept. It was unnerving.” Eric had attended a concert, not a gig, where he could hear a voice—“move out of New York.” He was not enjoying himself, was reserved, stiff, and the musicians didn’t look like they were having a good time. The audience wasn’t enjoying itself either, and it left, too. For two years he’d been thinking about moving. He knew he couldn’t stay in New York City and had a two-year ordeal of deciding. Eric didn’t want to leave his friends or his stature in jazz. But he was unhappy. He realized that “I had neglected my humanity and ignored my maturity and my own growth; it was stunted.”

MUSICAL GROWTH

Adversity is cleansing. It gives us perspective. Before turning to opera, Paula Kimper traveled many musical paths:

Opera is really the last genre that I entered. Everything is a kind of process. . . . I got a bachelor’s degree in trumpet performance; I was a trumpet player. The trumpet was loud, and I could be in the band. It was kind of ego-based in a way. I moved to New York [City] in 1979 and went into pop music. I played piano, used a custom synthesizer, had my own studio; I could do it all myself. That led me into film scoring and doing music for theater. I liked opera, listened to opera broadcasts, and I was in opera in college. When they needed stage bands, I played in the orchestra.

After a great success in Miami, Istanbul, and other places, Allan Harris tried his hand in New York City but had little success. He dug deep to understand what went wrong.

I was not well received, not by the audience. I did not know how to present myself, what to say onstage. I was too abstract; I was not directed and focused. New York was not into fanfare like Miami. It took me a few years to shed that, and the residue is still out there. I was making a good living out there [in Miami]. I saw myself drifting into the sunset. It was a challenge, and I got my butt kicked. I brought that small-town mentality to New York, thinking that that was enough. I got the starch taken out of me. I realized that I had homework to do, and I had to grow as an artist.

I reached out to Allan to follow up. I said, “You had shared your story about that evening at the then-popular club Tatou, where Tony Bennett was in attendance. You bombed, driving you to do some serious soul-searching.” He replied,

I now call it keeping my chops tuned. I am never going to be the next Jimi Hendrix, Pat Martino, or the great Chet Atkins! There was a time in my youth that I fantasized and flirted with the dream of maybe one day being mentioned in the same breath as them. The more I came in contact and exchanged musical experiences with my peers, I began to realize I had a hard decision to make. The first was to put down the guitar for a while to more fully understand and concentrate on my growing vocal prowess. Writing “Cross That River” on acoustic guitar was cathartic for me and reminded me how much I missed playing. So I’ve been incorporating more guitar into my performances, and it makes me very happy. Oh and yes, keep the Tony Bennett thing!

Quality versus Quantity

I began my work life as a production assistant. After two years, I was promoted. Having only worked at Random House for four years, I got the job of manager of production at Grove Press, where I had a horrible nine-month run. My next production job at John Wiley & Sons was equally painful. A job at W. H. Freeman opened up as I was reaching my one-year mark at JWS, and I was thrilled. There was a problem . . . my résumé reflected six years of production experience, but, in fact, I had two years’ experience, three times, so I was woefully inexperienced for that job. Had it not been for my patient supervisor, Ellen Cash, I may have gotten fired, especially after an oversight of mine cost the company $4,000. I had to be honest with myself; I did not like production work! But my ego would not allow me to be the weak link of the department. After some soul-searching and hard work, I learned how to do the job and immensely improved in a relatively short period of time.

What does this have to do with being a musician? I have encountered many who have worked for years, some twenty plus, who have not grown musically and/or professionally. They tell me, “I’ve been doing this for X number of years, I’ve worked with so-and-so, and so on and so forth.” They bellyache about the work they are not getting rather than being grateful for the work they do get. (“Funny,” Art Blakey told Javon Jackson, “If you’re working, you’re doing something right.”) What they lack is an ability to self-reflect and self-assess that leads to their victimhood. I say about victims that they’re all alike. They have a tendency to accuse others of actively working to impede their success by awarding gigs to others that they believe they deserve, or they believe that people are jealous of them. Here’s the rub: sometimes the work you don’t get has nothing to do with you.

In reality, according to Eric Reed:

Self-assessment is not simple. What I’ve come to discover is that there isn’t a whole lot of work for the number of musicians there are. And folks are dying. What I’ve found is that there are phenomenal musicians that do not work; it has nothing to do with ability. Sometimes it’s an inability to connect to influential people or to connect to people who are working, or an inability to network. Often the powers that be have an agenda so the way the industry works they’re figuring out how to make money. If it don’t make money it don’t make sense. They’ll put their money behind an idea, behind a movement, but rarely will they fund an artist who has something musical to say. They’ll fund a look, fund an image, they’ll support that; not the music. In the 1980s it was the image that sold jazz. They had to call it something, so they called us “young lions.” The thing is that, regarding self-assessment, you have to be around musicians who will be honest with you. Part of the problem in the jazz world is that ability is subjective. In European music, either you can play or not. Nobody mediocre will wind up onstage being featured with the L.A. Philharmonic playing Brandenburg Concertos. If you sing at the Met, you have your stuff together. In jazz you can be mediocre. It depends on the musicians. If you’re playing with musicians whose focus is bebop, for example, yet you come with an approach from Albert Ayler or Eric Dolphy, they’ll throw you off the stage. Young musicians should be held to a standard to play the music. The things that Ron Carter requires in his bands [aren’t necessarily] what Chick Corea requires in his: jazz is subjective. Billie Holiday had no range, but she sang her truth; I listen to her to hear emotion. The best singer is Sarah Vaughan—there is no such thing as the best singer in jazz. Miles Davis kept you guessing. He said Blossom Dearie was the only white woman who sang with soul—what? Rosemary Clooney, Anita O’Day . . . ? So many people treated Miles like a god. What came out of his mouth was gospel, what he put out was curriculum as far as so many people were concerned.

Speaking in a general sense about music, Eric made a case for an industry cleansing, of sorts, among musical genres. “They still study the classics (Bach, Beethoven) but Duke Ellington, not so much. Janis Joplin screamed and spit her way into a career,” he chuckles. Also, “Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington are making people aware of their music. A good thing. No one artist should take the burden of an entire field. Every artist must be true to himself, be honest, be genuine, have integrity, and give people something of substance.” You just have to learn to accept what is (I know that isn’t easy) and keep working on your craft. To quote my friend, comedian Wali Collins, “Y’Nevano!”

NOTES

• Be honest with yourself!

• Do some soul-searching.

• Talk to people whom you trust.

• Learn.