Back in my freelancing/whore days I was hired to accompany a john cellist who had secured a one-night, one-set gig in a cocktail lounge. Aside from the oddity of a cello-piano duo in a cocktail lounge, the transaction impressed me as just yet another gig, yet another $100, yet another boring evening playing boring music in a boring venue, an engagement to be competently dispatched then quickly forgotten. This one wound up being memorable.
As it turned out the guy was a cellist in only the most fundamental sense of the word, in that he owned a cello and that he drew a bow across the lower region of the strings while pressing down his left-hand fingers over the upper region of the strings. Ratchet up the requirements by a millimeter and he morphed from cellist into public nuisance. He was a perfectly nice guy and all that, but his cello playing was nauseous, gruesome, ghastly, and galling. It stank. It sucked.
He was hardly the first crappy player I had accompanied, although he was arguably the worst, but he still wouldn't have left an impression had it not been for the selections he brought to our quick pre-gig rehearsal. A few made sense after a fashion—a movement from a Vivaldi sonata, the obligatory Saint-Saëns Swan, the opening of Stravinsky's Suite Italienne, itself drawn from the faux-Neapolitan ballet Pulcinella. But I nearly fell off my piano bench in stupefaction when he produced the Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus from Messiaen's Quatour pour le fin du temps. For a BAR GIG?? I blurted out, proving that even the most hardened hooker can be shocked by a sufficiently kinky request. Even the Saint-Saëns impressed me as being only marginally appropriate for the venue, but that Messiaen thing is heavy sailing in all weather. Monsieur Olivier described it thusly: Jesus is considered here as the Word. A broad phrase, "infinitely slow", on the cello, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of the Word, powerful and gentle, "whose time never runs out".
Apart from the possibility that we would be playing a bar in the Vatican—and even then, they'd probably prefer strippers and BeeGees—I couldn't imagine performing that thing in such a casual venue. Then there was that little problem with the guy's playing. His vibrato alone induced vertigo. But there it was. He was paying for it, and after my shock subsided I made like the responsible floozy I was and gave him what he wanted.
The lounge, a strikingly crystalline room atop a major downtown hotel, sported contemporary bling and marvelous views. The manager—nobody's fool he—had booked us for a single set at about 10:00 PM on a Tuesday night—i.e., when the joint was all but deserted. Two tables were occupied by quiet, well-dressed people having quiet, well-dressed conversations. We set up, me on the stark-white Yamaha G-1 baby grand and my cellist with his wire music stand. We began to play through our program. Darting and distressed glances came from the folks at the nearest table. Presently they nodded to each other, dropped a $20 for the tab, and departed. About then we started the Messiaen. The couple at the other table rose to depart after a brief whispered conference with the hostess. She had a brief whispered conference with the manager. The manager had a brief whispered conference with the cellist. He stopped playing so I stopped, too. He had been fired mid-note. I presume those few patrons had been the only thing keeping him on after the first minute or so. Yes, it was that bad. Yes, it was that inappropriate.
There's a time and a place for everything, but a cocktail lounge is most indubitably not the place for a cello-piano duo, especially not when the cello playing is so irredeemably horrid, especially not when said cellist doesn't know his repertorial hawks from handsaws. Maybe the manager was remiss by having hired us in the first place. However, I got the impression that what my cellist lacked in talent he made up for in salesmanship, thus the manager had allowed him a (mercifully brief) trial on a dead night when no lasting harm would be done. And I made damn sure I got paid anyway.
We musicians are not hired to play for our own amusement. We play what's appropriate to the surrounding, we play what we're asked to play, we play quietly if they want quiet and get rowdy if they want that. When we're hired to play a gig we're not Great Artists who stand at an imagined center of an imagined cosmos; we're employees, entertainers, contractors with a job to perform. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and in fact that's been the way of the world for as long as there have been entertainers, which is to say as long as there have been people. The Neanderthal in the baggy loincloth cracking mastodon jokes in the cave gave way to the elegant string quartet providing dinnertime ambiance at Le Club Hoité-Toité, but the difference is in degree, not kind. Had said Neanderthal begun haranguing his audience about declining sabre-tooth tiger populations, they would have shown him the door. (All right already: Caves don't have doors. Let it stand, let it stand.) Sometimes we're artists, and sometimes we're the hired help. The secret to a successful career in music is to recognize when we are expected to be one or the other, allowing for the occasional fuzzy zones when we're a little bit of both.
It was 40 years ago that, as a green-as-the-grass conservatory freshman, I heard an address by the president of the Ford Foundation. His topic was starting a career in music. His advice: If they ask you, say yes. Worry later about whether or not you think you can do it. Worry later about whether or not you want to do it. Worry later about whether they're paying you enough or at all. Worry later about whether or not it's artistically gratifying. Just say Yes.
There is no better advice. Just say Yes. But as the Sufis say: Put your faith in God, but tie your camel to a post. Understand your Yes. It could mean Yes I'll give you what you want or it could mean Yes I'll do this to gratify myself. The former Yes pays the rent and could lead to a future when No has become a practical possibility. The latter leads to selling parakeets at Sammy's Pet World.