Playing for Time
The Jazz Foundation of America is a nonprofit organization that helps older jazz and blues musicians who are experiencing financial troubles or severe health problems. Most of the musicians helped by the program were sidemen on old jazz recordings and are now without social security or album residuals, owing to the irregular payment policies of most recording sessions in the jazz and blues industry.
Instead they’d likely be paid a one-time fee between $300 and $1,000 for the recording session. They never saw any part of album sales and writers were not given writing credit if the album was reissued on CD. Long-term stability was an alien concept.
When royalties were paid in the 1950s and ’60s, the union royalty rate for sidemen was typically 1 to 4 percent for each sale. “Jazz was a dirty word back then. My mother didn’t want my jazz records any more than I want to listen to the kids’ hip hop today,” said Phoebe Jacobs, a founding member of the foundation and executive vice president of the Louis Armstrong Foundation. “That’s why it was disregarded by almost everyone.” It was not until 1992 that major label EMI, which owns Blue Note Records, raised their royalty rates to 10 percent, an industry standard at the time, for all musicians who recorded for EMI-owned labels prior to 1970.
Even musicians who were members of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and the Local 802 union were victims of poor or nonexistent insurance plans, said Dr. Billy Taylor, a founding member of the foundation and jazz pianist. Taylor received more stability as a member of entertainment unions, like the American Guild of Variety Artists, and calls the treatment of jazz musicians a national shame. “For every one of us, there were hundreds of others who deserve what we got and still don’t have it,” said Taylor.
According to a 2003 study of the jazz industry by the Research Center for Arts and Culture in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Study Center, only 30 percent of jazz musicians belong to the American Federation of Musicians, one of the U.S.’s largest music unions. Of those musicians who are not union members, 57 percent are without retirement plans and a similar number live without health coverage. Almost 66 percent of all jazz musicians earned less than $7,000 in 2000, according to the study. “Music, I don’t think, was ever meant to be a business,” Oxenhorn said. “The business end doesn’t allow a pure form of the artist’s creative force.”
In 1990, a jazz fan named Herb Storfer, along with help from his wife, Muriel, Taylor, their friend Phoebe Jacobs, and singer-songwriter Ann Ruckert, began raising money in the Storfers’ elegant 30th Street Manhattan loft. Friends would lend their houses in Riverdale and White Plains for concerts to raise money. Even from the beginning, the funds raised would go directly to the musicians in need, and most musicians simply needed food. “It was pretty scary there at first,” said Taylor. “We didn’t know they were in as bad a shape as they were.” They would continue this ad hoc aid program for ten years until it was passed on to Oxenhorn.
The foundation’s roots go even farther back, to 1972, when Jacobs helped found the now defunct New York Jazz Museum. Jacobs convinced musicians such as Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw to donate memorabilia and join the board. When the museum was forced to close in 1977, the memorabilia went to New York’s Schomburg Center, where it was turned over to the care of Storfer and Ruckert. The partnership would later inspire the creation of the Jazz Foundation.
