I come from Cleveland. I left well before I realized how much great culture there is in that town. There’s the world-class orchestra, landmark architecture, a fantastic art museum, and excellent opera company.  Not to mention the great jazz in Cleveland: The CJO, Tri-C Jazz Fest, and great clubs, the Bop Stop and Nighttown.  Sure, I’ve had some time to go home and enjoy these great resources (and sometimes they come to me), but it’s all a little too little, too late.

Since Meghan and I have made a commitment to living in Lakeland for the present time (something I spent seven years swearing I would never do), it’s time to face the reality of life as a musician (hey, even though I love my day gig, there’s an itching to do this full time!) in Lakeland, Florida.  

Setting aside the relatively active Orlando and Tampa scenes, of which I am occasionally a part, there’s still plenty of room to make a living in Lakeland and much potential for a great scene here.  Two of the local colleges have healthy jazz programs.  There are also some great thing happening in the (well, let’s just call a spade a spade:) smooth jazz scene.

That said, there’s not a lot of jazz “In the Tradition” happening around here.  I feel like there’s a dearth of musicians really interested in communicating and creating in this town.  Though the scene is rather dry for casuals and restaurant gigs, there was a time when there were gigs to be had; those tend not to be very musical gigs around here.

There’s a small cadre of musicians I know who are tying to grow and write and make music on a high level, but most of them are either associated with one of the schools or former classmates of mine.  I often import musicians from the nearby larger markets to play with, but we don’t rehearse and can’t really spend the time necessary to build a solid rapport.  This is the most common complaint I heard at USF from visting alumni – in the average town (even in NYC, to some extent), it’s difficult to find like-minded musicians with the time and wherewithall to build a rapport and community devoted to growing as Jazz Musicians.

I really need your interaction on this one.  If you have managed to do this – create a scene where there wasn’t one or where there had been one – in another town, how?  What were the results?  If you’re in Lakeland and have been thinking the same thing, let me know – we need to get together.

Tags: Local

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.