Lori Walsh: While the coronavirus pandemic has shut down nightclubs, bars, and concert venues, musicians still have the desire to work and to perform, and audiences still want to hear live music. So to help satisfy the needs of both, the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society has launched a weekly virtual concert series. On Thursday evenings, local musicians present a live stream performance via the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society's Facebook page. Alex Gilbert-Schrag is the organization's executive director. She and Sioux Falls trumpeter, Jim Speirs, spoke with SDPB Jazz Nightly host, Karl Gehrke, about the virtual concert series and how local musicians are coping with not being able to get out and play their music. Gilbert-Schrag says she got the idea for the weekly series after the success of the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society's live-streamed Jazz-Athon last month.
Alex Gilbert-Schrag : There was such a good interest and turnout from the public, that I felt that there was a need in the community for something like this. I started to reach out to artists to see if they would be interested in doing something like this, because, obviously, as Jim can talk to you more about it, but most of their gigs have been canceled over the next several months. So this was a way for not only Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues to be able to support them, but to give them a different type of platform to reach new audience members, to be able to get a virtual donation just to kind of help us get through this next time. But from our standpoint, I'm very lucky in that I get to set it up. I'm doing the marketing for it. The musicians can stream from their home, or Ricardo from our wine bar has graciously let us use his back room if the musicians don't have a place to stream from. We just kick it off every week. So it's been probably one of the easier things to organize on my end.
Karl Gehrke: But you're finding artists they're more than happy to do this?
Alex Gilbert-Schrag : Yes. Obviously, we as an arts organization don't exactly have a ton of income coming in or money that's expendable right now, so we've been asking the artists to participate in this without us being able to provide monetary compensation in hopes that they would get the compensation from the tips. But I've been very, very lucky that I think in my short time at the organization, I've been able to meet so many wonderful artists in a variety of ways, and that they're willing to participate in this concert series knowing that, me, I can't pay them, but that they just want to be able to play and they seem so excited about it that I'm just glad that I can help bring a little bit of sunshine to everyone's lives on Thursday nights.
Karl Gehrke: Well, going back to the Jazz-Athon from last month, which was early when things were getting shut down, Jim, how was that experience? How did that go?
Jim Speirs: It went very well. It was an odd experience, I think. Just everything was changing so quickly at that time. It seemed like every day there was sort of a new normal or a new set of guidelines. So for us to get together and perform in kind of a stressful time, I think it was a bit cathartic or therapeutic in a way. Actually, the performance went well, the bands played great, but it was odd to play to an empty room. I think we even commented on, during the live stream, how odd it was to know there were 80, 90, 100 people listening, but we couldn't see any of them react to what they were hearing, have that community, that communication that is so essential to music as an art form. So that part was strange, but it was pretty smooth. I think the musicians in this community will always put their best effort forward. They'll always play their hearts out no matter if it's one person in the audience or a thousand. So we still played as well as we were able to at that time.
Karl Gehrke: Well, Jim, what do you see is the mood of performing artists, of musicians, in Sioux Falls and in the area, people that you're talking to, and how they're dealing with not being able to get out there and perform, and not being able to get out and perform with other musicians?
Jim Speirs: I would say the mood is antsy, itching to play. I think everyone wants to get out and perform. I think there's a lot of creative ideas that are being hatched right now. I think with the time on our hands, especially the time in the shed, so to speak, the practice room. We're working on our craft, but we're not able to go out and share that work with each other or with the community. So that's, I think, creating that little bit of angst. But also, I think out of that comes new ideas. So I think we're going to be in for some pretty cool new music when this is all over with. I'm sure a lot of local musicians and, really, musicians around the world will have a lot to share when they can get back out into public and play live performances.
Karl Gehrke: And Alex, for you and your discussions with musicians as the executive director of the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society, what are you hearing from musicians?
Alex Gilbert-Schrag : The biggest thing that I've heard is a lot of them just miss being able to play their instrument and not only by themselves, of course, because now we're all staying at home as much as possible, but being able to come together and collaborate. That has been a big challenge, I think, because you get so used to being able to go out and just play in groups of four or five or two or whatever that may be, and the biggest struggle now is you are, for the most part, playing by yourself. We're moving into this technology of being able to play with each other virtually, but it's still not quite the same. I feel like jazz is so much about collaboration and playing off of each other that when it's taken away from you, being able to come together it's kind of a big part of what you do, the music is gone.
So that's been a big struggle, and then of course the financial impact it's had on musicians because... We're lucky that here in Sioux Falls you can be a professional musician and make money off of that and really make that your sole focus. But when that gets taken away, what do you do? I've heard a lot about the financial implications and so that's what, as an organization, we're just trying to help out as much as we can so that they can go back to being professional musicians once this is all over.
Karl Gehrke: Well, Alex, for the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society in general, you've had to cancel a couple of concerts. What does this mean for planning the upcoming season when so much is influx and so much is unknown?
Alex Gilbert-Schrag : That is a very good question. It is hard to know when people will feel comfortable in coming back out in groups to see somebody perform. I think that's the biggest struggle that most arts organizations are having right now. We are trying to reschedule as many performances as were canceled, and we're looking at fall, but even then, a lot of the feedback I've gotten in the industry is that, "We are planning to hopefully be able to do something this coming fall with the understanding that we might have to reschedule performances yet again." So it's been difficult to know when we can be up and running, but it's also given us this weird blessing of being able to have the time to plan for something bigger and better in the future. It's almost like we have this forced downtime, which gives us a lot of room to brainstorm and be creative. So it's glass half full, glass half empty, kind of both.
Karl Gehrke: Jim Speirs, you're a jazz trumpeter member of the JAS Quintet and other groups. Are you able to do any playing with other people at all or you just have to play and practice on your own?
Jim Speirs: Yeah, pretty much the latter for me. I've been fortunate to be invited to provide a couple solo tracks to projects that are being produced right now, where friends have asked if I could provide a little trumpet solo and I record it in my home studio and send it to them via Dropbox or something, and then they drop it into their master audio track on whatever song they're working on. So I've done a little bit of that type of collaboration, but pretty much it's been the proverbial woodshed, just doing a lot of practicing on my own trying to keep my chops up. Trumpet, especially, is such a physical instrument, you just can't really say, "All right, I'm going to take a week off." It just doesn't work that way, so I'm still trying to maintain the physical side of playing. And no, the JAS Quintet has not been able to get together to practice or perform. In fact, we're sending in something, I believe, to Alex. She might not even be aware of this yet-
Alex Gilbert-Schrag : Yeah.
Jim Speirs: ... but we're going to try to send in a video to her of one of our performances, because right now we just don't feel it's in our best interest or the community's best interest for even a band of five or six people to get together in a studio space. So we're really following those guidelines. We've looked back at previous performances that we've videotaped and we're going to try to share those during this virtual concert series. It was funny, we were emailing and texting back and forth as a band yesterday and we all kind of went, "Wow, it feels like a lifetime ago that we all got together and played a concert."
One of our bigger concerts was just last fall. One of the videotapes is from a performance out in Spearfish. So it's not that long ago, but it's starting to feel like a really long time ago because [inaudible 00:10:16] just performing as a community, performing as a band is so vital to the jazz art form. I think it's about that communication, that conversation that happens on stage. You always hear jazz being described as a language, and so it gets a little bit old to just be talking to yourself all day. So we're really looking forward to that time when we could come together again and perform. We know that's going to happen. It's in the future, just we're not sure exactly when.
Karl Gehrke: Well, Alex, it's hard to plan for the future, but what do you see on the other side of this as far as the health of jazz in Sioux Falls, in South Dakota? You're new with the organization, so you're coming on board at a very challenging time.
Alex Gilbert-Schrag : I know. It's funny. I officially took the position in January, which seems like years ago at this point, but it was really only what, three months ago or so? But I think what's interesting about this situation is that it's forced many art forms to figure out another way to reach their viewers, and customers, and patrons online. I think that moving forward, we're going to want to, at least as an organization, maintain that in some capacity; which is opening up a different type of programming that we didn't necessarily offer on a regular basis, which I'm excited about because we'll have some of these infrastructures in place. Now that people know to look to our Facebook every Thursday for jazz, why can't we do something like that similarly on a regular basis moving forward once this is all over? So that's going to be exciting, I think.
Otherwise, I am looking forward to being able to bring back some of those educational opportunities. We've been talking about ways to provide jazz education online through our Sioux Fall Jazz and Blues organization, and figuring out what does that look like. What can we provide to students who are obviously stuck at home who can't come together? I think most importantly, I'm looking forward to being able to bring everyone back together over the love of jazz. I think that we are going to have a very strong support system coming out of it, because everyone is going to be excited about getting out of their house, and perhaps, for once, we won't be canceling plans as much as we did before. I know that I'm going to follow through on a lot more plans than I used to, but we'll see what happens after all of this.