"Sunday" blogs - a rant blog (trials and tribulations of a young touring bandleader)

The origin of this blog post takes place as my bitter ass was sitting at JFK Terminal 1's Soho bar, drinking the only thing that costs under $11 while typing angry things in to an unresponsive digital flight bot for a flight booking website. I was on my way to Frankfurt for a week long intensive residency and set of shows, and Air Europa pulled the rug out from under me and cancelled my flight without notifying me. I had spent another $650 booking a new flight on the same day. I had to be in Frankfurt on Sunday night to start my 9am-5pm rehearsal day on that Monday.

“Talk to an agent!!!!!”

“Thank you for contacting eDreams. Please enter your 7 digit confirmation code. *prayer emoji*”

“*enters confirmation code*”

“Thank you. What would you like to do with your booking?”

“Refund!!!! The airline cancelled the flight on me. I've submitted five billion requests. Also, I'm a musician, I'm super broke, please give me my money back so it doesn't come out of my already limited pay and the program doesn't berate me for being an inconvenience to them.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Refunds can be processed through Manage my Booking. Please click the link below. *downward arrow emoji*”

“There is literally no cancellation option when I click that! Please do it for me!”

“Hello, thank you for contacting eDreams. What can we help you with? *prayer emoji*”

“For the love of god I'm going to unalive myself if I cannot talk to a real human being right now.”

“*raised pointer finger emoji* Our agents are extremely busy. *lightbulb emoji* Did you know you can handle most inquiries on our website? Click below to explore your options. *downward arrow emoji * ”

“Well, apparently, you can't handle this inquiry. That is literally why I'm messaging. So please help me out.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Refunds can be processed through Manage my Booking. Please click the link below. *downward arrow emoji * Is there anything else we can help you with?”

“You can suck it. That's what you can help me with.”

“I'm sorry, we are not able to process your request. Please select one of the options below.”

“Wow, so bots can't even understand jokes or deprecating statements? Even Siri has enough digital intelligence to respond to things like that.”

“I'm sorry, we do not understand. What can we help you with today? Option 1: Review Itinerary Details. Option 2: Change My Flight. Option 3: Online Issues?? *shocked emoji with x's for eyes *”

*slams computer shut *. 11:25pm. I ate half of an order of airport quality loaded fries in a frantic half-rage before my stomach started feeling like a defunct butter churn. “Hey, how much is a Bloody Mary?”

Maybe this is so frustrating for me - not just because I am not getting my deserved refund or haven't talked to a human agent in 3 hours – but because this is not the first time I've had travel trouble on tour. Any other time I've been on vacation, something non-work related, I have never had a problem. My first band tour of North America when I was 20 years old? Toronto border patrol kept my South Korean drummer for 9 hours without any updates to me, having confiscated his phone, and sent him back to the US based purely on speculation. (No, he does not have a criminal record, despite Toronto border patrol insinuating that that was the only possible way he could have not gotten in). Our first show in Ottawa had no drummer since there are no jazz musicians who actually live in Ottawa.

I got my New York drummer flown in to play my Montreal Jazz Fest show. His flight gets delayed in to our show time. It cost an extra $500. Montreal airport lost my carry on with my computer and my mallets in it (small plane means they gate check carry ons) for three hours. I didn't get a chance to eat for 20 hours. Ironically, that was the best gig of the Canada run.

The only drummer for the final Canada gig literally could not play the music, despite the fact that I sent him recordings and charts ahead of time like the frantic planner I am. I sat on the top of a hill in Vancouver after the show and felt humiliated that I could not play the shows I wanted for my debut tour with my band. When it came time to play the next festival gig a couple months later in Monterey, I got so nervous I kept fucking up. I could not get my mind to think straight. Some folks actually started leaving during the show. It was one of the worst feelings I've ever felt. All at 20 years old. JazzTimes had just called me a “young mallet master” in a recent publication. The juxtaposition stung. I felt like a fraud.

I thought about stories of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman playing shows that folks didn't get, which caused them to either walk out or boo them as they performed. It didn't, however, make me feel better. We smoked weed after the show and for some reason the strain made me shake uncontrollably. I kept it to myself. It was my own doing – I refused to ask for any help. I lived in my anxiety that night, and many nights over, silently, tortuously. Anything to forget what had just happened on stage, anything to keep me from breaking.

Fast forward a couple of months – we go to London. My drummer once again cannot get in to London. Same problem, different country. Speculation about a military service he didn't have to do for another two years. My pants rip before the gig so I run to H&M during the first band's sets to buy new pants. I go to buy cider at the grocery store later that night and they don't take American driver's licenses and won't sell me the alcohol despite showing my birthday on an official document of sorts. (Yes, when I was only 100 pounds, there are folks who thought there could be the smallest possibility I was not 18 yet. Even with tattoos. Now that I'm 30 pounds heavier, this does not happen anymore, and it doesn't sting my late puberty teenage self so much).

I ended up spending some extra time after performing in London by staying with a friend of my mom's, taking the subway around to wherever I could make in the time I had - Brick Lane, Borough Market, London Bridge, Big Ben - trying to fight the looming fact that I needed to be on depression medication again. I remember listening to Kate Davis' Trophy on the Hackney Downs subway train, looking out at the severe January gray fog, and writing about how I hoped I would one day be good enough at vibraphone that I wouldn't find a reason to be depressed. That nothing would get under my skin again, and I would face every sucky travel day with optimism that once I played it would all melt away. Three years of therapy later would tell me that getting better at the instrument would not actually resolve my depression. We may actually be stuck in a symbiotic relationship for the rest of my life. It was not about fixing as much as working with and around it.

I would continue to have bad luck with tour travel. I would still cry, squatted next to the only working outlet in JFK in the arrivals hall where you have to hold the plug in place the whole time because it keeps falling out, as I try to figure out where Air Europa went wrong. The difference now is that I would still tell myself I'm a true adult and I've been through this before and there's no reason to cry over this. I need to be practical and find the next solution. I used to cry for hours on end in high school, multiple days a week. Now I exclusively seem to cry in spurts of 60 seconds.

So promptly, after 60 seconds, I stood up. Deadpan and uncomfortably sweaty in my New York winter wool coat and scarf, I asked the travel agent where I could check in for my new flight with Air France. 20 minutes by Air Train to Terminal 1. I spend that time on the phone with one of Air Europa's agents. Air Europa never gave me a refund. I had $300 taken from my band fee for something that was out of my control.

And my inner child wailed on. My adult being beelined straight for the bar. Because I cried too much as a kid. I was emotionally slutty. My amygdala, for an unknown reason, has been haywire since I was an infant with months long colic. But nobody knows these things, and frankly, nobody cares. Jazz musicians even have t-shirts made on this topic just to make a point of how unaffected they are by everything – something that screams mental illness to me but reads as hyper masculine resilience and the notion of “beating out the competition” to most folks.

The silent dilemma.

I have been forced into my practicality to communicate that I am strong in my job, and that I will never have audience members walk out on me or let travel issues bog me down. Adults find realistic solutions. I want to leave every situation saying that I tried my hardest to figure it all out. Even when it feels like I still have absolutely nothing figured out. I remember that whenever a certain family member saw me distressed when I was younger, them exclaiming, “So what? You're just gonna give up? You're just gonna give up on everything?!” I still hear that voice in my head today every time I feel like I have no trying energy left.

It's a little too serendipitous that shortly after I finished this paragraph I realized I had lost my passport in the Paris airport during my transfer to Frankfurt. Note that I have only ever lost one valuable thing in my entire life. Sure, I've left my keys in my apartment once, but I live alone and the super keeps extra copies of keys for other apartments. In my mind, I went...after all of this, are you fucking serious?? Today??? Today is the day I lose my passport?

But I did gather myself. I wasn't gonna get upset again. I had four hours left in my layover. I retraced my steps. I had it when I got through security for my connection. There were only so many places it could be. I went inside a Relay for some water, and a cafe for breakfast and an espresso. It wasn't at either of those places. I realize I may have left it in the bathroom, or that a good samaritan found it and turned it over to security. When I found a lost wallet in Bushwick on Halloween, I had done the same by returning it to the nearby store and attempting to contact the person who owned the wallet. Plus, French people are even nicer than Americans. I find Air France security – they immediately say that they have it. I got in back in under 15 minutes. I breathe a major sigh of relief and rip off my coat for the tenth time I've sweat through it in the past 12 hours.

I finally arrive in Germany at 12:45am. I have to wake up at 7am the next day to prepare music for the next four days of residency rehearsals and recordings. There was no time to adjust from the jet lag, and there was not a lot of time for relaxing or sight seeing, either. After 5pm I would have a little bit of time for dinner and a beer at the bar, but I would have to back to my hotel room to keep editing and writing the music, which was intended to come in to the residency in the form of a work-in-progress. It could be another three hours of work. I would see emails and texts with folks from the US pressing me about why I haven't responded to their email - gig requests, unpaid drum competition panelist follow ups, concern about personnel for a gig three months away. I got my period in the middle of it all (I have extremely painful cramps on my first two days) and spent one lunch period lying down on a cot next to the studio waiting for my Midol to kick in while it felt like I had a knife in my uterus. I didn't know to explain this pain to a bunch of German men.

Now, would I say this level of high intensity work made me the musician I am today? No doubt. By the third rehearsal the band sounded like an entirely different band and it fully blew my mind. I had some of the first moments of my life admitting to myself that I was actually killing a recording. Even though they are my peers and equal in skill level, a bandleader learns to possess the ability to identify what the musicians could do to make the music better – particularly if it is their original music. We would sit in the studio listening back to the recordings and I would give them directions and things to think about. More open voicings here, let the trombone solo breathe, hint at the dotted quarter note subdivision as a build up to section C, put alternate changes over the second soloist. We make all the puzzle pieces fit in some vaguely omniscient act of assemblage. The music morphs and shifts accordingly, and it came out the other side an entirely transformed band. It was fascinating. For a second, I had forgotten why we put ourselves through stressful or tiring days as musicians. Living with a depressive disorder felt like enough on its own. I was constantly hitting my physical, emotional, and mental limit – but it's what I had to do to make it happen. And it worked. Each show got tremendous responses and encores. The Mannheim show got two. I have never in my life played a show of my own that got two encores.

I also realized I didn't even have time to digest the things in the past couple of months that have changed my career so drastically as a result of my hard lessons learned from being a young traveling bandleader. I look at that 20 year old on my first tour and I could not be more different. Hell, I look at myself at 21 and 22 and feel wildly different. I celebrated a lot of firsts in my career in the last six months alone – and for the first time, I did it all by myself. Of course, this is hard for me. I'm not good at celebrating or feeling any sort of redemption or reward. I was the kid who grew up in the top 5% of her class, musically and academically, simply because it was expected of me. Pride is not an emotion I register easily, if at all. But in the same sense that I showed up for myself to handle all situations as maturely and realistically as possible, I have to show up for the form of validation it has taken the longest for me to earn – my own. I now feel it deeply in a form that could not have taken place when I was on that Canadian tour three years ago. It all gets so much harder, but only because we become more resilient and experienced.

The traveling ordeals may persist through my whole life, by bad strokes of luck or otherwise – but my playing, my mindset, my confidence, the things I do have some control over – they have all changed. I now that some of the reason why I struggle to recognize it has to do with the fact that I'm the only one who really gets to see the extent of it at such a personal level. My family and best friends, while extremely supportive, are not musicians, and I had split with my significant other who was a musician over a year and a half ago. I am my strongest means of support. It is rare that I ask for help anymore. I am committed to staying that way - through my six hours of layover on the phone with various travel agents scrambling to get my refunds, finish my music edits, my 2 hours of sleep, my misplaced passport. All the nights I'll spend working over a piece of music that I still can't nail, the 60 second clock that begins to tick once I feel the water behind my eyes, the silent thoughts in the hotel room before the tour starts, wondering whether I'll be able to go to sleep before 3 am easily again...

The fact of the matter is that this is what it is to be an adult, and there's nothing you can do but sit in the muck with yourself and the problems only you can fix and let it suck until the suckiness starts to let up. Sometimes this happens the hard way. You lose money, dignity, sanity, whatever. Maybe if we were more real about how we all find ourselves in the suck pool once in a while, we might have a little more sympathy for eachother. I do believe sympathy is one of the most underrated tools for folks in the Western world. Its lack of prevalence in the music world particularly shocks me, and I think it could really use a heavy dose of it.

The flights get more flexible, the music gets more powerful.

When I reach the end of the residency, I'm with my drummer at the airport, falling asleep into the palms of my hand after I got aggressively searched at the Frankfurt airport because of the necklaces I wear as a matriarchal heirloom in my family. My drummer lets me know he sees our other musician friends who had just returned from their Europe tour. It's an outpour of love and reconciliation. The kind of exhausted happiness with new experiences coupled by a yearning for finally going home. They, too, were working every day. When we're finally on the flight, I fall asleep before the flight takes off and stay that way.

Until next time. When, of course, we do it all over again.