It’s 8:15 at night and Scott Fish walks down a nearly-deserted Eastern Parkway, pulling an amp strapped down with bungee cords and carrying a modified Stratocaster guitar on his back. He hasn’t rehearsed tonight’s set in a few weeks, but he isn’t worried — the show should be casual. Besides, most people at a bar would rather talk to their friends than listen to live music.
His commute is easy: it’s a mere five-minute walk from his Crown Heights apartment to Two Saints, a local joint with just enough room for a makeshift bandstand and a regular Tuesday night live jazz series. Everything about the job is effortless for Fish. All he has to worry about is waking up in time for his 9 a.m. class the next day.
Fish and his bandmates, drummer Patrick Granzen and vocalist Bella Rocha are all students of the College of Performing Arts. Fish and Granzen are current seniors at Mannes and Jazz, while Rocha graduated as a jazz vocalist this past spring.
The set started at 9 and the group played mostly jazz standards (including “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “One Note Samba,” and “My Funny Valentine”) — “because that’s what we learned in school,” Rocha joked with the crowd. The audience was more receptive than the band anticipated, especially during their rendition of “Head Over Heels,” by Tears for Fears, which prompted three women seated nearby to cheer and sing along. The trio also threw in a few more stylized covers: a sultry rendition of the Jackson 5’s, “I Want You Back” and a stripped-down “Georgia on My Mind.”
“It’s a real no-pressure gig,” Fish said during the break between their first two sets. “The three of us play together in different musical contexts and this is just one of them.”
Aside from their jazz trio, which plays Two Saints about once a month, Fish and Granzen make up an experimental duo called Honey Drizzle, which plays other Brooklyn venues like The Glove. They also play in Rocha’s indie-rock band, Twin Village.
“Gigs either come from word of mouth recommendations or me approaching a venue,” Fish said. “If I want people to pay attention to the weirder music that I’m playing I would probably go to an art gallery, as opposed to a bar where friends can just come and grab a drink and hang out.”
Aside from their musical talents, what drew Fish, Granzen, and Rocha together was, ultimately, their ability to get along as people.
“If someone isn’t a fun person to be around then you just won’t make good music together,” Fish said. He met Granzen almost accidentally, on a gig with a mutual friend in their shared hometown of Madison, Wisconsin the summer before their sophomore year. That’s when they realized they went to the same school.
“I’ve met a lot of people through just playing at people’s houses who may not even go to New School or who may have graduated,” Granzen said. “Finding gigs and people to play with is really just about being out there and being present.”
CoPA encourages students to seek out performance experience. The School of Jazz provides students with access to a “gig office,” which maintains a list of various performance opportunities and provides students with tips for marketing themselves as working musicians.
Granzen has never used the gig office, but described it as a faculty-supervised program in which students may audition to become band leaders. A client will contact the gig office looking for live music for a specific event, often cocktail parties or weddings. Specific band leaders must then assemble groups dependent on a client’s particular needs.
“I never used [the gig office] or was called for a gig through [them],” Rocha said about her time at The New School. She said that band leaders appointed to the gig office would usually end up inviting their friends or other instrumentalists to play shows. “It wasn’t super helpful for vocalists.”
“I think for Jazz the emphasis on going out and playing in the city is a little more stressed [than at Mannes],” Fish said. “If you go to Mannes and you use its resources well but you stay in a practice room your whole four years, you’re ultimately not going be prepared when you graduate.”
Granzen described the jazz program’s ability to prepare students for life as a working musician as “kind of a hit or miss.” Some of the business and entrepreneurship classes can be outdated, he said, focusing on aspects of the industry like managing record sales when most of today’s successful recordings are accessed almost entirely through streaming services.
“[The New School for Jazz] has really helped me become comfortable with performing and reading different music, for sure,” Granzen said. “But it’s really shown me that you have to do more than just play your instrument if you want to survive solely off of music.”
One of the biggest challenges for working musicians, especially for those who are also students, is financial security. Gigs aren’t necessarily steady and pay is often unreliable. Bars like Two Saints that host musicians will often pay a band a predetermined amount of money at the end of the night, and usually offer free food and drinks during the set. More established music venues might pay musicians a cut of the admission fee they charge patrons at the door.
“At this point, three months out of school I’ve been playing a few gigs each month and currently I’m not depending on it for income,” Rocha said. She currently works at the clothing store Awoke Vintage in Williamsburg, but hopes to be able to transition to a full-time career in music soon.
“I think there’s a whole group of musicians now that are simply playing the music that they want to play for themselves and for the people who enjoy it,” Fish said. He said that the chance to experiment and play music with like-minded individuals far outweighs how much money they’re handed at the end of the night.
“That’s a really refreshing way to play music,” he added. “That’s what I hope to do now with my friends.”
Fish, Granzen, and Rocha are playing Two Saints on Tuesday Oct. 16, 9 p.m. to midnight.
Photo by Orlando Mendiola