Although we are currently focused on jam sessions because they cover everything we stand for - mentorship, community, and fair wages - we have ideas for the future. Here is a glimpse of the kinds of things we're thinking about and ways we want to approach them. Feel free to contact us with ideas or anything else.
Background
Venues have always had to balance staying in business with providing opportunities for artists to perform.
The board members of Stage Time have decades of experience performing, teaching, and working with venues around the world to create, book, and manage performance situations that work for the venue and the artists. Using these skills and experience Stage Time can help create a scene that supports venues and artists to the benefit of everyone in the community.
Performing artists help bring creativity to life in our community and Stage Time is dedicated to helping make this happen.
Problem
The ever increasing cost of doing business for venues leads to business owners doing whatever they can to reduce those costs and their live performance budget is often the first thing to be cut. Limited opportunities for artists to work in a smaller community create an unhealthy competitive environment and a culture of suspicion and hostility between artists.
In addition this need for businesses to save money and the Covid pandemic that shut down virtually all live venues in late 2019 created a situation where spaces for live music and other performances remain scarce. More often than not, businesses that do provide a space for performing artists can rarely compensate the performers adequately and live music performance suffers across the community.
Performing artists help bring creativity to life in our community and Stage Time helps make this happen.
What can we do?
One of the ways Stage Time works to help mitigate these issues by working with venues to provide a fair wage to performing artists by helping subsidize wages to musicians, paying musicians directly, and possibly offering short term grants to venues to provide music for a certain number of performances.
Opening up more venues also helps give upcoming musicians live stage time to develop their skills and gain the experience they will require to move forward in their music careers.
Finally as a way to bring the music community together and help new musicians get a taste of live performance we organize weekly jam sessions at venues in the area and hire experienced professionals for the house bands. This gives students of music live stage time in a mentoring environment and follows in the long tradition of students learning from professionals while on stage.
We Have Experience
The current board members of Stage Time are seasoned musicians who have been performing professionally for decades. There comes a point where a person wants to share their experience and help the younger generation enjoy the same kinds of experiences a career in music provides. Stage Time is a way to do these things in an organized environment where nobody is left out due to being popular, rich or poor, or any of the ways people are left out of the things they would love to do.
Everyone we’ve discussed Stage Time with has had a positive reaction and shared ideas of ways to further our mission. Venues, musicians, and the general public have all been supportive of the idea.
Future of the Project
Initial funding for 2025 will hopefully be enough to cover the house band for a jazz jam we are hosting at a local venue. As we grow we want to work with as many venues as possible to create performance opportunities for musicians. The more the better. As time goes on this will lead to a cultural shift in the community where more and more people will go out to enjoy all the music that is available.
As we grow, part of the plans for the future involved clinics, master classes, and other education for performing artists where top end professionals are brought in to teach, mentor and share knowledge of how they got to where they are.
Notes:
Our focus is on the local community and exposing more people to the performing arts which then creates more support for the performing arts and gives Stage Time the opportunity to help open more spaces and venues.
The artist community in the Bellingham area is somewhat fractured because the lack of spaces to play creates an unhealthy competitive environment. If we can create enough work for performing artists so there is less anxiety in finding places to perform, the artist community can transition from a “win at all costs” kind of competition to competition that is based more in artists pushing each other to get better, sharing knowledge, and trying new things in their performances.
