For The Musician (Blue Room Books, 325 pages), Atlanta writer Mike Shaw draws upon his decades as a jazz artist to chronicle the fictional story of Tom Cliffe, a pianist devoted to his craft but without a pathway to stardom or financial success. Like many working musicians, Cliffe survives on the edges of the business: playing small nightclubs, living in humble quarters, fighting temptation and constantly scrambling to earn enough money to survive.
Shaw’s novel is set in both New Orleans and Atlanta, and it depicts a side of the music business that’s often lived but seldom told — the push and pull between the love of creating music and the realities of making a living. It’s a world he knows well. He played in a New Orleans jazz funk band and did solo gigs in piano bars, including Lucky Pierre’s on Bourbon Street, which is thought to have been the original “House of the Rising Sun.”
The novel, Shaw’s first, has generated notice in the jazz community. Ralph Miriello, who writes about jazz for the Huffpost and other publications, has called it a “must read . . . true, endearing, joyful, and at times disheartening.”
Shaw recently talked to ArtsATL about The Musician, and his life on and off stage.
ArtsATL: Your protagonist, Tom Cliffe, is a journeyman pianist. He’s not famous and even struggles at times with the imposter syndrome: feeling he’s not worthy of being on stage with great musicians. What drew you to this character and to writing about a side of the music industry that isn’t chronicled very often?
Mike Shaw: The dedication page reads: “To the hundreds of thousands who strum, blow, beat, pluck or sing impressively enough to make a living making music.” I wanted to write about them. Only a tiny fraction of musicians achieve celebrity, and almost all do something in addition to playing music in order to feed themselves, not to mention to afford the luxury of a family.
The “business” itself is no business; there’s no structure, no ladder to climb to get ahead. You just play night to night, gig to gig, finding work and playing where you can in hopes of getting recognized and better opportunities, better venues. The only thing you can control is your music, so you practice constantly to get better, to become more accomplished. As the saying goes, “If you want to play jazz, do nothing but play jazz.”
But playing music, especially playing well and with others who play well, is so gratifying that musicians are willing to sacrifice the things in life that most of us seek out and consider necessary and normal. That’s Tom, and though Tom’s not famous, I think his story is compelling because of his commitment, his dedication to his craft and his determination to play the most challenging music well, to get good and be recognized for it.
ArtsATL: Tell us a little about your background playing jazz and funk in New Orleans. And what brought you to Atlanta?
Shaw: In the mid to late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I led a jazz funk band in New Orleans named Metropolis. Those guys inspired several of my main characters in The Musician. We were the house band at the Absinthe Bar, a long-standing Bourbon Street club. (The last time I visited New Orleans, the Absinthe Bar had been converted to a Daiquiri Factory.) I also played piano bars there, including a place named Lucky Pierre’s, also on Bourbon Street and reportedly the original “House of the Rising Sun.” I used to exchange sets with Frankie Ford, who had the big hit “Sea Cruise,” which he sang at least three times a night. “A fifty dollar request,” he explained. And yes, there were still working girls there.
I think you have to be from New Orleans to live in New Orleans — especially the kind of work I was doing, and the kind of life everyone I knew was living at that time: booze, drugs and way too much of both. I didn’t have the stamina. I was day-moonlighting at a magazine, writing and editing articles for an emerging video game industry (remember Space Invaders?), and when one of the advertisers offered me a job as advertising director with their company in Atlanta, I made the move. About a year later I opened my first of what eventually were three marketing firms, including my current, Shade Communications.
ArtsATL: You’re both a writer and a musician, two artistic endeavors that most often aren’t especially financially rewarding and can be fraught with personal perils. A major theme of the book is how a musician sacrifices financial rewards and often personal relationships in the quest for artistic bliss. How strong was the tug between the two for you, and how did you make use of that for the character of Tom Cliffe?
Shaw: I was fortunate enough always to work regularly, not always the best venues, but regular. Even when I was making $50 a night, which was about my average for those early years, I was putting something aside, which over the years amounted to something rather substantial. My marketing companies in Atlanta were small but we did quite well. And I’m still writing and generating an income. So I didn’t suffer like poor Tom Cliffe.
At one point late in the book, at a club in Gulf Shores called the Flora-Bama, where I’ve played many times over the decades, Tom delivers an explosive diatribe about his circumstance and the hardships he has encountered as a musician, including lack of money. But as poor as he is, that’s hardly his biggest frustration. Again, I think as a musician you don’t focus on making a lot of money; it’s just not reality for most players.
ArtsATL: The book reads a lot like a memoir. How autobiographical is The Musician?
Shaw: When someone who’s read The Musician asks me, “Did you really do all that?” I’m quick to reply, “It’s fiction.” As Thomas Wolfe pointed out in the introduction to his epic novel Look Homeward Angel, fiction is fact repurposed. He took a great deal of grief from the people he drew from for his characters, including family. Most good fiction walks a fine line between actuality and truth. You have to write about what you know, what you have experienced, and what you draw from all that that strikes a chord of familiarity with your readers, something they can identify with and maybe expand their understanding of.
Yes, like Tom I am a singer-pianist, and yes, I spent years on the road, and then settled in New Orleans, and worked a great deal along the Gulf Coast. But the scenes and most of the characters of The Musician are fictitious.
ArtsATL: You say in The Musician that jazz is a lifetime study, and you’re now studying with Atlanta pianist Kevin Bales. And you’re still performing. Where can someone see you play?
Shaw: Most of what I’ve done the last few years is country club and other private events. When I do play, we do it as a quartet, which includes some of the city’s finest jazz musicians: saxophonist Matt Miller, guitarist Dave Frackenpohl, and either Kevin Smith or Neal Starkey on bass. Occasionally I’ll sit in at one of Atlanta’s weeknight jazz jams, but I haven’t worked regularly in a club since they shut down music a few years ago at what used to be the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead.
ArtsATL: In the process of writing the book, did the narrative take a direction or unveil a truth that surprised you?
Shaw: A couple of people who read the novel before it was published told me I needed some love relationships in the book, which had none until about version 20. So I added Penny in Kansas City early, then the love of Tom’s life, Muriel, in those chapters set in Atlanta. Maybe how much Tom loved Muriel, and how broken she left him was a turn I hadn’t expected. I wanted to write about music, not necessarily relationships, so maybe I was a little surprised about how those two ladies came to life and became so much a part of Tom’s story — enough that my publisher would like to see at least Muriel show up in a sequel.
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Scott Freeman is executive editor of ArtsATL. He is the author of four books, including the best-selling Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (which is in development for a feature film) and Otis! The Otis Redding Story. He has worked as an editor at Atlanta magazine and Creative Loafing. He was a reporter for the Macon Telegraph and News, as well as The Providence Journal.
