Why did you cancel a gig?

[jazzyvee]

About 3 months ago I was offered a gig at a Jazz festival run by one of the large breweries here in the UK. Unfortunately the members of my band were unavailable due to previous commitments. So I decided to use a dep keyboard player and drummer I'd used successfully before and got a sax player whom is a great jazzer and in fact has played sax in a couple of bands where I have been depping on bass.


All good you would think. Anyway I sent everyone the music straight away for the set list via drop box with a list of guidance notes in case anyone had issues with the track. The keys and drummer contacted me about a couple of tracks and I made changes and re-issued the music and the notes to all the three band members. Now at the end of March I contacted the band individually to organise rehearsals and to let them know which tracks we'd be doing at each rehearsal with a full set run for the last one so they'd know how to pace themselves. Sax player never responded to my calls, texts, emails or fb messages. So he never turned up at the first rehearsal and 3 days before the next rehearsal he answered the phone and said, can I do him a CD so he can learn the tracks as he has not been able to download the tracks onto his computer.(Remember he was sent the music in April!). I burnt him a cd and drove across town to get it to him and arranged to pick him up for rehearsal on the Friday night. Got to rehearsal and he hadn't learnt a single track. He'd made some notes and scored a few parts but no arrangement so had no idea what to play and was blowing hard solo's over everything as if that was ok. Bear in mind most of the set is Grover Washington Jr so nice mellow tones required and not the bebop or Charlie Parker sound or fury that he was blowing at every opportunity.


We had another rehearsal a couple of days afterwards which was the same. The rest of the band were understandably annoyed and spoke to me at length about it afterwards.  Anyway after rehearsal I had not been able to get hold of him by all modern methods of communication or via some of our mutual friends who both confirmed they had told him verbally I was trying to contact him.
It was 10 days to the gig now snf I still hadn't heard from him and had no idea if he,  was even gonna be contactable before the gig, will turn up for the gig, or even if he does; what will he play! I rang a load of other sax players who were not available on the gig date or didn't have spare time to learn the 90 minute set. I felt I had not choice but to contact the festival organisers and cancel the gig. However I did the decent thing and found them another band to replace us so they were OK with that.


On Monday the sax player responded to my email on FB with a pathetic jokey response which I rebuffed in my response to him that pointed every incident I felt he had behaved unprofessionally, I told him I had to cancel the gig because of him and let him know how much money I had lost in rehearsal studio costs, the time the other musicians had spent learning all the music expecting to be paid after the gig but now none of us would be paid due to his behavour. Also the lost opportunity for other gigs to come from that appearance at the festival can't be overlooked either.

Up to now he has not responded. I have seen him appear on fb but he has not taken to sending me a message.
The next interesting thing is we are both in the same band for a gig on Friday which is a 2 1/2 hour drive in the minibus..............


I'm not looking for answers or suggestions on how to deal with this. It is that cancelling a gig due to the behavior of someone in the band has never happened to me in all my years of playing in bands and I just wondered if anyone has any interesting/frustrating stories about their experience of this. Funny ones are too. :-)

[pauldo]

Jazzy, sorry to hear that.  Great to hear you are such a professional in sticky times.  So unfortunate that the sax player lacked any type of integrity.

[edwardofhuncote]

Ditto what Paul said. Good on you for handling things correctly.

Flaky musicians... man, I've got stories. We had a fiddle player once, great musician, classically trained, but had assimilated into Appalachian fiddling, (something not as easily done as one might think) but that guy was a walking soap opera. He was so habitually late to gigs that the band would be in panic mode. It'd be like moments before a bride was to begin walking the aisle (we played a lot of weddings) and we'd hear screeching tires, a few seconds later, dude would come dashing up still trying to tie his shoes and a neck-tie. It wasn't really a reflection on me personally, but the degree of stress that put on the rest of the band led to bad gigs and band arguments.

I could go on and on. 

[growlypants]

Yea, you did the right thing, Jazzy.  You can't let one bad player, ruin the whole band's appeal.

[gtrguy]

We had a fairly big (for us) outdoor gig a couple years back with a band we built around a singer. She backed out at the last minute for 'personal reasons' and we had to grab and hire some people and go on with a show. The guitar player we hired had his own band and ended up scarfing up the gig and took it away from us and we never got it back. His band still plays it (it was a concert in the park series show for a local town).

Long and short of it is that:
You almost never refuse a paying gig
There is another pro band that will take your gigs if they can (understandable)
Performers (singers, players, etc) that back out on gigs get a rep fast & I think nobody in their right mind wants to ever work with them again

To combat this we have players and singers we know sit in with us at gigs, with our own internal goal of seeing if they might be a good sub if ever needed. Not everyone gets this and I have had our own singers or other band members in our band not want to have outsiders sitting in.

I personally file it under the "doing good business" heading, meaning some performers do and some don't. The ones I think do not "do good business" I don't work with. Often the ones who don't are quite successful, so there is no moral to the story, just a personal code for me.


On the other hand, I once was hired to pay bass on a local yokel country album and the producer/engineer took an instant dislike to my BC Rich bass. He tried treating it like a P bass at the board and it sounded like crap. I was let go in an somewhat unprofessional fashion and another bass player in the wings with a Fender was brought in. A year or two later our band did an album for good money and this same person was brought up to be the engineer. I refused to work with him and we went to another studio and did a fine LP. That same bass that same year was used by me to record a song that went on the become a hit in Hawaii, so I know it was a great recording instrument.

"Music is a long dark dirty hallway filed with pimps, pushers, cons, and crooks. Oh, and there is a bad side to it as well"

[CaseyVancouver]

That sax player is a flake.

There are too many good sax players ...here he would be replaced. Too bad you could not find one, in your circumstance I might change it up and use trumpet.

Getting good paying gigs is the hard part, there are always great players around. I can't recall losing a gig cause one player can't make it, in thousands of dates.

Years ago I played in a busy 7 piece jazz group that had a 'first call' drummer. He was very good, could read anything and swing like crazy, but WAY too busy. I recall many dates where he came late because of a earlier gig or actually left early for another band's gig. One time he showed up late with another bands outfit (he had come from a gig) played our date in the wrong clothes then left early for a gig with yet another band!  I was not the leader and 'pro' sidemen keep their mouths shut. The final straw for the band leader was a good paying New Years gig in Washington USA where he left early for a second NY's date in Vancouver Canada. It's totally noticeable to all when the drummer is late or leaves early with his gear.  This guy was/is a top local pro!  ...wow.

[lbpesq]

I've been fortunate.  The only time I've been in a band that cancelled a gig it was for medical reasons.  Sorry you had to go through that, Jazzy.  As has been noted, too many musicians are flakes.

Bill, tgo

[jazzyvee]

What is a flake?
Over here it's a type of chocolate bar made by Cadbury (aka Cad-Berry to you US guys). Over here the "d" is virtually silent.  :-)

[pauldo]

Flake:
n. An unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through.

[edwardofhuncote]

"...two peoples, separated by a common language."   

I recently had to get one of my Australian buddies on TalkBass to explain what a "push-bike" or a "pushy", was.   

[dtothec]

I've dealt with several flaky singers that show up late or don't want to come to practice, but only want to show up to gigs and get paid.  I don't have a lot of tolerence for that, because in the end it is a reflection on the entire group, and if someone doesn't care enough about how we will sound at a gig to come to practice, then I prefer not to perform with them. In the end this is an art in which you have to pay attention to detail, and that takes practice and commitment to that art.  Everyone else in that band that is making that commitment and you are only going to sound as good as your least committed member! As of yet I haven't had to cancel one. Jazzy sorry you had to cancel but being the pro you are, you handled it in a professional manner and went a step beyond and even found them a replacement!

[gtrguy]

I once played in a group with a drummer who at one time was jim and tammy faye bakker's drummer. As you can guess, he had a lot of great stories!

He told of of a Gospel group he was in at one time with a husband and wife team. On a gig during warmup beforehand the husband had a heart attack and died on the stage behind the curtain. My drummer friend was sitting on his drums when the paramedics showed up and tried to revive him. Anyway, the wife decided to go ahead with the show! She said they all knew he was in bad health and could go an any moment!!! So they did. The Show must go on...

I have seen people die on the dance floor and the gig was ended. It's funny how scruffy the average bar looks when the house lights come all the way up at night.