Now is the right time to become an American Federation of Musicians member. From ragtime to rap, from the early phonograph to today's digital recordings, the AFM has been there for its members. And now there are more benefits available to AFM members than ever before, including a multi-million dollar pension fund, excellent contract protection, instrument and travelers insurance, work referral programs and access to licensed booking agents to keep you working.
As an AFM member, you are part of a membership of more than 80,000 musicians. Experience has proven that collective activity on behalf of individuals with similar interests is the most effective way to achieve a goal. The AFM can negotiate agreements and administer contracts, procure valuable benefits and achieve legislative goals. A single musician has no such power.
The AFM has a proud history of managing change rather than being victimized by it. We find strength in adversity, and when the going gets tough, we get creative - all on your behalf.
Like the industry, the AFM is also changing and evolving, and its policies and programs will move in new directions dictated by its members. As a member, you will determine these directions through your interest and involvement. Your membership card will be your key to participation in governing your union, keeping it responsive to your needs and enabling it to serve you better. To become a member now, visit www.afm.org/join.
A tribute to Stuart Spector’s legendary craftsmanship, the Euro4 1977 provides an extremely comfortable, fully carved body, handcrafted from solid American walnut. A three-piece maple neck runs through the length of the instrument and features a 24-fret rosewood fingerboard with dot inlays. It has the same single DiMarzio Model P pickup as the original, but has been updated
with a modern, lightweight zinc brass alloy Spector bridge and Tone Pump tone circuit.
by Juliet Haffner, member of Local 802 (New York City)
“Julie, you have to hear this,” said Recording Engineer Gary Chester, calling me into the recording booth. He played back the freshly recorded track. It was the finale scene from Cradle Will Rock, the motion picture written and directed by Tim Robbins. I listened to the track: David Robbins’ incredible composition, masterfully orchestrated by David Campbell of Locals 47 (Los Angeles, CA) and 802 (New York City), and played by the fantastic AFM musicians that I contracted. It sounded fabulous. Hearing this exuberant and joyful track was the payoff for months of work coordinating the musicians for the film.
This post-production session was the culmination of a 10-month project that included three months of filming with 28 sidelining sessions, prerecording, on-camera recording, and post-production. All of the work was filed under the AFM Motion Picture Agreement. As contractor, I was responsible for the musicians’ weekly payroll during the entire project. In addition to basic scale, on-camera musician payroll included wardrobe fittings, wardrobe removal allowance, makeup, travel time to sets, meal penalty allowance (the company must provide a meal break after six hours of shooting or pay a penalty), and additional scale for live on-set recording.
Through the years, the AFM has negotiated all of these provisions. It was tedious work to keep track of every little detail, but I was grateful that I had a contract to follow, and that the musicians were compensated fairly. In addition to the film score, there was a soundtrack CD for which I filed a whole separate contract with musicians under the Sound Recording Agreement.
Cradle Will Rock featured songs by Marc Blitzstein, as well as David Robbins’ original score. I needed musicians who could play diverse musical styles. My friend Paquito D’Rivera was in town and played on the Latin conga march scene. We also needed a Kurt Weill type band sound (complete with banjo and accordion), plus strings that could play ballads, classical, gypsy, as well as swing. When Tim Robbins thanked me for putting together such a great band, I was pleased that I had accomplished my goal of fulfilling the musical requests of the composer and arranger.
My other goal as contractor on this project, and every project I’ve booked musicians for, including numerous recording sessions such as Aerosmith’s Nine Lives and films such as Bringing Out the Dead, was to never hear the question “Where’s my money?” As a violist, when I work for employers, I assume that they have taken care of the payroll details. When I’m responsible for those details, I can’t take a chance of being liable for the money, if there is a problem. Someone, somewhere has to sign something. That is why the AFM exists, to enforce agreements that protect musicians.
In addition to side musicians, composers, orchestrators, and arrangers benefit from AFM agreements. As a contractor, I submit their bills (not including the composer’s artistic fee) with the musicians’ contract so they don’t get lost on someone’s desk.
The cost of musicians is just a tiny fraction of a film’s budget. Still, sometimes I have to come up with creative ways to make sure musicians get paid. For the David Mamet film The Winslow Boy, the producer asked me to be the signatory. I told her that I couldn’t be responsible for future payments. I suggested that her production company be responsible for the session payments and the distributor take care of the Film Secondary Markets Fund payments. She agreed. The musicians’ pay was handled by a payroll company. There are numerous options that make it easy for producers to file AFM agreements, even if they are not signatory.
When Elmer Bernstein uttered, “I have never done a session with so many first takes” from the podium in an offhand way, or David Mamet said, “The music is magnificent,” I felt a sense of joy and pride for the musicians that I hired. But the best part was getting them paid fairly for their work on AFM contracts. And, those films continue to pay musicians through the Film Secondary Markets Fund.
Artistic Citizenship brings together the perspectives of artists, scholars, educators, policy-makers, and activists to investigate the system of values surrounding artistic-educational endeavors. The book looks at the social responsibilities and functions of amateur and professional artists in a wide range of disciplines, including music, dance, theater, and visual arts. An accompanying website features video clips of “activism” in action.
Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, edited by David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne D. Bowman, Oxford University Press, www.oup.com.
In this book, written for children ages five to 10, author Lucy A. Warner presents 12 classical composers as superheroes. This colorful book engages children who learn about storied classical composers Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonin Dvořák and eight others. A short biographical paragraph, memorable poem, and famous piece of music is provided for each. The book also features a glossary, a map showing where each composer came from, a timeline, composer quotes, a listening/viewing guide, as well as a bibliography.
Zap! Boom! Pow! Superheroes of Music, by Lucy A. Warner and
illustrated by Patrick Ackerman, Spring Promise Productions,
www.springpromiseproductions.com.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell (13th District) delivers introductory remarks, emphasizing the value musicians give to the community. (L to R) are: O’Farrell; Local 47 President John Acosta and Vice President Rick Baptist; Local 47 members and honorees Carol Kaye, Dick Nash, Vincent DeRosa, Louise DiTullio, and Gene Cipriano.
In April, Local 47 (Los Angeles, CA) held its first Lifetime Achievement Awards honoring five Local 47 members—Gene Cipriano (woodwinds), Vincent DeRosa (horn), Louise DiTullio (flute), Carol Kaye (electric bass), and Dick Nash (trombone)—for their outstanding achievements and support for the artistic community of Los Angeles.
“The efforts of everyday working musicians who have created a meaningful and lasting impact on the artistic community are largely unknown to those outside the music world,” says Local 47 President John Acosta. “Too often, these wonderfully talented artists remain unsung heroes. We are excited to begin this new tradition of shedding a public spotlight in recognition of these most deserving musicians.”
Cipriano first joined the union in high school so he could get booked playing club dates. Throughout the 1940s he built a professional reputation and was a sought after jazz player, joining Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1950s, he became one of the busiest studio musicians and recorded as part of The Wrecking Crew. He also toured with Frank Sinatra. Cipriano plays many woodwind instruments, including the full range of saxophones, oboes, English horn, flutes, piccolo, and clarinets.
DeRosa launched his horn career in 1935 subbing at the San Carlo Opera Company’s production of La Traviata. He continued performing professionally through 2008. He is one of the most recorded brass players of all time having performed on many film soundtracks, recordings, and television programs. He was first horn for such greats as Henry Mancini, Alfred Newman, Lalo Schifrin of Local 47, and John Williams of Locals 47 and 9-535 (Boston, MA). Outside of Hollywood studios, he was a member of the Abnuceals Imuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, which recorded Frank Zappa’s first solo album, Lumpy Gravy. His impact on the business includes a new standard for studio horn parts.
DiTullio is one of the most widely heard flutists today, having performed on more than 1,200 motion picture and television scores over four decades. Aside from collaborating with a long list of distinguished film composers, DiTullio has held the principal flute position in many Los Angeles area orchestras and appeared as a soloist with orchestras across the country. She began teaching at age 18 and has served on the faculties of the University of Southern California, Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, and California State University at Fullerton.
AFM Local 47 officers look on as Dan Higgins presents honoree Gene Cipriano with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Kaye has played and taught guitar since 1949 and worked in dozens of nightclubs around Los Angeles. She began playing Fender bass (as it was called then) in 1963 when another bassist failed to show up for a recording date at Capitol Records. Soon after, she became first call bassist for record companies, movies, television, and commercials. In the mid-1970s she began performing live with the Hampton Hawes Jazz Trio. A leader in electric bass education, she’s given seminars across the nation and written bass tutoring books.
Nash played with many big bands and ballroom bands during the 1940s and 1950s, traveling with Billy May and with other bands. In 1953 he relocated to Los Angeles. His first LA break came when Tommy Pederson arranged a job for him with a local big band. He soon became a first call studio musician. He was Henry Mancini’s favorite trombonist and is a featured soloist on several of the composer’s soundtracks. In 1959 he played bass trombone on Art Pepper + Eleven—Modern Jazz Classics.
Local 47 says that this event was just the first of many ceremonies planned to highlight and recognize its members.
by Michael Manley, Director AFM Touring/Theatre/Booking Division
The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circuses—the Red and Blue units—give their final performances in May. Here’s a look at the unprecedented musical legacy of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Perry George (“P.G.”) Lowery sideshow band. Photo: Ringling Circus Museum
Every year for 146 years, The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey (RBBB) Circus has inspired audiences throughout North America with one-of-a-kind spectacles accompanied by professional musicians performing bespoke circus music. Though there have been many traveling circuses over the years, RBBB is known simply as the Circus—with a capital C.
For every season since its debut in 1871, each act of The Greatest Show on Earth has soared to the waltzes, gallops, marches, drumrolls, and fanfares performed by tireless professional circus musicians. While the United States Marine Corps Band and The New York Philharmonic precede it on the cultural landscape, the circus is the oldest enduring touring entertainment in US history. It arrived five years before the debut of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Richard Wagner’s opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, and only six years after the end of the Civil War.
The train car has always been home to circus employees, and the railway their Main Street. Before the circus began playing arenas in the 1950s, workers set up temporary tent cities next to the big top. Performers—and animals—from around the globe lived and worked together in a mobile melting pot that foreshadowed the multicultural patchwork that came to define the American experience in the 20th century. Before radio, film, and television, the circus brought its singular spectacle to smaller cities and rural towns, whose residents had no access to the theatres, opera houses, and music halls of large cities. In building audiences in these smaller markets, the circus tilled the soil for future touring entertainment—from vaudeville to Broadway musicals—and even today’s sports and concert spectacles.
The final “Red” Unit Circus Band
Through every season, live music has been the engine of the circus. Its musicians are known as “windjammers,” a reference to “jamming” wind through their brass and woodwind instruments, sometimes for seven or more hours a day. In the early days the 30-plus musicians of the circus would divide so that half the musicians could play the traditional parade through town, while the other half gave a staged band concert—all before the show began. The circus provided access to jobs for musicians who were often outside the conservatory training programs. It spawned a large body of repertoire, which has become standard literature for concert, marching, and military bands. Like the well-known marches of Karl King and Henry Fillmore, much of this music was written by circus musicians themselves.
Long-term steady employment has always been a draw of circus work. Its most famous bandleader, Merle Evans, raised his baton for 50 consecutive seasons from 1919 to 1969. In the first decade of the 20th Century, Ringling and other circuses of the day were early employers of African American musicians, though they were barred from the main tent and relegated to perform as “sideshow bands” due to the racial segregation of that era. The most renowned sideshow bandleader—composer and virtuoso cornetist Perry George (“P.G.”) Lowery—was justly famous for both his brilliant playing and his compositions, through his nearly 50-year circus career. Circus bands were not fully integrated until after the civil rights movement.
Over the years, the model for musical employment changed. In the 1950s, the circus retired the big top and began playing arenas. They toured with a small core of musicians, filling out the rest of the ensemble with local musicians in each venue. In this way, the circus provided a wealth of local musician employment over the next 30 to 40 years. In the late 1990s the circus phased out local musician hiring, and returned to traveling all of the musicians—bands of nine players on each unit—in 1998.
The 2014 “Gold” Unit Circus band. (Photo: Emily Fleck)
The AFM has covered the employment of circus musicians going back at least to the early 1940s. This continues today through an agreement between current circus owner, Feld Entertainment, Inc., and the AFM. One challenge faced by circus musicians is familiar to those in other sectors of live music—the preservation of jobs and maintaining large-size bands. The AFM has maintained the current traveling complement of nine musicians per unit for nearly 20 years, from 1998 through the RBBB Circus closure in 2017.
From 2004 to 2015, six additional circus musicians were employed on the Ringling “Gold” Unit, which was designed to play smaller towns outside the range of the railways that defined the “Red” and “Blue” Unit circuits. Since the employer was not providing train transportation, the “Gold” Unit contract contained a unique provision that allowed musicians to travel and live in recreational vehicles. This “RV clause” required zero-interest loans, the payment of a per-diem to offset vehicle costs, and an employer buy-back provision to protect musicians from incurring huge debt if their employment was severed. This was one of many “only on the circus” labor issues; problems with the train car, temperature, animal dander, or transportation from the train to the venue often trumped wages as priority negotiation items.
While the current Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circuses take their final bows, circus entertainment is far from dead. New York’s Big Apple Circus is currently striving to make a return, and Cirque du Soleil has a successful roster of updated traditional European circus shows. And it is not impossible to imagine the Ringling Circus resurrected in some smaller form in the future. What has always differentiated The Greatest Show on Earth is the sheer enormity of its scale—no future entertainment is likely to travel a company of 200-plus workers all over the continent on a mile-long train, for more than 40 weeks a year. Nor is any future production likely to generate hundreds of scores of musical repertoire, or provide a century of continuous musical employment.
The circus as an art form will live on, even as it also moves on and evolves. Still, it will never quite be the Circus.
“It all started when the clowns gave him a mohawk,” the email began.
Not the usual message a union representative receives from a musician, but then nothing about the circus is usual. Former circus musician and union steward Donald Parker recounts the curious incident, circa 2004, which lead to his famous opening line:
“The circus was in Dallas at the United Center. We had a general manager (GM) who thought he could do whatever he wanted, and walk all over us. One of the musicians did get a mohawk haircut from one of the clowns, and the GM wanted to discipline him and pull him off the show because of his appearance. I told the GM he could do that, but he would still have to pay him because we didn’t have an appearance clause in our contract. The GM took issue with that, which really made the rest of the band mad.
“That night we set up a barber station outside our train car, and all nine of us in the band got a mohawk. Then we went down to a show party the GM was throwing, and proceeded to mingle and socialize as it nothing was different. We really wanted to shake him up and get under his skin. After the party, we all came back and shaved the rest of our hair off so the management couldn’t complain about our appearance on the bandstand. We shaved our heads in solidarity—and oppressive management was our best organizing tool!”
Thanks to Mike Montgomery (Windjammers Unlimited, Inc.), Mark Heter, Paul Celentano, and The Ringling Circus Museum for their research assistance in the preparation of these stories.
A study from the University of Montreal published in Brain and Cognition showed that musical training leads to faster reactions times. In the study, 16 musicians who played piano, violin, percussion, and cello and had started learning as children were compared to 19 nonmusicians. The subjects clicked a mouse every time they sensed a vibration or noise. The musicians performed an average of 30% better than those not trained in music.
Study lead author Simon Landry says the results suggest long-term musical training reduces simple nonmusical auditory, tactile, and multisensory reaction times. Possible implications are that musicians make better drivers and that musical training later in life could benefit older people whose reaction times naturally tend to get slower.
“It was a really confusing and fantastic thing to watch. There was this huge crowd of people and speeches. And what really hit me was the music—Mahalia Jackson; Marian Anderson; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Bob Dylan [of Local 802 (New York City)]; and Joan Baez. I had never heard folk music before. It was old, but really urgent, and it was connected to something going on in the world.”
Three years later, McCutcheon’s father bought him his first guitar, a Silvertone from Sears. “That began the long downhill slide into professional musicianship,” laughs McCutcheon. The 14-year-old immediately went to the public library and checked out Woody Guthrie Folk Songs, thinking it was a guitar instruction book, and methodically began learning each song. “I was singing ‘Union Made,’ but I had no idea what it was about,” he concedes.
Ironically, McCutcheon’s first gig, just two weeks later, was a Labor Day picnic for the local paper mill union. The neighbor who hired him wasn’t concerned when McCutcheon told him he only knew three songs, but he did require McCutcheon learn one new tune: “Solidarity Forever.”
Through most of the picnic no one seemed to notice the young musician, but when it came time to play that tune, everyone stopped talking, stood up, joined hands, and sang together. “I was flabbergasted!” says McCutcheon. “It was the first crack in the door connecting the principles that I was seeing and the songs I was singing; the song connected real people, in real life, and it moved them to do things.”
“Back then, people were from union families and it was cradle to grave. You just instinctively sided with the guys who were out on strike,” he recalls.
He soon realized the connection between the labor unions and the Civil Rights Movement, his very first inspiration. “When Martin Luther King marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, he was flanked by union guys. At the march on Washington, there were union people all over the dais. It was one great social movement,” says McCutcheon.
From that first union gig, he was hooked, beginning a lifetime of dedication to activism through music. “I wanted that to happen again and I also wanted to have the feeling that I was helpful—doing something that wasn’t just about me,” he says.
“I spent a long time working with different unions,” says McCutcheon. “In this line of work, we [musicians] have it pretty easy. I’m very aware that the hard work gets done by the people I’m coming to sing for. I constantly think about what I can do to help. And that ends up being, not only singing for them, but turning their stories into songs and singing them to other people.”
“Being part of the labor movement for my entire career, and especially being involved with the AFM, helped me keep the sentiment that it’s not just about me,” he says.
One of the founders of “traveling musicians” Local 1000, McCutcheon explains the idea for that local came from musicians at the annual Great Labor Arts Exchange in Silver Spring, Maryland. “We were telling labor war stories of bravery and resolve of the unions we’d worked with and Charlie King said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we felt that way about our union?’”
“At the time, the AFM essentially didn’t know that people who do our kind of work existed,” McCutcheon explains. “We traveled; we weren’t part of a big ensemble or collective bargaining agreement.”
A group of similar AFM members got together and formed what they called the New Deal Committee to explore the idea. A few years later, at another Great Labor Arts Exchange, someone asked then AFM President Martin Emerson about the possibility of forming their own local. “He didn’t shoot
it down; we started talking and eventually got chartered,” says McCutcheon.
“I remember talking to my buddy John O’Connor, who was the first Local 1000 president,” McCutcheon says. The pair came to a quick realization that they were agitators, not bureaucrats. “That’s when we began learning how to be a local. Local 1000 would never have thrived without the mentorship and help of Local 802.”
“The idea caught on. We were able to open up access to a pension plan through some very creative means via the LS-1 contract,” he says.
McCutcheon was Local 1000 president for 15 years, and now serves on the board of his home local in Atlanta. “Our union has gone through some rough times, but it’s headed in the right direction; I’m really enthusiastic about it,” he says, adding, “We’ve got a lot of myths to break down because the union has changed tremendously in the past 30 years.”
McCutcheon has written hundreds of songs, and released 37 solo albums, resulting in seven Grammy nominations. Among other projects were tributes to some of the people who inspired him, among them Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill. In creating the album This Land: Woody Guthrie’s America, Woody’s daughter gave him complete access to Guthrie’s papers, including never finished songs.
A DVD (and CD) project, Joe Hill’s Last Will, is a one-man play written by Local 1000 member Si Kahn. McCutcheon portrays labor songwriter Hill in the final hours of his life.
McCutcheon’s songs are often sparked by events in the news or happenings in his life. “I’m not writing to have a song, or even to finish anything. The more I write, the more I understand that there’s a part of you that you don’t know; it’s wonderful to explore that area.”
“Songs can transport you to another place, help you forget your world or dive you deeper into your world; they can fill you with awe, or rage, or inspiration,” he says. “They move hips and hearts, and sometimes mountains.”
His 38th album, Trolling for Dreams, will be released
February 3. Begun as a collection of earlier songs that never made it onto albums, there’s also some new material. Among the inspirations were a road trip he took with his father who was ascending into Alzheimer’s; his son’s wedding; and a perilous illness last year.
McCutcheon regularly plays more than 15 different instruments. He travels with a hammered dulcimer, 12-string and six-string guitars, banjo, autoharp, and fiddle, plus a piano is waiting at every gig. “I was taught by amazing teachers who never realized they were giving me lessons,” he explains.
While in college, McCutcheon convinced his advisor to let him do an independent study to learn banjo from musicians in the Southern Appalachians. “It was a three-month independent study that I’m still on 45 years later. I went off thinking I was learning how to put my fingers in the right place, and all of a sudden, it was about everything—the context of the music, the community that fosters the music, and the music that sustains the community. I fell in love with the region, the land, the people, the music, and the food.”
At McCutcheon’s shows you will hear a combination of original tunes, labor tunes, traditional songs, classic folk songs, and a healthy dose of storytelling. At first, he had no idea the storytelling would become such a big part of his show.
“Stories are like connective tissue,” he says. “I would tell stories to recreate the environment in which I learned a song, or wrote a song, so the audience could sort of climb inside a little easier.” He soon discovered that his audiences craved the storytelling.
He says “This Land Is Your Land” is always an audience favorite, especially after the contentious election. “It feels like people are yearning for a sense of connection.” The song brings him back to the paper mill workers picnic all those years ago. “It captures an audience in a way that is reflexive, unexpected, and all of a sudden they feel connected to one another.”
“I look for those moments that are unexpected and surprise you with their power,” he says. “I was surprised at 11 years old, hearing those songs, but I didn’t know my life was going to be changed by it.”
Eager to encourage young singer-songwriters, McCutcheon hosts Songwriting Camps at the Highlander Center in east Tennessee—a place that holds special meaning to him. It’s where Martin Luther King heard ‘We Shall Overcome’ for the first time, and it was the initial stop on McCutcheon’s “independent study” program. “I fell in love with this group of people who were activists from all over the Appalachian Mountains, and all of a sudden, the whole region opened up for me in a very real way,” he says.
Largely due to technology he sees a bright future for young folk musicians. “There’s a whole old-time music scene of people that can play rings around the rest of us because they grew up with it,” he says. “The Internet exposes kids to music from around the world and the stuff becomes a mash-up. That’s cool and exciting to see!”
“The dream that fueled me all those years working in a leadership position at Local 1000 is the notion that young musicians will not only find a home within the union, but help to direct it so it morphs to accommodate them. They are full of great ideas, and if we give them the foundation in unionship, we can learn from them and they can learn from us,” he says.
Viv Albertine, lead guitarist of The Slits, offers a rare look back at the 1970s punk scene through a female perspective, capturing the historical importance of punk in a way few books have done. Told in her unabashedly honest and irreverent voice, Clothes … Music … Boys doesn’t shy away from tales of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, as she reflects on defining punk fashion, struggling to find her place among the boys, and her romance with Mick Jones. She also includes an honest account of her post-punk life.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir, by Viv Albertine, Thomas Dunne Books, A Division of St. Martin’s
While Led Zeppelin did win the copyright war over “Stairway to Heaven,” it will not be compensated for its $800,000 in legal fees. In the ruling Judge R. Gary Klausner found that the copyright lawsuit against the band was not frivolous and that there was no indication that the plaintiff “harboured nefarious motives.” The plaintiff, trustee of the late Randy Wolfe (aka Randy California), had claimed that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had lifted the introduction to “Stairway to Heaven” from an obscure instrumental that Wolfe wrote.
