In my first year of college, in Elmira, New York, back in the early '80s, a friend and I used to slip into a hole-in-the-wall rock club near campus. Most nights blur together now, but one doesn't. A band I'd never heard of — whose name I've long since lost — played a rendition of a Spooky Tooth song that stopped me cold. It wasn't a cover. It was theirs. If I could find a recording of it today, I'd book a plane ticket in a heartbeat just to feel that again.

I never will. I suspect most of those musicians have passed on by now, the club is probably long gone, and whatever made that night what it was existed only in that room, for the people who happened to be in it.

That's the thing about live music at its best — it isn't just a song. It's a group of people deciding, in real time, that they're going to make a piece of music their own. That used to be the whole premise of rock and roll. It's still the entire premise of jazz.

Last December, I saw Oz Noy and Dave Weckl play Dazzle — a small nightclub in Denver, maybe a couple hundred seats. And for two hours, I got that feeling back. Musicians of that caliber, in a room that small, taking songs apart and putting them back together their own way. It reminded me of exactly what live music used to feel like everywhere, not just on the nights you got lucky.

The fact that it felt rare is the point. Forty years ago, that kind of night wasn't an event — it was Tuesday. Now it's something you remember for months.

What Happened to All the Gigs

I've been playing guitar for nearly fifty years. From 2002 to 2007, I had a band called Funk Shui, and for those five years we had a real, if modest, calendar — Taste of Colorado, community festivals, the Denver Aquarium, Dazzle, corporate events, and our share of weddings. We played originals off our album True, alongside hardcore funk and R&B built to get a room dancing.

I want to be honest about what that actually was, though, because I think the honesty matters more than the nostalgia. We didn't play a lot of gigs. I certainly wasn't making a living at it — who could afford to? I hired professional musicians for those shows who were genuinely happy to walk away with $100 each for a night of work. That was the real economics of it, even then, even in what I'd now call the better years.

So when I say most of that has disappeared, I don't mean a middle-class living in music vanished, because it was never really there to begin with, not for musicians like us. What's disappeared is something else: the variety of rooms willing to let a band play its own thing and get paid something for the trouble. The festivals, the corporate gigs, the club dates built around original material — those have thinned out considerably. What's left, almost entirely, are the gigs that come with a script.

Most musicians I know are glad to get wedding work, at least for a while. A lot of them also play churches, regardless of their own religious affiliation, because a church gig is steady and it pays. Some, if they're willing to be gone for weeks at a time, play cruise ships. All of it is real work, and none of it is nothing.

But all of it comes with the same condition: you play what's on the menu, and you cook it the way the boss wants it cooked. A wedding client wants their song, their way, on their timeline. A church wants what serves the service. A cruise line wants what keeps the room comfortable. None of it is unreasonable — it's what the gig is. But it's a different thing entirely from a band getting to stand in a room and make a song its own, which used to be the whole point.

Gone are the days of hearing Charlie Parker reinvent a standard on a given night because that's just what happened when he played it. Gone are the days of catching Led Zeppelin in a small club before anyone had to shout their name from the back row. Gone, too, is the Motown machine that somehow turned assembly-line professionalism into some of the most inventive music of the century. What's left now, mostly, is competent, reliable, paid work — and that's not worth resenting. It's just worth naming honestly for what it is, and isn't.

Patrick's

In 2005, I hand-delivered a promo packet to the bartender at a club in Aurora called Patrick's. Nothing came of it — no call, no follow-up, nothing. I figured that was that.

Then, out of nowhere in the summer of 2006, Patrick himself called. He said he'd just heard about my band, asked where we'd been all this time, and paid us more compliments than we'd heard from a club owner in years. He wanted Funk Shui to open a new jazz series he was putting together — great exposure, he said, a real showcase. The pay was $400 for the night.

We played that Thursday, over July 4th weekend. About half the room was people we'd invited ourselves — which is just the reality of a first booking at a new venue.

A week later, Patrick called again. He said the show had been a catastrophe. Our vocals were off-key, apparently bad enough that his patrons probably wouldn't come back for the rest of the series. When I asked who'd told him this, he said his night manager.

I did what a band trying to build a relationship with a venue does — I offered to make it right. We'd play again, no charge this time, so he could see what we could really do. He agreed. I brought in a genuinely excellent vocalist for the second show.

The night manager found something else to complain about.

We never played Patrick's again. Looking back, I suspect the more experienced bands in town already knew better than to bother — Patrick's had a reputation for not paying well, and the ones who'd been around longer had already learned to stay away. Patrick's doesn't exist anymore.

I don't tell that story because it was unusual. I tell it because it wasn't. Every working musician I know from that era has some version of it — the venue that oversold the opportunity, the vague secondhand complaint, the offer to fix it for free that still wasn't enough. It's a small story. But it's also, in miniature, exactly why so many good musicians eventually decided the wedding gig, or the church gig, or the cruise ship contract, was the better deal. At least there, everyone agrees in advance on what's being cooked.

What's Still True

I won't pretend I have a solution to any of this. The venues that closed aren't coming back, and the industry that replaced steady bar gigs with wedding bookings and background playlists isn't going anywhere either.

What's helped me, honestly, has been narrowing rather than widening. A few years ago I joined the Colorado Jazz Workshop — a group of mostly retired musicians, many of whom have loved jazz and jazz fusion their entire lives, who get together every Tuesday and play straight out of the Real Book. No promoters, no door money, no night managers relaying secondhand complaints. Just musicians, in a room, playing.

Semi-retirement gave me something I didn't have during the Funk Shui years: time to actually study again. I've been taking advanced guitar lessons with Mitch Chmara, and whatever I learn on a given week, I bring straight to Tuesday's group and try it out. It's the closest thing I've found, at this stage of my life, to that feeling from the Elmira club — a small room, players pushing each other, nobody performing for an audience they need to impress.

Building notems came out of the same instinct, in a different form. If the rooms have gotten smaller and rarer, maybe the answer isn't to keep chasing the rooms that used to exist. Maybe it's building smaller, honest spaces — a Tuesday night, a workshop, a place to write down what fifty years of this has actually looked like — for the people who are still doing it for the reason you're supposed to: because a song, played by the right people in the right room, can still stop you cold.

I still don't know the name of that band from Elmira. I think about that sometimes — that something that good could exist for one night, matter enormously to the two or three people who were there, and then just be gone. Maybe that was always the deal with live music. You don't get to keep it. You just get to have been in the room.

Some nights, like at Dazzle this past December, I still get to be in the room. That's more than I expected, and I don't take it for granted.