Interview with T.J Müller
T.J Müller moved from the United Kingdom to St. Louis to play with Pokey LaFarge’s band. In this interview he talks about the traditional jazz scene there, how it is suited to the rooms that it’s played in, and how it adds value to value to the city’s cultural life.
RW: Is this a good time for you to talk?
TJ: Yes, I have a little time before I need to get ready for my show. I was just messing around with an instrument right now called a mellophone, just let me just put it back. It’s weird, it’s a 1920s, French Horn-like instrument I got the other day, and I’ve been messing around with it trying figure out some solos. It’s interesting, but I’ve been wasting too much time on it.
RW: How did you develop a love and aptitude for traditional music? What got the ball rolling that eventually meeting Pokey LaFarge and emigrating to the United States?
TJ: I was born in the south of England. We travelled a lot from parish to parish, the longest period of time we lived in one place was when I was about 10 to 18 years old and we lived in the north. My father was a Church of England vicar and played a lot of traditional music. He was a pianist and a flutist and double bass player. Traditional music was in the house while I was growing up, and I learned a lot of the songs as a child because of him. We had a little family band and played a lot of traditional band numbers on a steam boat—“American Patrol”, “When The Saints Go Marching In”, the basic ones.
When I left for college I got interested in traditional jazz, which had always been my favorite, really, so I established a jazz band where I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland. I developed a connection with pop music and got my name out there as a trumpet player. Some other local bands in the area wanted me to travel with them playing that sort of stuff, so I did some touring in Europe. Eventually we started opening up shows for Pokey LaFarge. He told me he was looking for a horn player so, I gave him a CD and a resume, and he gave me a phone call and email about a month later and offered me a job in his band, so I did the paperwork and visa stuff and took a flight for America, and wound up touring for him for about three years.
RW: Did you have much contact with traditional music fans in Germany or Scandinavia?
TJ: When I was with Pokey we had a huge following in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. We played in Germany a lot. There’s a big scene in traditional music there, and a lot of Americana. I can’t remember if we went to Norway. I think we played in Sweden.
RW: From what you’ve heard from older players, what was the difference between their lives as musicians and those of players today? Do today’s musicians have as many opportunities to play full time, or did musicians always have to have day jobs to make ends meet?
TJ: That’s a good question. I think it changes from genre to genre. In the ‘70s there were all those rock and roll bands, I think that’s really when it changed. The bands started going around in vans and played for less money, hoping to get a record contract. For the jazz guys things have changed. All the old guys I know told me they were working every night of the week back In the ‘60s and ‘70.
RW: I have the idea that people were playing 5 or 6 nights a week with multiple shows in restaurants and dance clubs before amplifiers.
TJ: Right. My friend Bill Mason is 87 years old. They used to have residencies in hotels.
RW: I would imagine that you’re working as much today, but just in a different collection of things. I don’t imagine you’re sitting around at home waiting for the phone to ring. You’re also making videos and teaching.
TJ: You’re right, you have to adapt to the market. I haven’t spent a ton of time on social media, so that’s why I’m working more now on that side of things—putting out videos and photographs, getting the online presence growing, and then I teach as well. I give banjo lessons at the Folk School in town and at my house. I get paid to host a monthly jam session at the school, too, and give group lessons. My next class will be an 8-week course in music of the 1920s. It’s a history and performance class. I do a lot of freelancing for other bands as well.
RW: How do you decide where to put your efforts in social media? Is it based on your audience’s demographics? Are the traditional jazz fans an older crowd that passes information more by word of mouth than Facebook?
TJ: We have an older audience as well as a younger audience, so I’m pretty selective about what I put on social media. I don’t bother to put a lot stuff on what I know the younger people aren’t going to be interested in. I know that they’re not going to want to pay $20 for a show they have to drive a long way to see, so I concentrate my social media on less expensive local ones. There’s another project I’m doing with the Arcadia Dance Orchestra playing 1920s style foxtrot, Charleston, and swing dance music. That’s a slow-burning project which we’re gearing up for that will have just two performances a year. We’re trying to make the social media for that project very regular in order to build interest around the project.
RW: How connected are young people? You said it’s kind of a split between young and old. Are young people getting involved with the banjo jams?
TJ: Increasingly so, really. We get new members of the Banjo Club and Banjo Jams regularly. Most of them are in the 25–50 range.
RW: I’m organizing an online Scott Joplin centennial. I went to Sedalia for their festival and met Bryan Cather from the Joplin House and Friends of Scott Joplin, and when I asked him about the music scene in St. Louis he suggested that I contact you and Pokey. It seemed like the people who went to those concerts were retired, I’m just concerned that if you don’t’ find a way to involve young people the music is going to dry up.
TJ: Right, that’s a very important thing. That’s what we’re pushing for with the Banjo Club, trying to bring it to young people. It’s the same issue with Dixieland and all those traditional jazz festivals. They’re not pulling in young people and will only survive for the next 15 years. What we’re doing here in St. Louis is bringing that traditional music to the audience, trying to meet them in the middle. Young people don’t want to spend a lot of money, and they don’t want to be in sterile environments. One thing we do is to bring the music to where they are, and in a way that they can afford, like the way it used to be. Traditional jazz bands used to be playing in bars in every city in America. It wasn’t just an exclusive thing that you had to pay a lot of money for, it was just part of the fabric of the town. That’s what we’re trying to rebuild here in St. Louis.
RW: That’s interesting. I hadn’t considered the importance of economics and environment, I thought the kids today just want to listen to Katy Perry because that’s what all their friends are listening to and it’s part of pop culture. It’s interesting that you’re also looking at it in terms of how much money they have to spend, and where they want to be sitting when they listen.
TJ: Oh, absolutely. The environment is everything. So many things in popular culture are artificial. Everything gets digitized and cleaned up. When people see something that’s authentic, I think they respond positively to it. When they go into a bar on the corner and the bar has hardwood floors and there’s a guy playing a real upright piano, and not like a little small one, but a great big upright grand piano playing Joplin rags without sheet music, and they can just sit there and enjoy something authentic, I think people really do respond to that. It’s so vastly different from everything else they are experiencing, and seems special and interesting. Then you can tell them, that on top of that, it isn’t a bizarre thing, it’s something that belongs to the city. We’re not introducing something foreign or weird here, we’re just maintaining it. If you nurture it it can grow, it still has room to grow. It doesn’t have to be a weird thing, it should just be part of the town.
RW: Is anyone there writing new music in that style or doing anything else to bring it into the 21st century? In Sedalia I heard someone say that more ragtime music has been written after that era than during it.
TJ: That’s interesting. Do you know Trebor Tichenor’s work? He wrote a lot of that sort of music.
RW: Yes, he has passed away, and his daughter Virginia is carrying the torch, but I don’t think she composes.
TJ: I don’t think she composes, but she plays her father’s music. I’m good friends with Virginia and her husband Marty. There are some folks in St. Louis composing in traditional styles. Kellie Everett writes tunes in a 1920s jazz style for the Sydney Street Shakers, a band that I play in from time to time. Her songs are great.
RW: When I first heard your name, I imagined that you were an old German guy who brought a love of old time music from the Old Country. I was completely wrong about you, and surprised to see all the young players in your videos. How do you recruit players for your groups? Do most of them already know the music, and have day jobs?
TJ: My group The Gaslight Squares is usually just a quartet. The banjo/guitar player, Jacob Alspach, is like me. He’s into this music and a full-time musician like me and freelances and teaches and knew all the material by memory. He was a perfect candidate. The piano player, Matt Sellers has been listening to this music since he was 10 years old. He isn’t a full-time musician, he has his own business. He’s a very interesting guy that buys, repairs, refurbishes, and sells antique pianos.
RW: Pokey is considered to be a musician in the Americana genre, and one of his songs is called “Getting High On Central Time”. What do you think is special about the Midwest music scene and the opportunities for musicians here?
TJ: One thing that I would say that I noticed with Pokey and his rapid success was that St. Louis is very centralized. It’s cheap to travel from St. Louis to lots of places. When I first joined the band, I was interested in that as well, why St. Louis was such a good location for touring bands. I found this chart that showed how much money it cost to get from St. Louis to different places, with the various prices shown in different colors. For $80 you could get to Chicago or Memphis, for $90 you could get to New Orleans, it seemed so cheap to travel to all these places. In a few hours you’re in the deep South, or going through Nashville on your way to the East, or go to Oklahoma and Texas. You can get to those paces so quickly and hit lots of major cities on the way that are great places to stop. As a working musician, I’ve found it very appealing. Being centralized you get to see other bands stopping by from the touring world.
My personal experience as a freelance musician in the town of St. Louis is that you can’t come here and make a living playing traditional jazz. You have to hustle and be very imaginative. At the same time, there’s lots of space to make your own way. The competition isn’t huge, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a double-edged sword.
RW: It’s always been that way in St. Louis being a rail and river hub. That’s why jazz developed there. The means of transportation have changed, but you’re still in the center.
TJ: Exactly. I’m right by the river. I’ve been working In the summertime on Mississippi riverboat cruises. My wife drops me off, I take a banjo and play 1920s riverboat music on the cruises for a few days, and then they drop me back off in St. Louis. It’s really useful being on the river.
RW: That’s cool that some of the Mississippi culture is still going.
Do you think breweries and wineries are more conducive to traditional and acoustic music than bars? If so, is it because they cater to a more mature clientele—people who more likely to want to carry on a conversation than hook up? How important are people like Tom Schlafly (Schlafly Bottleworks, Schlafly Beer), Mike Willerton (Kirkwood Station), and Chris and Lisa Lorch (Sugar Creek Winery)? Do they have an interest in supporting the music beyond just selling drinks and food? Are they nurturing it?
TJ: Oh, man, Schlafly has been great to us! He books so many great bands. Schlafly now hosts the St. Louis Banjo Club once a month, and they give us this whole huge room to perform and hang out in with our own bar, our own little stage area, all the amenities we need, a huge parking log. Schlafly has been so good for that. He especially nurtures the old school acoustic American music atmosphere. They’ve been great. I’m biased, but I think acoustic music works best in that environment. If you want to engage with it you can. You can enjoy the performance, but it’s not loud, it can be background music. You can half listen to it, or be completely engaged, or dance to it. It can be whatever you want it to be.
RW: Music has always evolved with the spaces where it was played. The long reverb tails of single line Gregoria's chant sound best in rock-walled cathedrals. The sound of the harpsichord projected well in the small rooms of Baroque palaces. When auditoriums grew larger to accommodate the growing number of middle class ticket buyers, the same technological advances in cast iron steel that allowed balconies to spam wider spaces was used in the frames of grand pianos, whose increased volume was thenable to fill the larger room. Rick Kinney talks in another of this book’s interview about his vision of renovating a movie theatre to create a room where a standing audience of 2000 can supply the right energy to inspire a high-energy rock band playing through a powerful sound system. What you mentioned about the hardwood floors being so well-suited to acoustic music makes me realize how much the architecture is connected with the acoustics and the listener’s experience. There are so many charming historic buildings in the Midwest and others ripe for renovation, and the rooms are on the right scale. You can fill one up with the sound of an upright piano, something you can’t do in bar that has low ceilings, carpet, and couches.
TJ: Exactly. It’s great to play the music in these spaces where the building was designed for that purpose. When you put the pieces together properly it works so much better than if you try to put the music in the wrong environment.
RW: And traditional jazz evolved to fit that. There are little breaks in the music, solos, and ebb and flow so that people can be talking with each other, but there are appropriately placed changes in the form of the song that hook their attention, keep them engaged, and keep things “lively”.
TJ: Absolutely! If you listen to early 20th century jazz records you’ll notice that quite often the band will drop out when the piano solo starts, maybe with a little bit of light cymbal work behind it. When you do that in a quiet concert environment it’s a cool effect, but it’s not necessary. In the places where we play, if we don’t do that, then the piano player can’t hear their solo enough, and the band can’t, and the audience can’t. If the band drops out, you can hear the piano loud and clear. You really see why the music was designed the way it was.
RW: And then the listener’s ears perk up because suddenly you’re hearing that little cymbal going along in a new combination in such a teasing way.
I think the future of music in a post-industrial age is not going to be about making hit songs, but rather serving amateurs and facilitating their participation. You’re working at the Folk School in St. Louis. How important do you think banjo clubs, ukulele orchestras, bands, choirs, and other types of community music groups are going to be in the future? How much time to you spend helping people participate as compared to providing a sit-back listening experience?
TJ: Quite a lot. The jam session I host every month is mostly amateurs. The lessons I teach are all for beginners, and Banjo Club is for hobbyists. There are some musicians, but it’s meant for everyone. It refers back to what I was saying about being authentic. Learning an instrument as a hobby, just for fun, is just such a wonderful thing to do. Being able to play an instrument is a real skill that you can keep and be proud of, something that you can work on and grow. But it’s also something that isn’t necessary for entertainment anymore. You don’t need to have someone in the family who knows how to play the piano in the parlor anymore in order to be able to listen to music in the evenings. It’s hard these day to convince people to learn to play an instrument for fun.
RW: Most kids don’t have the attention span necessary to put in the time needed to the get over the initial hump of frustration. to get to a point on an instrument where they can then play it for fun.
TJ: There are so many other options now. If you were a kid in the 1930s you could go to the movie pictures for fun, ride your bike, play outside, there were a few options, but it’s not like today. Kids now have an endless variety of options just with an iPad. There is no reason to look up from that. There are a million things to do on that one screen.
RW: They’ve also designed it to be addicting to the point where you become anxious if you don’t keep check in. One hopeful sign is the idea that we seem to be moving towards an experience economy, perhaps in part because we’re so starved for authentic experience to balance out all the time spent with electronic devices. The theorists behind that say that economies move through a series of stages, starting with undifferentiated commodities, and then on through branded products to services, experiences, and in the end, transformation. It sounds like the old time music scene is moving away from products like CDs to live performance services, memorable experiences, and the transformational process of learning to play music.
TJ: Sure. I’ve been part of the band-as-business model, where you make your record, do the promo, sell the record, tour the record, and then you repeat that cycle and try to get bigger. My focus in the last couple of years has changed. First, I’m married, and need a little income to pay rent. I’m trying to keep my head above the water, so I am making earning money a priority for me and my wife. But I decided with music, for me, it’s not about personal success. I want to do something that I feel is valuable. It doesn’t matter if a lot of people know what I’m doing, it should be valuable for the community, to improve the cultural value of the city that I’m in. For me, the most important thing is that I know that every week, sometimes every day, I am producing some music of St. Louis, and playing it in such a way that it can be an option for everyone in the city, so that if they want to hear traditional music in the city they live in, they can. To me that’s important enough to keep doing it. Some people are spending their time trying to preserve the old buildings of the city. I think that for me, and my friends and fellow musicians, preserving traditional St. Louis music is part of that maintenance of traditional St. Louis culture, and I think it adds a lot of value to our city.
RK: I was going to ask if you would consider moving to a bigger market, but it sounds like you’ve found the perfect place, since so much of the music you identify with originated there and is an organic part of the community. It doesn’t seem like It would be a good question now, if I’ve been paying attention.
TJ: Right now, there aren’t many of us doing this. If it ever gets to the point where a lot of people pick it up and I could feel like I’d managed to recruit enough people to the cause, I’d consider moving. First and foremost, I’m married, and my wife and her family are from St. Louis. If I wasn’t making any semblance of making a living here, the question would be whether to move to a bigger market or retrain.
RW: Could you see moving up river to Chicago in 25 years?
TJ: If I felt like traditional music in St. Louis would keep on growing without me—and I am not being arrogant or anything, it’s just that there’s not a ton of us right now, there are just a couple of bands—but if I felt there was somebody who’d take my place, I’d maybe consider it. But not a place like New York, probably more like New Orleans where there is a lot of enthusiasm for traditional music, and a lot of players.
RW: Do you think that the audience for traditional music in St. Louis is more for locals than it is in New Orleans? I suppose there it’s much more of a tourist scene.
TJ: Right. I certainly agree with that. There isn’t a big tourist industry in St. Louis, and so I think our working musicians consider it to be something for the audience who lives here.
RW: Thank you so much for your time. I’ll let you go, I know you have to get ready for work. Best of luck with everything. You’re smart, articulate, and dedicated, and I believe you’re going to do well. Congratulations, and I wish you all the best luck.
TJ: Thank you so much. If you ever come to St. Louis, send me an email, and I’ll let you know about any shows that are coming up.
RW: Great! Thank you very much for all the information, and have a great day.
TJ: Absolutely. It was great talking with you.
RW: Take it easy.
TJ: Bye bye.
©2017 T.J Müller and Robert Willey