I'm Adam Manus, and I'm Peter Martin, and you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast.

Today we're going to talk about something kind of different for us.

It's a discussion on how long should you try to be a jazz musician before you give up. Now, Peter, you wrote out this topic, and this must have been on your mind. What brought this up? Well, I almost gave up the other day, and I looked at the calendar and counted back the years to when I started being a jazz musician. I was like, ooh, can I muster another day, day by day?

See, folks, you can be playing up the White House one day and then wanting to give up the next. Right. No, but this is a good thing because jazz is hard. It's hard to play, and the business is hard. Yep. And you have to be thick-skinned and you have to be dedicated. So this is a good question. Yeah. And it's actually a question that I've never thought of myself,

but I have gotten it from students and even, you know,

we're all students in this music because it's difficult,

but even older folks or whatever, like, oh, should I just give up or whatever?

And so I wanted to try to address it, and hopefully we'll have some inspiring words or some

informational things that will help everyone on their jazz journey.

Yeah, no, this is important to me, too, because, you know, I kind of took a step away from

jazz in my musical career to write songs and play more pop music and stuff like that.

And I never totally went away from it.

I always kept something up. And now as I'm in my 30s, my late 30s, and I'm starting to get back

into it, I'm so glad that I didn't give it up totally that I kept with it because it's so rewarding

the longer you stay with it, you know, as an art form. Right, right. And I think it's important

that we have a

little bit of healthy separation between the professional side, the business side of being a jazz

musician, and then just the, how you identify yourself within this art form as a jazz musician. And I

would say, to answer the question of how long before giving up, I would say never

for anybody. And I don't care what your skill level is. I don't care if you've never made a penny

playing this music or if you're making a million dollars a month playing it. If you consider yourself a

jazz musician at one time, I think you should never give that up, no matter what life is throwing

...