The modern music industry is constantly adapting, especially for musicians looking to break through to the next level.
It’s challenging to be a freelance artist, but the current scene can be advantageous because of the accessibility to produce songs at home or release them online, jazz saxophonist Jimmy Farace said.
“Nowadays, you can put it out and reach a much wider audience. So it's really helpful, I think, for me to think that, like there's no ceiling, there's no cap, I can go for it," he said. "Now, it's really hard because there's a lot of content out there, so to cut through the noise, you have to put in a lot of hard work to get heard.”
Farace’s debut album “Hours Fly, Flowers Die,” focuses on themes of nostalgia and is inspired by poet Henry Van Dyke’s poem “For Katrina’s Sundial.”
As a jazz musician and professor at Chicago’s Merit School of Music, Farace sees common threads and inspiration in many other genres.
“If you think about country or bluegrass, it comes from the same roots, which is blues, right?" he said. "You think about how that progressed to rock and roll, this is again coming out of blues, so almost like we can think of an evolutionary tree. We're coming from the same ancestor.”
But there's a fine line when it comes to inspiration. Even when not meaning to, it can be easy to end up with a piece that sounds close to another artist's existing song and has to be changed or requires licensing options, Farace said.
"There are only 12 notes, so there are only so many combinations we can put them together," he said. "Just last week, I sat down at the piano to compose a tune, and I was like, 'Oh, I really like this. Oh, I'm hearing this melody.' I'm writing it down. And then I realized, I was like, I just wrote down (jazz composer) Chick Corea tune 'Windows.' "
Farace is playing a tour over the next couple weeks that includes stops in several cities along the Great Lakes, like Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Cleveland. His tour started Friday with a show at Black Dots record store in Buffalo.
