Ah, the musician's life: playing with your friends every night, staying in cushy hotels, traveling all over the world. Who wouldn't find it exciting?
Well, your spouse, for one — and your children, too, if you have any. While you're prancing from stage to stage, they're back home cleaning their teeth, lying in bed with chicken pox, or complaining about eating their vegetables. Stretch that out for several weeks or months, and it begins to look less and less like a formula for domestic bliss.
What can you do? Give up, grab a briefcase, and get a real job? That won't work, either. If music is your obsession, spending eight hours a day in a cubicle won't necessarily make you a cheerier mom or dad when you get home.
If anyone has shown he understands how to combine those demanding and contradictory ways of life, it's Avery Sharpe. Not because he's toured and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny, Archie Shepp, and Art Blakey. Not because he's been a member of McCoy Tyner's band for more than 20 years. Not even because he's done all that while staying happily married to his high school sweetheart and helping raise their four children to young adulthood.
No, Avery gets the nod because of an ambitious recording project that specifically addresses that very subject. It began in 1994 with his album Extended Family, which celebrated the lessons he learned as one of eight children raised by the kind of parents most people wish they had. The following year brought Extended Family II: Thoughts of My Ancestors, which examined how the contributions of previous generations continue to enrich people's experiences. Extended Family III: Family Values, released this past October on his own JKNM label, brings it all home. The latest chapter reflects on everything that's right about families. It does so in a multitude of musical settings ranging from solo acoustic bass to large-form ensemble and choral works.
So he's not only lived it but he's also turned the competing and often conflicting demands of fatherhood, being there for his wife, and living on the road into a work of art.
LAYING THE FOUNDATION
First, I'll be clear: Sharpe is now and always has been a traveling musician, so it's not a question of taking local jobs. From the time he began playing gigs away from home, he's traveled as many as 10 out of every 12 months. Even now he's typically away at least half the time, six months or more each year. Maybe if he'd moved to New York from his longtime Massachusetts digs, he could have survived doing sessions and been home in time for supper. But that's not his style.
Sharpe decided to stay in New England for the sake of his family. “Probably I should have moved to New York, for career reasons,” he says. “It was hard for me to drive back and forth, four hours each way. But I decided that the only way I could be on the road in good conscience was to have my family around my brothers and sisters and my mother and father. It's a nice environment, and the cost of living is more reasonable. So I decided to put the pressure more on myself than on my family. After all,” he says, laughing, “they're stable; I'm the crazy one.”
Sharpe is actually a meticulous thinker. While attending the University of Massachusetts as an economics major (with a music minor), he mapped out a plan based on a realistic self-assessment. His two great loves were his wife, whom he married before graduation, and music. Each was indispensable; there had to be a way to keep both in his life.
Honesty turned out to be the key. “It wasn't like I came home from the office one day and said, ‘Honey, I want to be a jazz musician,’” he says. “Ever since we were in high school, she's known that music is what I've always wanted to do. This may not be a good analogy, but if you marry an alcoholic and you think, ‘I'll change him,’ that won't happen. So I've always been clear with her about this: ‘I've made a commitment to what I'm doing, and if you're going to be with me, you must understand that this is not something that will pass.’”
But there was a trade-off. Sharpe realized that he couldn't lay the best foundation for his family as a struggling newbie in music. Certain necessities had to be arranged first: a house, a car, some savings. So he committed the first three and a half years of his marriage to working full-time as a claims adjuster for an insurance company. He was also there as father and husband. In his spare time, he pursued a graduate degree in music and practiced his instrument.
“I was averaging about four hours a night,” he says. Four hours of practice? “No,” he says, laughing. “Four hours of sleep.”
LONG-DISTANCE DAD
After fulfilling his promise to put his family on a solid footing, Sharpe quiLY:e insurance job and made the big leap into music. Almost immediately, he confronted major lifestyle choices. “I didn't know what it would be like to be a musician until I was actually doing it,” Sharpe says. “I hadn't even thought of the uncertainty of it: you don't know where you're going to be working in ten months or whether you'll be working at all.”
Separation from his loved ones quickly became an issue as well. When he was offered a pit-band gig for a nine-month European tour with a Broadway company, Sharpe was so apprehensive that he sought advice from his mother. “You know, your father used to be away, because he was in the Air Force when you were younger,” she told Sharpe. “It made a difference, but you didn't miss him, because of the way he dealt with it. He always made his presence felt.”
Sharpe became diligent about staying in his children's lives during long absences. “My phone bill was off the hook,” he says, laughing. “I'd always call on their birthdays. If they were playing in a big game, I'd call after it was over to see how it went. There was no e-mail at that time, but I'd fax them from Japan or wherever I was, and I sent letters all the time. There were lots of little things I did just to let folks know I was there.”
QUALITY TIME
Equally important was how Sharpe spent his time when he came back from a tour. “Cats would say to me, ‘Man, when you go home, don't you chill out?’ I'd be like, ‘No, that's when my real gig starts: husband and father.’ When I'd come home from the road, I'd pick up the slack: she'd have to give me the schedule for running the kids around, because I wouldn't know what she had set up, but I'd pretty much take over. I mean, if I'd been at home while someone was away, I'd want them to do that for me when they got home.
“It's a rough road,” Sharpe says. “That's why I said to my wife, ‘If you're not ready for this, then maybe you shouldn't be on board, because this is something I have to do — or at least try to do.’ I've always felt that if you've got that passion for music, you've got to at least try to be a musician. To not try, and to always have that question ‘What if?’ there, that's when people go off, slap their husbands or wives, kick the dog, whatever. You've got to at least try. Even if you don't accomplish what you want, the fact that you tried makes you successful.”
