Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#274: Tony Miceli (Jazz Vibraphonist) (pt. 1 of 2)
Today we release part one of our interview with Tony Miceli. He’s a jazz vibraphonist who has performed and taught all over the world. Under the umbrella of Miceli Music, LLC., he hosts the sites www.tonymiceli.com and www.vibesworkshop.com -- a virtual meeting place and teaching tool with 4,000 student and professional members. Tony is also the co-creator of the World Vibes Congress, a formal gathering of players who share the desire to bring public awareness to the vibraphone. If you want to get a glimpse into what it takes to be a successful working musician, you'll want to hear what Tony has to say! This interview is sponsored by @steveweissmusic
Today we release part one of our interview with Tony Miceli. He’s a jazz vibraphonist who has performed and taught all over the world. Under the umbrella of Miceli Music, LLC., he hosts the sites www.tonymiceli.com and www.vibesworkshop.com -- a virtual meeting place and teaching tool with 4,000 student and professional members. Tony is also the co-creator of the World Vibes Congress, a formal gathering of players who share the desire to bring public awareness to the vibraphone. If you want to get a glimpse into what it takes to be a successful working musician, you'll want to hear what Tony has to say! This interview is sponsored by @steveweissmusic
Hi everyone, Nick Petrella here. This episode is sponsored by Steve Weiss Music, percussion specialist since 1961. If you're looking for a rare piece of sheet music, a specialty gong or anything percussion, Steve Weiss Music will have it. Please visit steveweissmusic. com or click their link in the show notes. That's S-T-E-V-E-W-E-I-S-S music. com our percussion series.
Announcer:Sponsor. Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making Art Work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. Any reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and.
Andy Heise:Nick Petrella. Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise.
Nick Petrella:And I'm Nick Petrella. Tony Miceli is with us today. He's a jazz vibraphonist who has performed and taught all over the world. Under the umbrella of Miceli Music LLC, he hosts the sites TonyMiceli. com and VibesWorkshop. com, a virtual meeting place and teaching tool with 4,000 student and professional members. Tony is also the co-creator of the World Vibes Congress, a formal gathering of players who share the desire to bring public awareness to the vibraphone. His extensive portfolio career includes teaching positions at the University of the Arts, temple University and is a lecturer at the Curtis Institute of Music. We'll have his websites in the show notes so you can learn more about Tony, the vibraphone and more. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our friend Dan Sullivan for connecting us with Tony. Thanks for being on the podcast, tony.
Tony Miceli:Hey, it's great to be here. I'm looking forward to it.
Nick Petrella:Let's start by having you give a thumbnail sketch of your bio from college student to where you are today to where you are today.
Tony Miceli:Okay, so, so, college student I go, so I go to college and I I fall in love with the vibraphone. I hated the timpani, I don't know. I know people love the timpani, so I'm not dissing the timpani, but when I got behind the timpani it did not bring me joy and uh, uh, I just played that for my four years of college. I went to a classical school. So at the end when I did my recital, technically I failed because I didn't do timpani and all the other things. And my teacher went to the other teachers. My teacher was Nick D'Amico, a great, great percussionist, and he said look, he's not going to do any of that, he just wants to do this. And he said, look, he's not going to do any of that, he just wants to do this. You see, he knows how to play this instrument, just pass him. And I passed and I got out of school.
Tony Miceli:To be honest, if we're talking about entrepreneurship and money and all that, a lot of my I got out of school and was playing, was playing down Atlantic City and a lot of that money went up my nose. I'm just saying a waste. When I look back now I just think, oh my God, I can't believe what I did in my 20s. But what's great? Because in your 20s you have your 30s to kind of fix things and you've got to get rolling by your 40s. And if you're not together by your 50s, you have your 30s to kind of fix things and you've got to get rolling by your 40s. And if you're not together by your 50s you're in a trailer house somewhere doing it. But I got out of school and I just wanted to play vibes and I hustled and hustled and got gigs and was doing plenty of stuff and never was worried about about anything, a career or anything, just wanted to play and found the places to play. And then I remember, if we fast forward through all that every 10 years, things change, have changed. For me so it was. It was jazz clubs and then all of a sudden corporate parties and that kind of stuff where you can really make good money, especially back in the day, and I switched to that and jazz clubs, and then all that kind of died down and then we had the 9-11. And for a jazz musician for all musicians, but for a jazz musician everything just died and our whole way of playing, which was get paid and play kind of went down the tubes because all the gigs shut down and, like a lot of musicians, you just want to play. So next thing I know is we were playing for the door after 9-11 because how could clubs pay us when people were not coming out? But we wanted to play, so we weren't making money.
Tony Miceli:And I actually went to my dad, who was a successful businessman. I said I want to do this, I love technology, I want to do this thing and start making a website around music and I did something called Larry's Improv Page and then he said how much do you need? And I said I need $30,000. He gave me $30,000 to buy cameras back then which were much more expensive than now. Oh yeah, learn how to use all the technology. And that's when I started Vive's Workshop and that enabled me to play around the world because people heard me around the world. So that was my kind of change once again, and now I'm 63, and I'm kind of figuring out now what happens next.
Tony Miceli:I do a lot of teaching. I teach at UArts Temple and University of Southern Mississippi. I haven't done anything at Curtis in a few years, which is a drag because the teachers get paid well at Curtis. And now I'm just sitting here, I have a video studio, audio studio and just trying to keep it all afloat from, I guess, my last chapter. So you're basically adapted.
Tony Miceli:If you play vibes, you know, I always think there's utility instruments. If you play bass as a utility instrument, you're going to work. You can have no personality, you can not hustle at all, you can sit by the phone and if you play good, you're going to work. If you play vibes and you sit by the phone. And if you play good, you're going to work. If you play vibes and you sit by the phone, unless you're warren wolf or somebody. You know one of those guys. So, uh, I had to hustle, I had to hustle and do this and it was hard, it was a struggle and it's it's still kind of a struggle, but uh, it was worth it because I just the instrument. I love playing it. It's great.
Andy Heise:And so I saw you recently released a new album with David Friedman called Sunset Glow.
Tony Miceli:Can you tell us a little bit about that project. Yeah, that came out of Vibes Workshop, because when I started doing Vibes Workshop in the beginning, all these people started showing up and I saw Mallet man and this guy named Mallet man was on the site every single day. So I went in and looked and the email was GaryBurtoncom and he was just coming to hang out and he loved the site. So it was him. And then after him I saw David Freeman who used his name. I thought was great, and I talked gary burton into switching his handle to his name because I thought every time you're on, you know 10 students are going to run to their instruments to practice, so you can be aspiring.
Tony Miceli:Um, david friedman came on and then I did a workshop in the Netherlands and David came out and we played together and it just felt like for me everything I've learned in my life led to that moment when I played with David where I kind of felt like I kind of hung with him, like I could do it. I wasn't in his way, because two vibraphones can be awful, sure you know two, what three, three octave instruments with eight mallets can be a disaster. And I just learned some things from this guitarist and we played and I had my, I had a new best friend, I had a new mentor and I had a new partner to do this thing with two vibes, which incidentally was double image in the beginning, and they switched from two vibes to vibes in marimba, which I thought was interesting. And then we played together for the next 13 years and would get together whenever one of us was in the other country and rehearse and play, and so we made our first cd a few years ago. It's 4052 miles is the name of the cd, something like that.
Tony Miceli:And then we were sitting on this one um, and I was waiting. We did it before covid and I was waiting for uh Malatek to put it out. And the one thing you learn when you're dealing with any business any business is everything takes four times as long. It's just you know where you sit in the pecking order. So I just said to Lee I said Lee, I want to put this out myself, and I just did it because it never would have gone out. And I just said I have an hour, I'm going to set up band camp, I'm going to put this on and I'm going to start. So at least it's somewhere Sure Right and then I can figure out iTunes and the other stuff and I don't expect we're going to make a lot of money off it but I just I'm proud of it and I wanted to make sure it was out there.
Andy Heise:Yeah, yeah you know go ahead indy. No, I just say that that's amazing, that that whole story is is is amazing and thinking about sort of the nexus of that, was you putting together the website and bringing vibraphones together yes, or then the the.
Tony Miceli:The catalyst for the whole thing was my dad, because if he wouldn't have given me that money, I didn't have money. I didn't have that and he did it. And actually when I first started putting a music website up, it was a little more wider scope than Vi's workshop. I did it myself. So I learned PHP, I learned MySQL, I learned HTML, I learned MySQL, I learned HTML and I would build this site. But I went on there once and I looked on the page and my page was gone and it was all porn. So somebody got on there, hacked it and put all these dirty pictures up. I was like okay, and I fixed it back up again. And then a few months later there's the Turkish flag on my site. So somebody got in and back then you hacked somebody's site and you just did a prank, right.
Tony Miceli:And there was a percussionist His name is Stephen Hambright and he was just following my stuff and he liked the way I play vibes and he was a good percussionist, played in Radio City Hall for a bunch of years. And he was a good percussionist, played in Radio City Hall for a bunch of years, and he wrote me and he saw all this and he said hey, you're a good Vi player, but you don't know what you're doing with the programming I do. Let me do it, let's get it going. And then we started with a software called Drupal and we made Vi's Workshop, drupal, and we made Vize Workshop. So without my dad and without Steven, it wouldn't be where it is now. I don't think.
Nick Petrella:And what I was going to say about the publishing, whether it's a book or recording. When you do it yourself and this is one of the things I talk with students you're going to be pushing it. When you give it to a publisher or a company, you're one of thousands, right, and if you don't push it, it's not going to get some traction.
Tony Miceli:Especially if you're not at you know, you have to just think about where am I on this person's list? You know, like Lee Stevens has this, where am I on his list and I love Lee Stevens. But this is reality. And you just start going. You know what, I'm way I on his list and I love Lee Stevens. But this is reality. And you just start going, you know what, I'm way down on his list and I always tell students the same thing and I say start now, because I started late and when I put stuff out myself I don't have the time to hustle it, so it's really hard to do anything with it.
Tony Miceli:So I'm always torn. Do I give it to a publisher and, just, you know, make a hundred bucks a year, or do I push it myself and just make a hundred bucks a year? Right so. But if they start young and they build up, then they could do. You know, I like a guy like Casey Cangellosi and guy like that, he's probably he's I know he's making money off his site and he built it up and built it up and built it up. So when you're young, right if you put $100 away when you're young, a month by the time you're my age, you can retire.
Tony Miceli:I didn't. So if you start your store, you know, at 22, by the time you're 42, you can probably have a business if your stuff is good.
Andy Heise:Yeah, that's right, and you think about the barrier to entry now versus when you started this. What your website right it's it's. It's a little simpler now.
Tony Miceli:Yes, it's a little simpler. There's many more people doing it, so you have. You have some other kinds of competition, some other? Yeah, right, I think. I think cause you mentioned students. I think students forget that, yes, youtube, instagram, and in one sense, you have to be good at what you're doing or be have a, have the gimmick, you know, if you're incredibly good looking and you're on there and you're playing vibes and you just you know well what's his name, justin Vibes, who is a great vibe player and he makes his living off of playing the vibes on social media. Now, he's great and he's also great looking and he plays real simple songs for people and he gets one of his videos had what? 40 million views, wow. So he's a great guy and we've talked about what he does and it was really he's, really I admire him a what he does and it's it was really, it's he's, he's really, uh, I admire him a lot yeah, it's good.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, we'll have to find that link. Link to it in the show. Oh, that's somebody you should talk to. Yeah, there you go. He mentioned a couple people you could have leon oh you should.
Tony Miceli:Oh my god, if lee gum comes on and talks about the business, first of all, four hours, leave the day open. He will not stop talking.
Nick Petrella:We'll have to set up an entire, uh, entire week. Then you're saying yes, exactly, I think he'd be great, he'd be great. So you know, before we get to the next question, I had another one. You had mentioned this word a few times and it's hustle. Uh, we always get questions. You know networking and how do you find gigs? This is from students. Could would you mind talking about how you hustled?
Tony Miceli:Yes. Well, you know what? Yes. So in my early days, to be really honest, I was. I was pumped up because of drugs, and I was pumped up because of drugs and I was out there doing it, but I wasn't a particularly nice person so I made it extra hard. So I tell my students now, don't be an a-hole, you've got to be nice, you've got to be nice to other people. And then I read the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and that one book, when I closed the cover, changed everything for me.
Tony Miceli:When that cover closed, I was not the same person I was when I started, because I realized it has to be win-win. I have to do something for you. You do something for me. You know, I get a gig, I pay you well, you get a gig, you pay me well, I get a gig, I pay you well, you get a gig, you pay me well. If I get a gig and pay you terribly well, you might get a gig and be like you know what, I'm going to pay him $150, like he paid me, and I'm going to keep his extra money. So I learned all this stuff in a moment and that started to change everything. And then you know, for me therapy, so I needed it. I went and did it. I had a great therapist, marilyn Luber, and we would just figure all this stuff out and it was a whole different thing. And just from getting nicer and being a competent musician, then opportunities started to lend themselves because people wanted to be around me and I wanted to be around people. Yeah, so did that answer your question?
Nick Petrella:Yeah, it does, it does. It's just a question that we often get. You know, how do I go out and get gigs? I think if you're born with that proclivity, it does come naturally. But as a teacher, how do you teach people? Because what works for me might not work for you or Andy, and vice versa.
Tony Miceli:Right. But I always a student asked me that question and I said you answered the question because he said how do I go out and get gigs? I said you go out and get gigs, said you have to go go somewhere and try to get a gig. And I know it's awful. I mean it's awful to walk in somewhere and say can I play here? I said but you know email. You know guys will email a club and they won't get a response and they'll write the club off and I tell students that's on your three-month list. Every three months you write the club back and half those clubs are going to eventually be stuck when your email comes through and they're going to say can you play tomorrow night?
Nick Petrella:Cold calling is tough for people and you know what was it, andy? Who was it? Bobby Watson suggested something. Boy, this is a couple of years ago. Now We've been doing this about three years. He said offer to play a set or do something, just as a sample. I've done that.
Tony Miceli:Yep, Well, I'll come in on a Monday night play one set for you.
Nick Petrella:So on your site I see you have a jazz and wine tasting offering. How did you come up with that idea? Or were you thinking specifically about different revenue streams? You should add.
Tony Miceli:No, I just watch things fall into place and, oh my God. So I have a thing with names and this guy's a buddy of mine, oh, quail. Oh my God, wait a minute, I've got to find his name. But sometimes when I introduce with my two wives and my girlfriend, I would go to introduce them and I wouldn't remember their name and then I would get in trouble for not reducing them. I know who this person is, but in that moment I black out. So I have this thing, but uh, jimmy Quayle, oh my God, he's a. He's, um, what do you call them? Uh, the one, oh, sommelier.
Tony Miceli:And I did a gig where he was at and I said, jimmy, let's put this out there and let's do it. And we did a thing at Chris's Jazz Cafe. We did a couple things and it kind of burned out. But the other thing I learned is groups are still groups and things are still things. So I haven't done anything with a few years. It's on my site. If somebody calls, it's going to be yeah, we can do it. And then I called Jimmy and we do jazz and wine. I have a group. We haven't played together in four years and then somebody asked us to come play at their festival. And so you guys still together, yes, we're still together and we get back together.
Nick Petrella:If it was later in the day, we could have done that here. B-y-w.
Tony Miceli:We could have Next time Entrepreneurship and wine, that's right, that's right.
Andy Heise:Absolutely. That's our next podcast. Yeah, here we go. Is Jimmy a musician as well, or just a sommelier?
Tony Miceli:Jimmy. Here's another guy for your podcast, because Jimmy's a drummer, okay, and he was in a band called the Quail Brothers the Quails and they played at we had a place here called the Quail Brothers the Quails and they played at we had a place here called the Latin Casino. They were the Osmond Brothers of our area and they were young kids and they were great musicians and they had this group their whole lives and then Jimmy went off and did the wine thing and he still plays drums and he's a total entrepreneur, to the hundredth degree, yeah all right.
Andy Heise:So, as nick pointed out in the intro, uh, you've created an entity called maselli music llc. What was the impetus for creating that entity and what role does it play in the variety of things that you're involved in?
Tony Miceli:well. Well, the impetus was my accountant, who said you got to put all this behind a business. You're doing these different things, you have to do it. And my accountant, lisa Kelly, said let's get this going. And we created a business. And I think that's just good. That's a good thing to have. If you're doing the hustling yourself, if you're a side person, then you're just doing it. But to have an LLC where everything goes into and you know, with taxes and all that, so that's what that was, and then everything can just fall under that and Lisa knows what to do. So every year I just, you know, I do quickens. So every week I do my receipts and then at the end of the year I more or less push a button and get my totals and just go to her and sit there and she does it and tells me the damage. So, yeah, it's just to put everything under. That's besides me.
Andy Heise:To kind of simplify and streamline that, particularly the tax process.
Tony Miceli:Yes, and any of these guys out there that have any kind of success usually have some kind of they're behind an LLC. So I think if you're going to go out and do it yourself, you're going to need it. Sure, yeah, Some kind of you're behind an LLC. So I think if you're going to go out and do it, yourself.
Nick Petrella:You're going to need it, sure, yeah. So, as I mentioned earlier, you have an extensive portfolio career. How do you manage to stay on top of everything?
Tony Miceli:Well, I think it is extensive. It is extensive and I also think, you know, like when I see some of my friends and I, I see their bios and things. For instance, when I I used to go to germany and they worshiped this horn player that was there and I knew the horn player, and when the horn player was back in the states he was doing weddings, you know, but they thought this guy was and he's great, he was great, it was great, you know. And so I think a lot of times we have to really make ourselves look better on paper than in real life. That's the first thing and I've done, I hustled a lot of things and done a lot of things. And my schedule's busy and it's even at 63, it's still overwhelming. Schedule's busy and even at 63, it's still overwhelming.
Tony Miceli:And I think the whole productivity thing I have to keep doing. You know, I use this app called Things and all the projects go in there and everything, and then I move things over and make sure I spend X hours on this, x hours on that, and I learned that as long as you move this thing over and put it in a calendar, it's moving forward and that's how you can manage multiple things and they take a lot longer to do, but all of a sudden this is done. If you think in terms of today and tomorrow, forget it. But if you're looking at things, and then six months from now, that's done, that's done, that's done. And then six months from now, that's done, that's done, that's done, that's done, and then things get done. So I think you have to be patient and keep an eye on things. Yeah, just keep going. My whole life is just. You have to keep going.
Andy Heise:Keep moving, yeah.
Tony Miceli:Yeah.
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