Q&A with Hudson Valley One Music and Arts Journalist, John Burdick
John Burdick didn’t anticipate becoming a music journalist. He stresses his training is not in journalism but in literature composition and writing as a professor at SUNY New Paltz. He also dedicates his time to his own musical goals. Yet with the encouragement of a friend at Ulster Publishing years ago, Burdick developed his voice in covering local music for 12 years across different publications. Today he covers music and arts with Hudson Valley One.
I spoke to Burdick on Feb. 15 to pick his brain about music in the Hudson Valley and a little bit about the big picture facing musicians in a post-record world.
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How do you feel about covering music in the Hudson Valley?
I never wanted to write about music, because I still entertain too many aspirations as a musician, but I loved it immediately and found my voice. Because it was a fairly low-pressure situation, I was able to approach it however I wanted. So I've treated it as kind of my platform.
What is your process for covering music locally?
For the years that I've been doing it, I’ve done a lot of conventional interviews and reviews. Mostly what I do is I find a concert, a local happening, or a release that I'm interested in that I know I have things to say about. Because it's local press and this isn't the big city, everything you write is somewhat promotional. On a certain level, you're trying to stir up the culture of the scene. So you're always trying to kill two birds with one stone. If there's a new record out by local artists that I desperately want to write about, which happens frequently, I'll wait till they have a show in a local venue. Then I will kind of lump all that in together. I love writing about music and I never tried to expand as most music writers do beyond a single publication. I had the perfect spot for me and it was like a soapbox for me. I think over the years, the weakest part of my game was the journalistic part. I don't have those chops, but I think over the years, I've developed in that way so I can be a more conventional music journalist when I need to, while still having all these opportunities to pontificate in my special way.
How do you perceive the Hudson Valley music scene more generally?
So obviously, the big story around here perennially, the music scene is the flight from New York City musicians upstate as they get into their nesting years. So, that often happens to people in their early 30s. Their 10 years in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side are done and up they come here. So our area, which has its own rich native music traditions, is incomparably rich in players. What we have around here are incredibly high-caliber players and certain specialties developed over the years as an example of that. One of the most important jazz drummers of the second half of the 20th century and into the present, Jacques de Jeannette, is famous for playing with Miles Davis when Miles went fusion when he started to incorporate rock, which was a very radical thing for him to do at the time, very similar to Bob Dylan going electric. He has Hall of Fame, Mount Rushmore-level credentials and he has been a Woodstock resident since the early 70s. As a result, a lot of other jazz players came up here. They don't play a lot locally, because that's another thing about the dynamic of a local scene. When recording stopped being profitable for artists, it changed the entire landscape. So in those days, the locally residing professional musicians rarely played locally. They would do benefit shows or weekly jam sessions, but when recording revenues died, artists' revenue streams changed irrevocably. All of a sudden, professionals could not even afford to pass on local gigs, in a way. The thing about it is that performance became the only way they're making money. Because tours are so expensive and so many people get cuts of the profit, people have discovered that if you keep it small, you keep it intimate, you get everything when you do it that way. You find more of the local professionals performing locally while mixing with the indigenous players, so it's a much more fruitful scene now regarding the professionals, the amateurs, the locals and those who came here from the city in the sense of interaction and collaboration. It’s much stronger than it's ever been.
So we have lots of musicians and established players, but what isn’t clicking here like it does in New York City for musicians?
What we lack is the population density for there to be any real sense of a scene, like the kind of scene that happens in urban environments where people start gathering around a band or an artist. That attention and intensity then attract the attention of the labels and the bigger interests in the music industry. Then you get these grassroots phenomena where a band built an intense local following in a city and those are the people who are cherry-picked by labels and then on up from there. But being your age and having grown up in the music world that you've grown up in, a lot of it is pay-for-play right now. It's a high-end kind of situation for artists. This is not to say that people with money are in any way inferior as artists, I mean to say people with support in their background have all the best education, they will the best connections, have all the best opportunities to cultivate talent, they even have the right to turn their back on their wealth and go busking in New Orleans for a year. But you lose something in the exchange though, where you're just talent that does not have the scaffolding to make it work in this economically almost impossible environment of arts, especially music because of the death of recording revenue. So you lose a little bit of sense of balance.
What about touring in the Hudson Valley with major festivals that come into the area, what does that mean for the musicians here that are already established, if it means anything?
Yes, I think that's a good question. I think you have to define the different levels of venue you're talking about. So if you're talking about Bethel (Woods Center for the Arts), that's a whole different league. These larger festivals that come in and take up how many square feet of an area, they have an entire weekend worth at (most likely) Bethel or whatever available sites that are out there now hosting these mega-shows belong to a class of venue that's often called the shed. It's an indoor-outdoor amphitheater type. Saratoga Performing Arts Center was the big shed around here for the longest time, but Bethel is bigger. There's a museum on the site and there's an indoor pavilion for intimate shows, which has like 800 capacity so they book at that level. I would say that the impact on the local scene is kind of minimal because they're operating at the Hozier level. And then, for instance, how an act like REO Speedwagon decides it's time to join in and go on the road just for the sentimental reasons of all the people who grew up loving that 80s guitar rock, they'll do it at that venue. On the other hand, Arrowwood Farms in New Paltz hosts big festivals with major names like Lucius. That's a little different since that has a much more local tie-in. Bethel’s very corporate, but things like what they're doing at Arrowwood Warms, which still has big names, especially in the indie world, local bands get on those bills as well. So it's much more tie-in at that level than at the very highest level where it’s not local as much.
What is a band or musician you’re listening to right now?
One of my favorite bands of the new generation of bands is Big Thief. You listen to that first record “Masterpiece,” and it sounds like a well-produced indie rock record of its period and it has some of my favorite songs of theirs on that record. Every record after that gets more casual, almost more Lo-Fi. They sound like they wrote it and then recorded it so it sounds about as casual as you could make a record. Every time they get more casual and less professional in a way, they get more popular. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen! What was amazing about that [UPAC] show was you could tell they went without a setlist because after every song, a tech was running out to bring Adrienne another guitar. They brought out one guitar, and she was just like ‘no,’ and kept sending the guitars away so they would play completely off the setlist. Big Thief created that level of freedom for themselves, which is a remarkable feat in the current environment.
