Jan Diehl: What 50 Years of Gigging Actually Teaches You

Jan Diehl has been playing professionally since he was 12 years old. Saxophone, clarinet, flute, bass — 50 years of gigs, 35 years as a music educator, and more wisdom per sentence than most podcasts deliver in an hour.

I showed Jan my app. He told me he'd never use it. And he's right — because Jan isn't who I built it for. I built it for the version of me in 2015. The guy with 142 gigs that year, making $3.85 an hour without knowing it, losing his family to the grind while thinking he was doing everything right.

This conversation is honest, funny, and practical. Jan talks about showing up an hour early, why gigs are relationships not transactions, and what he wishes every gigging musician understood from day one.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Money gigs is supported by trifloral.com. T R Y F L O R A L dot com forward slash the money gigs to get your discount. Trifloral produces THC beverages. They come in 2.55 and 10 milligram varieties and all sorts of flavors. I have one prior to my gig and everything is so smooth. Visit T R Y F L O R A L dot com forward slash the money gigs. That's trifloral.com forward slash the money gigs and get your discount. Hey, welcome to the Money Gigs Podcast. I'm Cliff Adams, a gigging musician and app developer out of Cincinnati, Ohio. My guest today has been playing professionally since he was 12 years old, 50 years of gigs, a 35-year career as a music educator, and he plays everything Doctor Basic. Jan Deal has seen this industry from every angle. I showed Jan my app, he looked at it, thought about it, and told me he'd never use it. And honestly, he's right. Because Jan isn't who I built it for. I built it for the version of me in 2015. The guy who had 142 gigs that year was making$3.85 an hour on some gigs without knowing it. And was losing his family to the grind while thinking he was doing everything right. Jan at 25, living off gigs, playing 13 Night Weeks. He's exactly who I built it for. This conversation is honest, it's funny, there's more wisdom in it than I expected. I think you're gonna get a lot out of it. Here's Jan Deal. You have been a part of musical productions at various schools.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

I've been known as a musician for a very long time, like your dad. You know, he and I probably started out. Well, we did. We started out about the same time. Then I went into music education. I was pretty successful as a jazz educator uh for young kids, and that got me a reputation amongst the music ed community. Essentially, uh, in the middle of that career, I was invited uh to be an adjunct with the University of Mount St. Joseph and uh teaching clarinet and saxophone. And so um during that time, I I was at a at a Mount St. Joe faculty meeting, and they said, you know, Jan, we'd really like to start back up our jazz band here. Would you be interested in taking it? And then I went, Well, okay, I you know, I'll try it out. So um I started it and um working with college kids and I'm trying to teach them how to improv, and none of them would stand up and take a solo. And so I was driving home one day and I said, you know, my junior high kids could do that. And then I said it, said the same statement a different way. You know, my junior high kids could do that, and so I started a junior high jazz group, and the the whole focus of the thing was essentially, you know, playing in a band and setting it up so that so that the kids could stand up and take a solo. And uh that reputation got around with Ohio Music Ed Association, uh, which is a teachers, music teachers group. And eventually, you know, I was invited to bring my little junior high jazz kids, well, they weren't really junior high, essentially they were elementary, to Columbus to do a presentation for the Music Ed Association, and people were blown away because you know I had I had a group of kids that were playing great, sounding great, and and taking up, standing up and taking solos. And my drummer was a sixth grader, uh, you know, the most of them were sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, and uh and and they were doing it, you know, and sounding good. And you know, just getting to do that presentation at the state convention, it's an audition process. You submit a tape and other people decide if you're good enough to do it or not. So after that presentation, the the executive director of OMEA walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, You know, Jan, I can't think of any time we've ever had a junior high group do this sort of thing. And I said, Well, that's very nice of you to say, Roger, but we're in elementary school. That got me, you know, established there. So I, you know, I get calls. Well, you know, uh Jan plays woodwinds, you know, Jan plays bass. He's pretty cool to hang out with. Yeah, yeah, I think that's an important part of it.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Sometimes because I see you with a bass, and sometimes I see you with woodwinds.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

So what came first? Okay, so when I was 10, I started saxophone. And when I was 12, I ran into an old jazz piano player who was the high school band director in an alley behind the school. And he goes, He goes, Oh, you're digging it, ain't you? And I said, Yeah, Mr. Chance, I'm digging it. Oh, I'd picked up clarinet too by then. So I was doing saxophone and clarinet because my junior high director wanted to start a stage band. And so I said, Yeah, Mr. Chance, I'm digging it. And he said, Well, you know, saxophone is cool, but if you want to work all the time, learn how to play bass. And I said, Well, okay. And he was right, you know, in about three months I was making some money. I I always had a parallel career from sixth grade on where I would I would play bass guitar and rock bands and then saxophone, clear net, and flute was my approach to the academic side of things, you know. And so uh I went to CCM as a sax player, but I paid for it by playing bass guitar six nights a week in bars. And and you know, and it's worked out for me in the long run because you know people go, you know, well, you need a sax player, yeah. J and Deal plays sax. Playing out anywhere? Well, my wife and I had a band called Elaine and the Biscayne's for 28 years. We decided we didn't want to be up at one o'clock in the morning anymore, and so we we dissolved that in 2010. Since then, we had a thing called the Bromwell Deal Band, basically an original music group. So we put together three CDs and did pretty well with it. The best of Bromwell Deal is available online and most of your downloading services. Yeah, so you know that went well. You know, we had a lot of fun with it, it was a huge success. And then uh Paul Bromwell developed Tinnitus, and so he had to quit playing. Now we've got another trio called Boutique, and it's a great American songbook with Elaine singing, and I play um Soprano Sacks clarinet and bass, and then uh we've got a keyboard player named Jim Sword out, who's very bright player. Of course, that's a trio I have, and then uh I've got a duo with uh my friend Chris Goens, uh guitar player. So he's got his Gibson 175, and I play an acoustic bass guitar, and we do great American songbook jazz too. There's uh Cincinnati Landmark Productions, you know, the theater company, they hire me to play, and so and I do you know a week of rehearsals and then four weeks of shows, and they pay respectfully and they're nice people, and it's an in it's a great challenge, it's an interesting challenge. So I did a Frank Sinatra show with them, I did um John Denver show with them. The most recent one was um they did a thing called Million Dollar Quartet, which is a musical based on the night four big dudes were in the studio one night uh in uh Sun Records down there in Memphis. Uh so the whole musical is a story around that. I played Carl Perkins' little brother, I was considered an actor, the whole cast and the director. They were all around 30, and we started rehearsals, and and the director was standing in front of me with his hand on his chin, you know, and thinking, and he goes, It seems like you know these songs. Yeah, I yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. Yeah, but uh, you know, it was fun. I had a great time with it. It was a month of sold-out shows for them, so they were happy.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

What do you want to accomplish now musically? What what what uh what do you endeavor to uh aspire to?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

See, I retired in 2020. I snuck out the back door during COVID from teaching from that period on from 2020 on. I did long-term subbing as a music educator in various schools. I I taught orchestra at Marymont, I taught Jay as at Walnut Hills, I taught music technology at Oak Hills, and I taught orchestra and band at Del High Junior High. And then finally I decided beginning this school year that I just let my license expire. That way I I knew I couldn't get a call and I couldn't accept it. So since then, my my goal is just to be a musician. I still do some guest things, like I teach a jazz class every now and then at McNick, uh and and also at Elder, and uh then I do uh guest conducting, you know, honor bands, that sort of thing. But I'm not an educator anymore, so I'm just working on the music thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Cool. Do you have any uh I get this question a lot myself? People ask me, have you done anything original? Like, have I written anything? And the frankly, I haven't. I I've like one song that I've made that that is out there in a sauce album. No, that's do you have that aspiration?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

No, I you know, uh I when I was a young man and when uh when we were first doing Elaine and the Biscayne, we were just throwing the original music in with the cover band stuff that we were doing because we were making money, you know. I mean, that was our that was our living at the time, or at least it was mine. I had taken a uh hiatus from teaching, then I was offered the Guardian Angels job and uh figured out that I could I could gig and teach. I did that for a while and wrote a few things in those days, but I've very quickly figured out that I'm not that kind of creative. I'm pretty good at uh co-authoring, so to speak, but uh you know, Paul Brommel and I uh worked together, but I never didn't contribute enough that I felt like I was a a songwriter. He has this brilliant melodic mind that that doesn't happen very often. And and so you know, we let him do his thing. Elaine wrote some things with him, uh, where she was contributing lyrics and also uh some of the melody lines, but uh no, uh you know I'm I'm the accompanist, not the that's that's actually very that's very centering because it seems like you're like completely at peace with that, but I think it's because out of this conversation so far, what I'm getting is you're a teacher, uh and you have been.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

I wonder if I invited you to my gig. Like I have I play uh solo keyboard at a couple restaurants during the week, six to nine, Tuesday, Thursday. I wonder if I sat you down next to me and said, Hey, you cover the base, and I I bet at the end of an hour or two, I bet you would have three to five, I don't know, maybe fifty points of insight that you might be able to infer.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Well, you know, um that's something I've I've tried to learn how to turn off over the years. So you know, there are points in time when you can share things like that, and there are people who have personality traits that you can share that kind of stuff with, but for the most part, it's it's best just to show up and do your job and and keep your mouth shut and and do it. No, I I figured out very quickly that I was a teacher very young. Um, that same JS piano player, I met him in the alley again, and he said, uh, so you still digging it? And I go, Yeah. And he goes, So what do you now that you're playing bass and sax, what do you think about doing? And in those days, you could hypothetically work real, you know. I said, Um, I think I'll work real hard and be a musician and and just play gigs and and uh maybe I get good enough, I can do some sessions. And and he said, Well, that's cool, man. He said, But you know, eventually you probably have a family, you know, you want to get that teaching degree. And I went, well, okay. So which is kind of the where I was as a kid. And then I I started a little private teaching studio when I was uh 14. Yeah, well, actually, I taught a few people when I was 12, but when I was 14, I actually had a studio kind of thing going. Uh, started teaching at that age and figured out that I I was okay at doing that, I can do it.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Looking out on sort of the gigging landscape, like the world as we know it. You think about the world today and what gigging musicians are doing, what would you tell? Let's let's really hone in on that teaching thing you do. What would you tell other gigging musicians? Challenges you see, mistakes you see made. What's what goes on in your head when I say that?

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Well, you know, I've been gigging since I was 12. So there are things that I do that I don't even think of anymore. But the the biggest thing is is um I'm an hour before kind of guy. So if if you book me for a seven o'clock gig, I'm probably there at six and getting everything ready and putting it together. I try to be friendly and I try to be nice. And and there seems so there are so many musicians who think that it's all about them, and it's and it's really not, it's all about you know however you develop a relationship with whoever you're working with, you know, and and so I try to make things happen. So somebody goes, Oh man, I don't know. I've I I don't have this cable or my cable died. And I go, give me a minute, and I go into my car and I pull a cable out and I said I think this one will work for you, you know. And they go, Well, why do you have that? I go, Well, you know, a lot of people don't think of gigs as relationships, you know. They they really don't, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

I didn't, and then that's something I'm running into and I'm kicking myself because I get to look over 32 years of playing and I was extremely focused on me. And part of that was getting to the gig and making sure there's this internal thing of always wanting to prove yourself, like and make sure the product's there. You don't want to offend someone, you don't want to mess up the songs, so you're hyper focused on the product uh that you're creating, it has always been about the people. There's a cap on on how much your product means on a gig. Uh, and and I think it's probably exponential when you start talking about uh relating to people, being friendly and being nice. You talked about getting there at six if it's seven, but I gotta tell you, like I leave really early for gigs now because I have to lift stuff. But um for me, it's about getting centered to do something creative after you've done something hyper practical. So you just got through traffic, you found parking, you set up your stuff. That is not the energy that my music benefits from.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

I hear you, man. Yeah, oh, I hear you. So you you know, you you do have to sit down and focus yourself. And you know, I could I could particularly see how you as a solo piano player would struggle with things, you know, and you and you as a solo piano player, and I and I have no idea because I haven't heard you play, and I'm thinking of one gal that I went to college with, she walk in at the last minute and wonder why she, you know, people aren't happy about her. You know, if you showed up a half hour early, said hi to people, you know, talked a little bit, because you know, people are people they you know, they they they're not going to judge you on whether or not you got that German six chord in there or not. That they don't they don't know about that. They're judging you on your personality and how you do things.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

So when you're when you're on a gig, when you when you've been on a gig before, and you said you started gigging when you were 12, was it always sort of natural instinct, say on breaks to go out and talk to people and and mix and mingle and stuff?

SPEAKER_00 15:05

I don't know. I guess I I guess I've always been friendly with folks. Uh but there was a booking agent that I worked with when I was a teenager, and we used to quote him people like a friendly band, and and and that's what it's all about, you know. So yeah, you talk with folks, you know, you you don't ignore them. They want to know you, they want to be able to go home to their friends and say, Oh, yeah, I know, I know Jane Deal.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Yeah. I want to let you go, but I a couple things. Any venues that you've played in the past where you would regard them as challenging.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Oh, yeah. Any venue where people talk louder than the music is challenging.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

That is a thing. Can you recall any time where you played a venue and didn't go back?

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Let me think about that. Well, you know, there were a couple places in the 80s that uh the biscaynes wouldn't didn't go back to a couple places, but they didn't they're non-existent and probably for good reason.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Was that because of the crowd or because of the venue?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Uh yes. It was it was just an atmosphere thing. It just didn't seem right. And you know, Elaine was she was essentially the boss of the thing. You know, she's my she's my wife. Uh, and uh she was the leader of the band, and I made sure the technology went well and and got all that stuff going. So at the end of the night, I'd be, you know, tearing down stuff and and loading up the truck, and she would be at at the bar dealing with the owner, you know, getting paid. So there were a couple of owners who were not necessarily respectful of a woman band leader. Those we didn't go back to.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

I sense your I sense you're putting that delicately.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Yes, I am. And then she had a couple that just simply couldn't respect a woman having to do business with a woman. She's a hard ass man, uh especially when we first started. She was fresh out of college. We didn't do wedding receptions per se, but every now and then we'd be hired. We'll do the wedding reception, but we're Elaine and Abiscains, we're not a wedding reception band. And so we got hired by one. And at the end, I'll never forget this one. At the end of the gig, Elaine went up to the mom and it's explicitly said in the contract, check due at the end of the gig, you know. And and the mom goes, Oh, I'm sorry, but I forgot my checkbook. And and and Elaine turned to her and said, Well, that's fine. You know, we're all packed up. We can follow you home. Nice. We we can take care of that, not a problem.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

So uh, you know, yeah, we got oh, hell yeah, we got paid. I don't base my acceptance or rejection of gigs on how much money I make or any of that other stuff. My my whole goal as a musician is am I gonna be challenged as a musician and am I gonna have a good time with the musicians I'm working with? And that's that's all I care about. That's it. So, you know, I'm fortunate that it that I make pretty good money because people call me for for things, but uh this is not a business for me. I don't approach it from a business point of view, I'm not of that mentality. I'm sure many people are, but if a guy calls me up and says, Hey man, you know, all I can do is give you gas money, but can you sit in with this big band? Well, hell yeah, I'll sit in with the big band. You know, and I've I've sat in with a big band for 25 bucks before because it's a musical challenge and I don't get to play big band music like that all the time.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

The the actual musical challenge, I can get that. Were you ever in in that kind of position where music you needed to make rent with what you were making?

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Yeah, oh yeah. When uh when Elaine the Biscayne started out, I took a six-year hiatus from teaching. Uh it it wasn't a plan to be a six-year hiatus, it just ended up being a six-year hiatus. But yeah, I was living off the gig scene. The biscaynes uh worked a lot. Uh, you know, we figured the end of a week is when we had a night off and we played some 13 night weeks, man. But that's the way the scene was. That was the end of the regular gigging scene as I knew it, uh, the whole 70s and 80s. But I guess about up to about 80, 88, 89. But 81, 81 to 87, I was playing music and I was working for a production company, uh sound and lighting company, part-time in the daytime.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

That's how you were making bread on the side.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

The music was the was the living, really. I mean, the the other stuff was just uh, you know, I'm I got free time in the daytime. Why don't I make money?

SPEAKER_01 19:41

It's interesting because you you've kind of been in that educational realm. And the other day I had someone post something like, I play for free because I enjoy playing. And I I might be missing something. That's one thing I know. Like turning turning the 50 corner. Uh, I I think I say that more often than I did prior prior to my 50s. But when he says something like that, I think about how much debt I was in after going to UC for jazz up until I was in my mid 40s. I think I was still in several thousands in debt, and I'm still now because I paid for my kids' college on loans. And I'm thinking, you know, someone taking gigs for I want to say exposure, or because they're rich, let's say they're a doctor, lawyer, they're they're they've got their so they don't really need the money. But when they go and they take a gig and they say, uh, you you don't need to pay me, I I wonder how that impacts.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Oh, I don't ever do that.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

But if but but if a friend calls me and says, Look, you know, this gig it won't pay much, but if you're if you'd like to play it, I'd love to have you. And if it's a good enough friend and I know the music's going to be fun, that's what I do.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

So I've done the same thing very recently. Friend called and he said, Cliff, we have a sublime cover band. And I was like, you are not hiring the right guy for this, clearly, but okay. Uh, and I took it and I have a three-strike rule of if I've played three gigs for you and it hasn't paid and I've put in X number of hours, I'm done. And and where that generally comes from is in 2015, I had 142 gigs that year. I had 104 the following year. And um, at one point I lost my IT job. And in order to replace that salary, I decided to Uber drive. And in the month, in the month of January or no, June 2015, July and August, I was Cincinnati's number one Uber driver. But as I was doing that, I was also gigging and I wasn't seeing my family. And uh it was really challenging. And I realized that I had not spent a moment of time getting educated on this thing that was now causing me to make money. It was just I got in my car, and from the moment I pointed my car out of my driveway, I was on the clock. And I then was running a band, I was doing gigs, and I started to apply that same philosophy to my And so I built this little calculator in a spreadsheet and I discovered that I was making$3.85 an hour for one for one group. And I uh the gigs that were paying the most was when Jim Connorly subbed me out at Jeff Ruby's for two hours because I didn't need to rehearse the the drive time was 10 minutes from my house. So I thought it's not that I'm gonna turn down opportunities when friends call, but I am going to seek out those opportunities that meet that goal so that I still have opportunity to accept those other things without it impacting the rest of my domestic life, which it did. I I was too involved trying to play. I was thinking, I've got this IT job, I'm also doing this band thing, and I'm going out, I'm making the bread, you know. Uh I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, and and I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do. So so that was, you know, that that all that is is kind of why I'm creating this tool. It's not that I'm telling you don't take gigs. What I'm saying is be aware when you do take a gig, especially if you're prolific, if you're doing 100, 140, um, you know, something like that. Be aware.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

No, I mean, you know, I'm always aware of of what income's coming in. That's that's not it at all. It's just that uh I'm not business oriented, I'm into the music for the music. Yeah, I took a gig in Batesville and took two gigs in Batesville, Indiana, two gigs same night, two different venues on the same property. The pay was good, um, but not once did I sit down and calculate how long the mileage was, uh, you know, all that other kind of stuff. I uh don't care. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

No, no, it's okay. You're in that position. That's the thing. I think part of what I'm what I'm understanding is when when you create a product, you have to identify the niche you're going for, the the actual person. Um, and you might not be, and that that's not the case. But what I'm definitely going for with the podcast and and what we've talked about today is how can I otherwise benefit musicians and the gigging musician community? And so I I think we've done a lot of that today. We're about 10 minutes over, and I want to respect your time. We need to meet up someplace.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

I'll tell you what, send me your email address. I send out email flyers of what I'm doing, and uh, you know, you can pick pick something you like. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Okay, man, I'll let you go. Thanks for talking with me. I'm sorry it took me 30 years to meet you. Appreciate it. Talk to you about it. That was Jan Deal, 50 years in, still gigging, still showing up an hour early, still pulling cables out of his car for whoever needs one. The thing that stuck with me most from this conversation is something he said almost in passing, that he doesn't think of gigs as transactions, he thinks of them as relationships. And I think that's something most of us know but forget the moment we start worrying about the money. Which is exactly why the money part matters. Because when you know your number, you stop presenting the gig. You can show up like Jen shows up present, generous, an hour early, instead of doing mental math all night about whether it was worth the drive. That's what the Money Gigs app is built for. It's free to download on iOS and Android, just search MoneyGigs wherever you get your app. There's also a venue map where musicians rate and review gigging venues anonymously. But here's the thing: that only works if musicians are in it, so if you download it and if you've played out, go add your venues. Be the person who helps the next musician decide if that gig is worth the drive. That's the whole idea. If this episode gave you something, share it with one musician who needs to hear it. That's how this show grows. I'm Cliff Adams. Go get your money gigs.