You can ride the bandwagon if you want to but you might not make it to the destination.
A long time ago, a good friend and a consummate music professional said to me, “Rio, you got to have your own platform.” I did understand the sentence and it totally made sense to me but I didn’t have enough experiences under my belt to know what that really meant nor the wisdom in that advise.
When I first started working at The Jazz Gallery, I thought I wanted to do bigger things in the future: bigger projects, bigger venues, and bigger artists. I thought that was the thing to do and I thought the way to achieve any goal is to network and to be noticed by people who were already somebody. I thought once someone takes notice of me and what I was doing, I would be pulled up to one of their wagons and I would ride that into sunset. I thought that notoriety and fame and power and authority of these people would rub off on me and I’ll be all set.
Not really.
