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How Don Mopsick Uses Jazz Near You To Promote Jazz in SW Florida

By Michael Ricci
July 12, 2021
4,795 Views

As part of a new series, I'll post how others use Jazz Near You to get the word out about their shows and promote jazz in their region. In our first installment, I asked Southwest Florida bassist and jazz advocate,

Don Mopsick

bass, acoustic
b.1950

We're local players. Our budgets are low. We just went through 15 months of bleakness. Now, for those of us who are vaccinated the business is showing signs of life, but it's like a deck of cards being reshuffled and re-dealt. Personally, for me live performance with other players is still where it's at. Here's why I believe in the concept of jazznearyou.com.

• Local jazz players can build their brands. Musician profiles in use for each gig are linked to allaboutjazz.com, so local players for whom local live performance is their primary source of income can get some local publicity without having to hire a publicist, or rely solely on obsolete jazz-burying websites, newspapers or Facebook (although I use FB Groups to funnel eyeballs to local JNY). This is the "grass-roots" level of support of JNY which feeds all the below. You would think that musicians, young and old, would be acutely aware of the need for self-promotion in service to earning a living playing the horn, but I'm constantly surprised at how few know the basic value to them of having a performance .jpg and basic bio page ready to go, much less an entry-level website showing current appearances. JNY fills all these needs free of charge to them. Duh!
  
  Local players for whom teaching is a big share of their income get to funnel prospective students through their musician page on AAJ, which includes robust support for finding local teachers.
  
  The strength of JNY for players is that all of these promo materials are gathered on one site according to one locale, and if there are enough gigs and good players manning them, the impression of a "critical mass" of a viable "jazz scene" is created. I'm guessing that creating this impression is easier in a big city where the gigs are concentrated in one area, but in our region of Southwest Florida the gigs and players are spread out in six counties covering from Naples in the south to Sarasota/Tampa/St. Petersburg to the north. So we're split into three sites: Fort Myers, Sarasota, and Tampa. The fans mostly stay in their own areas, but the A-list players tend to want to drive to any of the three and across to Orlando and down to the east coast, depending on the gig and the bread. For example, I play an annual big band gig in Naples led by trumpeter