Musician and engineer Gabe Herman knows a thing or two about local music scenes.
Moe Black, one of the Chapel Hill native’s first professional bands, was big in the late 1990s around Wilmington, N.C., where the music-friendly television show “Dawson’s Creek” was shot.
Later, while earning a BFA in sound design for film and television at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Herman gigged all over town.
“I would teach guitar lessons during the day, go to class in-between, do four or five hours of studio work at night, and then go out and play in clubs Thursday through Saturday,” Herman says. “I was making my bread playing and burning the candle at both ends.”
Flash forward to now: after a stint in Boston, Herman operates AudioGabriel, his own production house, in his West Hartford home. At the Hartt School, he chairs the Music and Performing Arts Management department and serves as the assistant director of Music Production and Technology; soon, the two majors will merge into a single focus on Music Industry.
Herman spoke to the Courant about his overlapping roles as an educator and music-industry professional.
Q: In your opinion, what are the characteristics of a vibrant local music scene?
A: There’s a tendency to assume a music scene revolves around the venues where it’s happening, where the performances are. I don’t think that’s correct. A vibrant music scene is one where there are lots of people living in an area who are interested in music, who play music, love music, need music to make the other things in their lives much more special. They seek it out and they find each other, and they enjoy it together in a community setting.
What’s great about that: It’s not specific to any one genre. If you play guitar, you can play any kind of music you want. In the [Las] Vegas scene, you’ve got a house gig where you show up and play the same kind of music, and that’s what they’re asking you to do. In a truly great community scene, people play the music they want to play, with the people they want to play with, and there’s no force of nature that’s going to stop that, except when the cops get called by the neighbors. But even that makes it fun.
That’s part of it, too: the “maker” spaces that just sort of happen. To me, that’s what’s all across America. It always has, right back to the 1960s with garage rock. The idea of a garage is a place where you can get together and play. Whether there’s a venue or not that will champion it is up to the commercial scene. But that’s a different scene.
Q: As a Hartt professor, you take an interest in the music your students play outside of the classroom. Why?
A: When I was first getting excited about music, I wanted to just be a guitar player. When I’d go somewhere else and tell someone where I was from, it was fun to say, “Oh, I’m from Chapel Hill. You don’t know Chapel Hill? Do you know the band Superchunk? Do you know Squirrel Nut Zippers or Ben Folds? They came from my town.” I could use their success to validate my aspirations.
That’s totally silly, but on the other hand, there’s something about a good community, where the success of any one person is the success of everyone. I’m a firm believer that the rising tide lifts all ships, that one person doing well is going to inject excitement about everything that everybody else is doing. You’re a writer for The Courant; if a band from Hartford won a Grammy, that would bring focus on the Hartford community, in a way that would be a life-changing experience for everyone who’s a musician in this area.
As a teacher, any one of my students who is successful makes all of my students more successful by default. I don’t root for any one student more than another, but I always try to find ways to demonstrate to my students: If you take what you do seriously, and if you take the people you work with seriously, and if you believe in the things you invest your time in, and you happen to be successful or not, it’s still the right investment. If you don’t win it, someone in your circle will. And when they call you in on a gig, that’s going to raise your profile.
Q: What’s the role of an institution like Hartt in cultivating a local music scene?
A: We’ve integrated Music and Performing Arts Management with Music Production and Technology to create a new department called Music Industry. That’s where we’re really going to start unlocking doors, in terms of how we think about the local scene and how we’re a part of it. I see guys out there; [Bronze Radio Return drummer] Rob Griffith is one of them. He was a music management student, and he was one of my first students at Hartt. He’s in a band with four other Hartt graduates with degrees in acoustics and music and music production. You’ve got three different degrees coming together to play in a rock band, which has nothing to do with what we teach here. We had nothing to do with what they decided to do professionally, but this institution allowed this cultivation of people who otherwise probably wouldn’t have come together to play music.
Playing in ensembles at Hartt, whether it’s the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz, or if it’s in one of the Hartt Orchestras or chamber groups, students learn that they’re not alone. They meet people with the same interests as them, who are struggling with the same basic concepts of musicianship and professionalism. Maybe they’re not coming into college with the same aspirations in terms of a career, but they also didn’t know each other when they got here.
What’s interesting to me is how students arrive at this place and where they are when they leave. The freshman class is nothing but potential. We don’t know how they’re going to do, but it’s a given: they’re going to graduate with all this deep camaraderie with other students. The combination is the right mix to produce good art.
I wouldn’t be so gauche to suggest that we are the music scene, but this is one safe place for creative people to get together and study. Then they leave the day-to-day classes, find other musicians in the area and collaborate. That makes Connecticut stronger as a music scene.
