Health insurance for jazz musicans

[Hardbopjazz]

Interesting article.

Jazz Musicians Throw Concert To Pay For Their Health Coverage

Laura Bassett Laura Bassett – Mon Apr 12, 5:48 pm ET

Thirteen years ago, 68-year-old jazz guitarist Calvin Keys underwent a life-saving quadruple bypass surgery. Keys, a notable Bay Area musician who recorded and toured with Ray Charles in the '70s, says he would not have been able to afford that surgery if he hadn't been covered under his wife's health insurance.

"I don't know what would have happened if I wasn't married," said Keys, who never had health coverage until he married his wife of 35 years. "There are quite a few musicians out here who don't have any health insurance. Most of us are from the ghetto, anyway. We don't know nothing about health care, and that's a big problem."

Keys said that as soon as he recovered from his surgery, he was so grateful to the hospital and rehabilitation center that treated him that he decided to throw a benefit concert to show his appreciation and raise money for other musicians who couldn't afford their health care.

"We raised about four or five thousand dollars, and donated it on the condition that 40 percent went to a musician that needed health care," Keys said. "That was my way of giving something back to the community. We musicians need all the help we can get."

Now Keys has joined forces with trumpeter Eddie Gale to throw the second annual San Francisco Jazz Fest, a health care fundraiser for musicians that will take place on Friday, April 23rd. Gale, who rose to fame in the 60's and recorded on Blue Note Records, says he came up with the idea for the festival after losing a number of his musician friends to health issues that could have been treated or prevented...

Article

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

This looks a damn good thing.

MG

[clifford_thornton]

[ep1str0phy]

I was supposed to play one of these concerts with Eddie and/or Lewis Jordan but was pre-booked elsewhere. Eddie's been pushing this cause and there's a lot of heart behind it; it certainly deserves all the support it can get. One thing I will say is that some of the most health-minded people I've ever met have come out of the Bay Area creative music community. A clear message here--and it extends back to and, somehow, parallels the ethos of healthfulness that Coltrane favored--is that the value of healthcare and taking care of one's health is not an abstract concept--it is and has been a pressing concern among many of my friends in and out of the music community.

--and, not to rant--but this isn't an issue of creative types not wiling to take the "straight" job which will get them insured. These are, in many ways, my "folk"--and there are world class musicians out here working 2, 3 jobs to make ends meet, support their families, and continue creating. When you magnify these issues by the sheer difficulty of securing new work these days, how hard it is to obtain suitable work hours that will offer health benefits while retaining the hours necessary for you to continue working in your originally chosen profession (music), the social flimsiness of private contracting and how difficult it is to offer up an accounting system that in anyway makes your myriad private students, night gigs, etc. look good on paper, the bursting-at-the-seams dilution of many urban music scenes, period (compounding the difficulty of obtaining music work in the first place), and also how pre-existing conditions have played a role, for so long, in obtaining insurance (the musicians we know and love so much are often a) old, b) nursing bodies failing due to poor health coverage in the first place, and c) suffering from some sort of psychological issue), you have a recipe for problems.

All the more reason the classic virtues of communal action and self-betterment are needed now more than ever, and why endeavors like the one above are so valuable.

Edited April 13, 2010 by ep1str0phy