*First appeared on APME blog: https://apmepopblog.wordpress.com/

About a month I found out that the way I organize my professional life and career has a name.

It’s called a Portfolio Career. A portfolio career is exactly what it sounds like – your career looks like a constantly changing, moving, and growing portfolio. It encompasses all the things you hear about musicians doing – writing, teaching, playing, touring, putting out albums, business meetings, website design, mixing, mastering, recording, bookings…ect. – each opportunity and experience adds to the breadth and depth of the portfolio. Pretty sweet, huh?

From the perspective of many people working traditional ‘jobs’ where they do the same thing, go to the same place and interact with mostly the same people every day, portfolio careers can look really messy and perhaps even stressful. But for the creative (one who creates) it’s exciting, exhilarating, fun, engaging, challenging, and always changing. Just like their art.

I recently took a course in Community Music. For some of you reading this, you are familiar with this term, but for many of you, including myself three months ago, I only had a vague idea about what community music was. I thought it was community groups that form in some church basement and play music for fun with their friends. And it is. But it’s also SO much more than that. In his book on Community Music, Lee Higgins (community musician, rock guitarist, scholar, professor, and now president of ISME) explores and explains community musicianship. He defines community music as (1) of a community, (2) communal music making, and (3) an active intervention between a music leader or facilitator and participants.

I had the opportunity to attend a Masterclass with a venerable jazz artist. The opening discussion was focused on what the students, most of whom were jazz majors, thought about music and jazz today. The conversation weaved back and forth between artist and students and at one point, a student said that they loved jazz because the music that is being created today is nothing but Paper Plate Music.