San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FACES OF THE PANDEMIC
For musicians here, the silence brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has been deafening.
For musicians here, there and everywhere, the silence brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has been deafening. Concert halls, clubs, theaters and venues of all sizes have been shuttered nationwide since March. San Diego, like nearly the entire state of California, currently does not permit live performances with in-person audiences, indoors or outdoors, apart from drive-in concerts. In September, we profiled 10 stagehands whose behind-the-scenes work is just as pivotal as that of the struggling performers whose stories we have been telling for the past eight months. Today, we focus on the musicians and explore how they have been coping with life in the time of COVID-19. These are their pandemic stories.
Nathan Hubbard was a doublewinner in July at the 2020 San Diego Music Awards, where he won the Best Jazz Album award for “This Stream” by the Nathan Hubbard Trio and shared Best Hip Hop or Rap Album honors for “The Bully Pulpit” as a member of the group Parker Meridien. His acceptance speeches, like the entire awards ceremony, were delivered remotely online because of the coronavirus pandemic. It was an all too telling illustration of the virtual reality conundrum now faced by myriad musicians whose performance schedules evaporated in mid-march and have yet to return.
“Things are at a standstill,” said Hubbard, a genre-leaping percussionist, band leader and composer. He lives in San Carlos with his wife and three children, two of whom started high school this year entirely online. Apart from a Sycuan Casino date and a few fleeting music jobs at restaurants, his calendar has been empty.
“I’ve always been the guy who works at night and is here for the kids in the day, picking them up from school and driving them to karate class and ballet rehearsals,” Hubbard said. “Now, it’s shifted. Instead of running out at night, I’m doing gigs from home on the Internet. This would not be possible for me if my wife didn’t have a very good full-time import/export position.”
In a typical week before COVID-19, Hubbard performed an average of five to seven nights per week. He worked steadily in various musical theater productions, with club dates, recording sessions and periodic cocktailjazz receptions in between.
“I did one preview performance of ‘La Cage aux Folles’ at Cygnet Theatre in March before it got shut down,” Hubbard said. “That was supposed to have run for eight weeks, seven shows a week. I was supposed to then do ‘An American in Paris’ at Moonlight Amphitheatre, followed there by ‘Ragtime.’ All that went away, as did all my club work.
What I was going to be doing the past six months of all went up in smoke.”
So did a Santa Fe Christian High School musical theater production Hubbard was booked to play. Originally scheduled for October, it has been pushed back to May.
The likelihood of doing any live performances does not look promising, even if health protocols are strictly implemented. Pragmatic by nature, Hubbard accepts this as a situation well beyond his control.
“As far as I know, everything is off the table until we get to the next state clearance level,” the La Jolla native said. “Even then, it will be a challenge. A smaller theater that has to give up two of every three seats for social distancing? It’s hard enough for them to make money at full capacity. So I can’t imagine how that will work until there’s full clearance from the state to operate without any social-distancing protocols.”
With all three of his children taking their school classes online from home, Hubbard has assumed new responsibilities. These include “making sure the Wi-fi is always working” and helping his kids stay focused and grounded.
“My youngest son is in first grade and now has to do all these things he’s never done before. He doesn’t know how to type, so it’s been a technological challenge,” Hubbard said. “Are my kids getting the education and information they need? Do they understand what is going on? Clearly, social interaction is null and void, so how do we keep them from going stir-crazy?”
That is a challenge their dad, a San Diego State University classical percussion-performance graduate, now faces as well. With his regular live dates canceled at least into next year, Hubbard is creating and honing his music — from hip-hop beats to wildly ambitious extended instrumental compositions — almost completely at home.
Until eight months ago, he would rehearse, record, perform and exchange ideas face to face with his collaborators. Now, he does so almost exclusively via the Internet. That’s a major disadvantage in many ways, although Hubbard notes that he is able to record long-distance with musicians whom he could not afford the expense of flying and housing in San Diego.
“Rather than going to band rehearsal or a studio session, it’s now a matter of recording sound files and transferring it to somebody, doing videos and using all kinds of technologies that weren’t so important before,” he said. “It makes you wonder if this is the new paradigm, or if things will eventually shift back to how they were before.
“On a purely musical level, it’s challenged me to focus on things that maybe I skipped over. Because I was busy enough performing, I didn’t have enough time to focus on technical things, both musical and electronic, like video editing or finding better ways to record my drums.
“So that’s been a nice silver lining to be able to step back, and think, ‘OK, I don’t have anything to do for the foreseeable future, so what do I want to work on?’ ”
“On a purely musical level, it’s challenged me to focus on things that maybe I skipped over.” Nathan Hubbard