Today we’d like to introduce you to Shoshana Bush.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Shoshana. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve always been a singer but didn’t consider it as something I wanted to do until I graduated college and just starting doing it. I’d always worked on my voice since I was a girl, and during college I began performing jazz gigs around NYC, but when I was younger I was simply adamant that singing and music were just hobbies. I can now see all the steps I took before that point of professionalism and know how important they were to my career and my relationship to music. Once I got comfortable with the idea of singing and performing jazz, I just assumed that I would stay within that genre. Though I have consistently continued to pursue jazz and blues, I have to give credit to some wonderfully talented musician friends of mine who saw more diverse musical potential in me. Over the past ten years, I have played and created in an incredibly varied musical landscape: from electronic (Blue Green Gray), to r&b and hip hop (Maya Angeles), to indie rock (Little Fools).
It is through these more contemporary genres of music that I also found my voice and strength as a lyricist and songwriter. Still, though, throughout all of these different years, bands, and sounds, jazz & blues has been my constant. It’s the music that gave me the strength to introduce myself a Musician; the music that I studied, analyzed and explored with a critical mind; the music that literally paid my bills, and the music that I hustled and grew up doing in my 20s in NY. I knew that by moving back to LA four years ago, I’d be giving up the awesome, hard, and fast life of playing jazz every night in bars and restaurants around the city, but I had to remember that I didn’t get into this work for the ego of it. I still play jazz around LA – currently at Vibrato Jazz on Beverly Glen – but my work life has changed and that’s ok. I go to NY a handful of times a year to work and tour with my indie rock band Little Fools and dive into the freelance world here in LA in the in-between. My musical career has shape-shifted so many ways over the past ten years, I guess I can just look forward to wherever it’ll take me next…
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Being a working musician is just plain hard. The hustle is real. Late nights, good whiskey, bars, vans, random people – it can be a lot. Working freelance is hard. Getting comfortable with the flow of working too much one week and not enough the next. Understanding your finances enough to recognize that one moment you’re flush and the next you’re scared, but the big picture is actually ok, or semi-ok, or ok-enough. Attempting a healthy work-life balance is hard. The beautiful high of performing and working on music and being in the scene brings me extreme joy, inspiration, and pleasure. However, I’ve also always loved cooking dinner, having weekends off, and hanging with my non-musician friends/partners too.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
My unique voice is what sets me apart. Yes, I have a raspy quality in my tone, but I also mean my storytelling-voice and narrative nature to the way I sing and the songs I choose. In jazz, I’ve never been a big scat- improvisationalist, relying instead on my instincts in phrasing and intonation. In my songwriting, I tend to walk the listener through a moment, often personal more than profound, Additionally, as a jazz singer, I’ve steered away from the popular 1920s trope/aesthetic that many find are the only way to connect a contemporary audience to the genre. I pride myself on being a woman in the 21st century singing American standards. I want to articulate in my performance that these are not retro-songs done up in a cute gardenia and a red lip but in fact, universal songs about love, relationships, and life. In Little Fools, my indie-rock band, I find I can’t help but draw from my blues roots and infuse my “contemporary” rock sound with instincts from my other musical life. Whether it’s my phrasing, or song structure, raspy moments, or blues sensibility — my rock sound is inspired wholeheartedly by my jazz and blues background.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
My definition of success constantly changes. Because of the past ten years of freelance life, I’ve had to become good at checking in with myself. For example, I was a successful, working, gigging, traveling, jazz singer in NYC making a living playing at small bars and restaurants and making a name playing at old school NY clubs. Had I wanted that life for my future-self, I could’ve stayed, sustained and moved forward in that world, successful and happy. However, I knew I wanted to live in LA, my hometown and where the majority of my family still lives. Now, my future-self has caught up with me a bit and my success-trajectory has narrowed. Life is filled with lots of checkpoints for success and I am searching for a way to combine, balance and make room for it all. Not ALL of ALL, but some of everything.
What I’ve learned/am learning is that it is important – at least for me – to allow myself to reimagine what success means, or can mean, as life moves forward. I am happy with my dog and my guy and my sunshine and my friends and my family AND my music. That version of success is important for me to embrace. I also rely on more concrete measures of success, like the work I’m putting in for this east-coast tour right now with Little Fools. I’ll look at audience turn out, how we treat our band, the songs we play at the show, and how many new fans we connected with. I’ll work towards my upcoming show at Vibrato in LA and measure success again, for that day and that show. With that said, success doesn’t mean perfection. I need to look at my professional success with a critical eye – ask how can that show be better next time, etc. – and as long as it was more of a success than a complete miserable disaster, then I need to let myself be proud and move forward with that in mind.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.shoshanabushmusic.com
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
Adam Primack, Daniela Ordonex, Lucas Hoeffel
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