Artist Managers: ‘Stories matter’

An intriguing round-robin email, the latest from the Latitude 45 artist management office in Montreal. Laid out therein, details of a UK tour this month (under the umbrella title ‘Wanderlust’) by two Canadian artists. Flautist Lara Deutsch is on the Latitude 45 roster; with her is long-time collaborator, guitarist Adam Cicchillitti. This is Deutsch’s UK debut tour, made up of no less than 10 concerts. Her CV is impressive — she’s a serial competition prizewinner and a BBC Music magazine ‘Rising Star’ of 2020 with a busy, multi-faceted career.

What, then, is ‘intriguing’ about the tour? Well, no location on the schedule has a reputation as a major concert centre – a wide geographical spread, from Penrith in Cumbria and Consett in County Durham down to Ludlow in Shropshire, by way of such towns as Accrington, Clitheroe and Ellesmere Port. More than that, there isn’t an authentic concert hall among the performing venues. All are possessed of a certain beguiling intimacy, including four libraries, a community centre, a village hall and a ‘mechanics theatre’.

So what exactly is the rationale behind Latitude 45’s championing and servicing of such an apparently low-profile UK debut tour, especially as the concert fees involved — and hence the commission income generated — can only be relatively modest in international terms? What’s in it for both manager and musicians? For Latitude 45’s founder and president, Barbara Scales (pictured above), the answer goes beyond the matter of profile. ‘You can’t play Carnegie Hall every week. It’s not always the most important thing to perform in large purpose-built concert venues, so many of which look exactly the same. Yes, playing in front of audiences of two thousand people is a great experience, but emotionally and viscerally there’s something special about playing in a small church or village hall or basement.

‘The sheer variety of venues on tours like this lingers in the memory. You’ll most likely be interacting with the local audiences and concert organisers in a very personal fashion, before and after the performance. In a way, this takes music back to a much earlier period of small-scale music-making. It can be utterly charming.’ And from what I read, the platform manner of the Deutsch/Cicchillitti duo is nothing if not audience-friendly, with plenty of engaging talk around the music.

Lara Deutsch affirms that she is ‘very much looking forward to this opportunity to connect with completely new audiences. My favourite aspect of being a chamber musician is the ability to create an intimate concert experience in which the listener is an active part of the event. We always meet so many wonderful people in our travels whose feedback and stories have informed our programming and musical choices.’

All that said, Scales emphasises that such an apparently under-the-radar tour can still form part of a manager’s career strategy for an artist. ‘There’s a story here, one that can be posted on social media: “Hey, I just did this…” and so on. When I attend conferences and have meetings with presenters, the tale of a trip like this is something I have in my hand that demonstrates exactly who these artists are and what matters to them. It does help build a profile. Yes, as an artist manager I only make a little from such a tour, but it’s one way of keeping an artist visible and working, which always makes a musician happy.’

© Brent Calis

The UK concerts also have the function of playing their part in the Canadian government’s longstanding commitment to supporting projects which further the cause of the country’s music and musicians in foreign parts. The tour has thus benefited from an amount of public funding, as is the case with Wanderlust as the performing duo’s first recording together. The Wanderlust concept was developed during the pandemic, projected online as a means of enabling viewers/listeners to travel the world in the mind while locked down. The repertoire featured reflects the wide variety of countries referenced in music by the likes of Bartok, Chopin, Piazzolla and Takemitsu, plus contemporary composers such as Grammy-nominated Mexican, Gabriela Ortiz and the Canadians Jason Noble and John Armstrong. The UK tour, says Lara Deutsch, ‘will allow us to proudly promote the work of our favourite Canadian composers abroad.’

The missing dimension to this narrative thus far is the means by which this UK tour was pulled together. And here we meet an organisation which, like artist manager Scales, operates as something of a go-between. Blackburn-based arts project facilitator Culturapedia has a history of mining the seams of Canadian musical talent as part of its work in offering diverse artistic talent to local presenting bodies which tap into the UK’s National Rural Touring Forum (NRTF) scheme. As an organisation receiving amounts of funding from the Arts Council, the NRTF’s core principles are that its endeavours should serve local communities which often have limited access to the arts, via performances for which ticket prices are kept affordable. Wanderlust is typical of the way in which tours become assembled across regional boundaries.

Culturapedia offers performers and performances to the NRTF’s network of local centres twice a year. The organisation’s creative producer, Stephanie Jessop, explains that ‘each centre can select whatever they wish for their audiences. Normally as an audience member at a traditional concert hall you enter somebody else’s space — the hall management and the musicians who are doing the performing. Whereas during the tours that we’re involved with the musicians are entering a space that very much belongs to local communities. The performers are far more likely to engage with ordinary people before and after the concert. It’s a very different experience for the musician.’

Barbara Scales agrees. ‘It’s so enriching at the human level to meet very different audiences to those you usually encounter something which will never be forgotten. The uncomplicated bottom line is that a tour like this is in and of itself a good thing for a musician to undertake, simply for the pleasure it brings to all involved. It adds to the colour of everyone’s life-story. Stories matter.’

And, one might add, the tour mirrors the rationale behind that Latitude 45 company name (I know, you’ve been dying to ask). Montreal is located at said latitude, halfway between North Pole and Equator, thus suggestive of the idea that Scales’s managerial outlook is geographically multi-directional. And it certainly stretches as far as Accrington and Ellesmere Port.

Lara Deutsch and Adam Cicchillitti embark on their Wanderlust tour on 3 October with an opening performance at Ellesmere Port Library. All tour dates can be found here.