Boom in Music

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 66, 19 March 1936, Page 10

Boom in Music

Dance band musicians formerly employed on a week-to-week basis are now being offered long contracts which enable them to earn up to £SO a week. Musicians are being lured from ono famous band to another, only to be lured by still more dazzling offers held out by rival bands.

Trumpeters, the most eargerly sought instrumentalists, are receiving offers of £25 a week and permission to make gramophone records and do film work brings their weekly earnings to £SO or more. Contracts extending over a period of years, with options for longer service, are being introduced by band directors as the only means of keeping bands together. Mr Sydney Lipton, director of the Grosvenor House, Park Lane, W., dance band, said:— “The fight among bands to secure talent has become so keen that all the members of my band have recently been put on a year’s contract, with an option for the retention of their services for a further year.” Many of these musicians who are now among the highest-paid workers in Britain, began life in workshops earning £2 or £3 a week. They took up a musical instrument as a hobby. A trumpeter, who is not yet forty, now earniug £2500 a year, began life as a house painter. Trombone and saxophone players are being offered £IOOO a year, and both can insist on being allowed to earn another £8 a day at film studios. The boom is also bringing prosperity to composers, particularly men who can arrange music for dance requirements. These arrangers, as they are called, arc in certain cases being paid £S for polishing up and rearranging a single tune lasting three minutes, ilxpert jugglers with other people’s musical creations are obtaining up to £4.0 a day in film studios, but have no time for dance band work elsewhere.