About Me / My Journey to the Research

As a musician, I have spent 25 years studying, improvising and teaching in the jazz lexicon, twenty of them in New York City. When I moved to New York in 2002, I was highly inspired seeing the most clever and skilled artists and improvisers the city had to offer, and I spent the years 2002-2019 building a body of work. My dream was to save enough money as a full-time freelancer to release an original jazz album on a reputable jazz label and build a career. The album cost $10k to record, press, and release physically alone. I also paid an additional $9k in live performance costs to my dear musicians and engineers, which is known as the bandleader tax, which I paid out between 2013-2020. These were years in which I lived on less than 15k per year as a piano teacher and freelancer in order to practice the craft and create the work. My focus was entirely on earning a living in music, which meant difficulties in maintaining relationships with those who were not also freelance musicians, out of survival.

Being a musician comes with a trade off - you get to make music, but the lifestyle is accompanied by an endless cycle of mental obstacles, financial instability, social depletion while promoting gigs, losing money, constantly working (unpaid) to get unpaid work, spending loads of time alone at my instrument (the piano - perhaps the most isolated instrumentalist as we are required to master all functions of harmony, melody, and bass), battling the fatigue of teaching and conditioning beginners while de-conditioning my own practice, withstanding a field with an extreme gender imbalance, and constant body, mind, and social fatigue from the highs and lows of performing and bandleading. (Plus a bike accident requiring multiple clavicle surgeries, physical rehab, carpal tunnel/tendonitis / repetitive use syndrome issues, exacerbated by the physical pain and fatigue from schlepping gear and instruments all over the city as a freelancer and multi-instrumentalist.) The profound thing: my identity as a musician dictated how I walked through the world, how I interacted with people, and how I introduced myself. It opened doors and came with rewards, but also an intense isolation and feeling I had to pretend I was always fine to be consistently booked as a musician and paying my rent - in short, endless insurmountable social, financial, and psychological costs. It was no wonder I eventually battled with burnout, depression, and anxiety related to performing and teaching during the pandemic, as life revealed mandatory abstinence from performing and allowed me to step back.

In 2019 while balancing international tours in Europe and North America, a home in Brooklyn between a full-time job and residency in Kuwait, and the exhausting year-long debut album release - I discovered the field of music psychology. By then I had long been speaking out online in my community about the hurdles for musicians and #metoo in the jazz community on Facebook. I was searching for wisdom that would shed light on musicians’ struggles. In 2019 I enrolled into a master’s degree in music psychology research program at the University of Sheffield, while teaching music ensembles and students overseas full-time at the opera house in Kuwait.

As I encountered the first year of coursework, I felt healed just by reading the different cognitive studies on occupational hazards and psychological stresses of practicing, teaching, and performing music. During my coursework, I was disheartened to find zero published academic studies on the mental health of US jazz musicians, except one retroactive study examining biographies of famous 1950s jazz musicians (Wills, 2003). Systemic racism and devaluing of the contribution of Black American Music (Iyer, 2019) has focused on the imbalance and focus on classical music in institutions, and in academic literature.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I lost my overseas teaching job and my home overnight, given 24 hours to leave Kuwait before the airport and borders closed on March 13th, 2020. Unable to return to New York, I went to Oman, where I got stuck in quarantine for three months as airports shut down globally. I watched with horror as musicians I knew and loved ones passed away, while my global livelihood and the livelihood of my community in New York evaporated overnight - rendering us helpless, questioning our purpose and meaning in isolation.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I felt research on the wellbeing of musicians became even more crucial to the community. Finding an unacceptable lack of adequate published research on the mental health of jazz musicians, I focused my graduate research study and thesis on a mixed-methods study of the mental health of jazz musicians in NYC to provide long-needed statistics and qualitative information about the community. I am grateful the research got me through the most unprecedented of times (read: the most meta time in my musician life). I received honors in courses including psychological research methods, psychology of performance, musical development in the first 14 years of life, and music in everyday life (something I credit the canceling of gigs to!). I reached a determination to publish the results.

From January until October 2021, I conducted my dissertation research on the mental health and well-being of the jazz and improvising community in New York City. Since 2021, I have presented my data on two podcasts and four global conferences (ICMPC-ESCOM 2021, SEMPRE October 2021, SysMus ‘21, This is A Movement Jazz and Gender Symposium in January 2022). I continue to contribute research and data collection and analysis efforts both independently and for the Music Workers’ Alliance and give speeches and presentations of my research at global conferences and podcasts in efforts for the community. I share the data on my research Instagram @jazzpsychologist, and on LinkedIn, and have served on the steering committee of the Music Workers’ Alliance since 2023.