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BETHANY CLANCY
Staff Writer
McEwen 202 filled on a Thursday evening is an unusual sight, but not when music industry professor Stuart Shapiro cancels class for a guest speaker who knows his way around the music industry on both ends: performance and business. With a warm introduction, Tom Rizzo, a musician and music producer from Buffalo, New York, sat interview-style next to Shapiro, ready to tell his story.
Unlike usual guest speakers, Rizzo didn’t talk at the audience for an hour with a generic presentation. He told the students the ups and downs of the music industry through advice and stories.
His musical journey started at a young age. He was always a singer and performed in many different choruses growing up. His grandfather, who was the president of the Buffalo Musicians’ Association, had encouraged music in his life, but his father didn’t want that. Eventually, however, his father gave in and got him a guitar one Christmas, and the rest is history. He played in various rock bands growing up because he only knew three chords, but according to him, “that’s all you needed to know.”
From there, he decided to get up and move to Rochester, where he taught music at a community college. That inspired him to take his students there and open his own music school with 18 teachers and about 350 students in total.
Deep down, he knew he wanted to tour, though — not only for the money, but the experience it came with. His first tour was playing guitar for Maynard Ferguson’s 12-piece jazz band. While on tour with them for two years, Rizzo still managed to run his business, until one day before he was about to perform, he got a phone call saying it had burned down.
Rizzo also performed as part of “The Tonight Show” band, “I’m still paying back all of the plane tickets from the several trips to L.A. I had to take,” Rizzo said. He’d have to fly out from Rochester to L.A., and after a rehearsal wait for a phone call saying if he got the gig or not, which he would usually get the day after he flew back to New York. During this time, he had an irregular schedule. “The Tonight Show” would have their rehearsals on Tuesdays at 3:30 p.m., taping at 5:00 p.m. and then it aired. From that Tuesday to the following Monday, the group would be doing shows all over with orchestras and fusion groups.
“The thing about ‘The Tonight Show’ was it was filmed in one take. If you spill the milk, it’ll be on the show,” Rizzo explained.
What he learned from doing “The Tonight Show” is that you get these opportunities by being gutsy and that show business was about creating an illusion. As an artist, he believed in the truth.
“Networking is more important than your ability to write or your talent,” he told the audience. That’s how he got so many awesome opportunities, by meeting people and keeping close connections.
Rizzo got the chance to become close with Jay Leno and write his theme song for his show.
Following that, he started producing and writing music for TV shows, including “Not Necessarily the News,” “In Living Color” and “The Wayans Brothers.” Because “Not Necessarily the News” and “In Living Color” were sketch comedy shows, he had to have different music for each individual sketch instead of scene-changing music like in “The Wayans Brothers.”
He’s worked in the studio with some apparently difficult artists throughout his producing career, including Brian Wilson and Barbra Streisand.
“Barbra Streisand was the most difficult to work with — mainly because she never knew what she was talking about,” he commented.
Right now, he’s working as an independent producer at his home in Rochester, NY. When he got married to his wife, who is also a freelance musician, he started to study finance so they wouldn’t become broke at any point. He said that they made more by investing their money than they did by doing their jobs.
He began writing a book so he could teach his two kids, ages 20 and 23, how to invest their money correctly. Rizzo realized that the real way to get them to understand was by creating an app. So he created “Drip”, an investment app based off of the formula he devised years ago. It puts money each week into a savings account of sorts, and then it gets put into a low risk investment. It’s designed for touring musicians or those with an unsteady job, but anyone is free to use it.
At the end of his talk, he gave some general advice and answered audience questions. Rizzo said that the elements of success were having a good personality and to develop a network of allies.
The biggest changes in the music industry from when he was touring to now are the relentless pushes to pay artists less and to even have them perform for free for exposure. Then came the big question, “Do you have any regrets?” He did. He wishes that, at age 22, he had just went out to L.A. instead of waiting until his 30s to try and make it.
At the very end of the talk, Rizzo and two Fredonia students played a few of his original songs, one of which included his daughter, Anne Marie, on vocals.