Three Days to Save a Concert at the New Morning

A phone call on a Wednesday evening. An album release concert at the New Morning on Saturday. An accordionist flying abroad for family reasons. And a bandleader telling me, very calmly: "We don't have scores, only audio files." What happened next is a story I will not forget — and one that convinced me, definitively, that a band without a shared repertoire is playing with fire.

The call

I am an accordionist. I am sometimes called in as an emergency substitute — that is the lot of working musicians, and I have learned to live with that unpredictability. But three days before a concert at the New Morning, the Parisian jazz and world music venue, this was a different matter. An album release concert. An audience expected. A recording planned.

The bandleader explained the situation: their accordionist had to leave the country urgently, family reasons, no choice. Could I cover? I asked: "Do you have scores, chord charts?" The immediate reply: "Not really. Some audio files, some demos."

I said yes, to help friends — and some stages are not to be turned down.

Seventy-two hours on headphones

What the bandleader could not have known was that my building was under renovation. Right in my apartment. Drilling, pneumatic hammers, a creaking goods lift — from the ground floor to the fourth, without interruption, from 8am to 6pm. Three full days.

I did everything on headphones. Sitting at my desk, the audio files looping, slowing passages down, rewinding, transcribing note by note what I could work out from the recording. Melodies sometimes buried in the mix. Harmonic progressions I had to reconstruct by ear. Structures to guess between bursts of drilling.

I wrote out my scores by hand, my chord charts, my structural annotations — the repeats, the breaks, the silences, the variations between verses. My own performance cues, my visual landmarks, my little personal arrows that only I can read but which, on stage, are worth their weight in gold.

No rehearsal with the band. No time. Not possible. We would meet directly on stage, the evening of the concert.

"But I have scores!"

On the night of the concert, backstage at the New Morning, several musicians came over to me. They thanked me warmly for agreeing to the last-minute substitution, saving the concert, showing up despite the impossible timeline. I told them it had been tight, that I had transcribed everything by ear in three days, that I had only had the audio files to guide me.

And then, silence.

One musician looked at me, slightly puzzled: "But… I have scores." Another: "So do I." And a third: "That's a shame."

The bandleader had not known. He had not thought to ask his own musicians before telling me he had nothing. Each of them had their scores, their chord charts, their files — somewhere in a personal folder, on a hard drive, in a cardboard sleeve at the bottom of a bag. Resources that existed, that could have been sent to me in ten minutes, and which cost me three days of intense work.

What this story says about us, musicians

This mishap is not an exception. It is the norm in most bands. Each musician manages their own material in their own corner. The band's repertoire does not really exist as a shared entity — it exists in scattered fragments, in email threads, WhatsApp conversations, Google Drives with expired access permissions, folders no one remembers the name of.

While everything is going well, it holds together. But the moment there is an emergency — a substitution, an absence, an unexpected concert — the house of cards collapses. And it is always someone who pays the price.

The rest of the story

This band uses Music Drive today. Scores, chord charts, rehearsal recordings, structure notes — all centralised, shared, accessible from any device. When a substitute arrives, they receive an invitation, open the app, and have everything they need right in front of them.

I wish it had existed that Wednesday evening, when my phone rang.