Music Makers Clear the Air: TAKE NOTE Indianapolis

Brian Paulson has played the Fender electric piano alongside Dizzy Gillespie and other Grammy award winners, but the secondhand smoke still clinging to most Indianapolis music venues these days limits his performances. After many years of playing in smoke- filled rooms, Paulson made a tough decision. He would put his health first.

“When my band broke up in the 80s I had physical withdrawals and I never smoked a cigarette in my life,” said Paulson. “But it was like I was smoking anyway. You still have to get out there in front of people and play, and it really hurts you in the pocketbook to say no.” In fact, he recently reflected on the fact that two of his former band mates died from lung cancer. Paulson recently buried his father, who also died from emphysema and heart disease. His father never once lit a cigarette, but was married to a heavy smoker.

Cigarette smoke is an unfortunate factor in the music business in Indianapolis, a city with a long-thriving music scene that produced guitarist Wes Montgomery and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Recently Paulson started looking around online for smoke-free venues when he stumbled onto a unique site and found that there was a community of other musicians in Indianapolis coming together to address the same issue. “I jumped at the chance to be a part of an organization like this,” said Paulson. “It’s a grassroots thing, but everything starts small.”

Take Note is an interactive community hub for Indianapolis-based musicians and performers who advocate for smoke-free performance spaces. The Indiana Tobacco Prevention Cessation (ITPC) launched Take Note as a pilot program after the husband of a staff member remarked that he wished his office could be smoke-free. He is a musician, and his office is the stage of bars and clubs.

“That idea of a smoke-free workplace for musicians really got us thinking,” said Karla Sneegas, Executive Director of ITPC. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could mobilize musicians around secondhand smoke? We got some musicians together for an informal meeting to begin to talk about how this might work. We wanted to create a network of entertainers and hospitality workers who would advocate for a smoke-free workplace, and as a leader in the tobacco control movement, we knew we had the resources to bring to the table. That’s how Take Note was born.”

Take Note initiated a dialogue within the Indianapolis music community about the workplace hazards of secondhand smoke. Take Note also launched a MySpace page, well regarded as the most popular online social networking tool for musicians. The page is slowly gathering friends and advocates across a wide variety of performing genres. 

“The musicians feel more comfortable now about talking about this and it’s becoming their movement,” said Sneegas. “We had to make sure that we weren’t pushing this as a tobacco control strategy.”

Sneegas and her team instead aimed to provide the tools to enable community building around the idea of smoke-free performance spaces. This was a very different approach from what could have been seen as a heavy handed public health initiative. Take Note aimed to get people talking about the possibilities of performing music without that choking smoke that Paulson decided to avoid. Sneegas and her team figured that there must be others like Paulson out there and with the help of a grant from the American Legacy Foundation (Legacy), developed a network to connect them.

“The American Legacy Foundation (Legacy) has been a critical partner for Take Note,” said Sneegas. “ [As part of its Small Innovative Grants Initiative] Legacy provided the resources to get the project started, and helped us put a plan together while supporting us in our passion to really make a difference in the lives of a special group of workers who do not enjoy the same clean smoke-free air benefits as most workers.”

Take Note sponsored the three day 2008 Indy Jazz Fest, making it completely smoke-free for the first time in its history. Both musicians and festival goers appreciated the clear air, that even at outdoor events, is often hard to find in Indiana.
The Take Note site currently lists smoke-free venues throughout Indiana and will soon begin publishing city-specific guides. The smoke-free entertainment guide is the most visited section of the site. Take Note also launched a summer club series, where the ITPC outreach will broaden to club workers and patrons as well.

The Take Note Web site also features a collection of personal testimonies from professional entertainers focusing on their struggles with secondhand smoke. Here René Hicks, a stand up comic, shares her story of being diagnosed with lung cancer though she never smoked a day in her life. She has now become a crusader against the smoky venues where she performed for years while her health silently suffered.

The Take Note project was an experiment in new strategies for Indiana Tobacco Prevention Cessation. “I’m a public health person, but we had to make sure we did this the right way, which in this case was different from the public health way,” said Sneegas. “Normally we would tell people that there is no safe level of secondhand smoke. The public health message is usually to simply avoid the harmful environment, to walk away. We couldn’t push musicians to turn their backs on work. We had to gain a cultural understanding of the music business.”

When the goal is a cultural reorientation, progress often proceeds in increments. Inch by inch, artist by artist, venue by venue, the Take Note initiative aims to turn the tide. Take Note is now in dialogue with Owl Studios, the premiere Indianapolis jazz label, to facilitate the musicians’ advocacy to play in smoke-free venues as part of the contract process. At this time, only a handful of music venues in Indianapolis are completely smoke-free, but the Take Note initiative aims to turn the tides.

“There needs to be more awareness, more publicity, and more events,” said Paulson. “Then we’ll really be able to show the club owners that we can fill those places to the rafters with people and not smoke.”