A Conversation with Blanche Israël
The East Coast Music Association’s new CEO is barely two months into the job, and she’s already being thrown into the busiest time of the whole year in her new role. With the annual awards week about to take place in Charlottetown from May 1 – 5, Blanche Israël is still getting to know all the players, on and off stage, and is using this year’s Awards to observe and meet as many people as possible.
“I'm trying to be strategic about what I do,” she says. “I don't think it's of value to anybody if I start getting in the way. We have a fabulous team that puts on the ECMA's, and it's quite well-oiled logistically. For the most part, I'm trying to stay 30,000 feet up and observe, and stay in the big picture. If we are evolving in the way we present things, then we have to be thinking about it right now, that's my role.”
Blanche Israël isn’t coming in completely new to the event. She was at last year’s Awards in Halifax, as an artist. Israël is, among other things, a classically trained cellist, and performed in a showcase with Yvette Lorraine, an R’n’B singer from Newfoundland-Labrador. She’s also recorded and toured with Juno Award-winning artist Jeremy Dutcher of New Brunswick. That creative side is balanced with a ton of experience in the arts and cultural industries. Originally from Montreal, she’s an Arts Management graduate, worked in that sector in Germany for a while, and in 2019 was ready to return to Canada. Looking for a new place to find a community she enjoyed, she chose Dartmouth and set up her own company, proScenium Services, offering consulting, strategy, and grant writing (“I called it Grant Therapy,” she laughs). She worked on major projects for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Halifax Regional Municipality, and served on the board of Music Nova Scotia.
She finds herself in that position of being somewhere in between an outsider and an insider, able to see what makes the East Coast stand out in the music world.
“Because I'm not from here, I notice some glaring differences,” says Israël. “I see musicians being like workhorses, working so hard, and not really being able to focus only on what they do best, but doing it on top of another full-time job, or multiple jobs. And this is super-normalized here. They’re hard-working. There's humility and a work ethic that goes with being an artist here, and it's the only way you do it. People are artists despite some challenging systemic things because they need to be. It flows through Atlantic Canada. Even our biggest names, these are working people. I get my hair cut and find out the person cutting my hair is Joel Plaskett's bassist. That's just the way it is around here.”
What quickly becomes apparent is that Israël puts the artist first in every discussion. She knows that industry matters, the businesses and communities that put on shows and sell the products, but ultimately, the ECMA exists to support its performing members first.
"It's a very elegant solution to most of the problems that we can run into if you remember that the artist is our boss,” she says. “They don't know that, but we serve them, we work for them, and then I think everything else falls into place as far as decision-making. Ultimately, I want this to be an organization that uplifts what musicians do day to day to become the best versions of themselves, and to be active in sharing their voices and perspectives. I think it's so important for any society for artists to reflect the society back to itself. We are facing so much right now in the world that we need to process. It's all coming at us way too fast. I strongly believe that we need people in our communities whose sole focus is to analyze that and process that on behalf of everybody else and reflect it back. So, if we are asking those people to also be accountants and garbage collectors, and do this on the side, then we are short-changing ourselves.”
To that end, Israël has put her stamp on the ECMA’s this year, with a new initiative she hopes will be a yearly feature. It’s what she’s dubbed a JAM Town Hall – Joining Atlantic Musicians.
“I’m hosting a kind of listening room with our membership,” she explains. “I just really want to hear from them, and I want them to know who we are, talking about where we could go, and where the membership would like us to go because they ultimately are our big boss. I did our pilot of this when I went to visit Charlottetown in advance of the ECMA's in March. People talk about what's on their minds, really have that open dialogue with us, we put some faces to names, and know that we're not this big scary team, there's a handful of us and we work hard throughout the year, and we want to hear from them. It's at 3 pm on the Friday (May 3).”
There she is, putting the artists first again. “I really want to hear from the membership or even from people in the music community who choose not to be members, and I want to get real about what they need, right now. We have to be conscious of the post-pandemic situation. The performing arts are behind on the recovery. It's taking more time than the rest of the world to recover, it is so, so recent that we've reemerged, where it feels normal to get people together in a room to enjoy music. With the post-pandemic state, the inflation that's going on, the extreme rise in the cost of touring, and the really big influence of streaming giants on music models, all of this has completely changed the landscape of being a professional musician. We (the ECMA) need to make sure that what we're doing is value-added for musicians, and I think we need to be showing up for them throughout the year and showing up in the regions more regularly.”
An Atlantic Canadian by choice, an arts administrator, an artist too, and someone who puts the musician first in all her plans and discussions. Blanche Israël is making hearing from East Coast musicians her priority at her debut ECMA as the new CEO.
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Article written by Bob Mersereau
Photo by Celeste Cole
