Interview: TJ Schaper, Talent Buyer and Trombonist

ITHACA, N.Y. — TJ Schaper, the talent buyer for Deep Dive and four other Finger Lakes rooms, sat for a 33-minute interview with the Pulse of Ithaca Podcast recorded on the Deep Dive main stage in April 2024, weeks after returning from a run of reunion dates as a trombonist with John Brown’s Body.

The number he supplies without being asked twice is the one that frames everything else. Deep Dive’s fire capacity is 191. The outdoor venue at Lincoln Hill Farms in Canandaigua held 1,500 the previous season and was expanding to 2,000, with a larger stage going in as the two spoke.

Schaper books Deep Dive, Lincoln Hill Farms, Lincoln on Main, The Range and The Upstairs. Episode 14 was published to the show’s YouTube channel on May 26, 2024, and is embedded in full below.

Eighteen hundred loads of fill

The expansion at Lincoln Hill Farms came up early, and Schaper’s account of it is mostly earthwork. Asked whether the grounds had to grow to take another 500 people, he said yes and no, and gave a figure.

“I think 1,800 dump trucks involved for this new one,” he said, then corrected himself. “I thought it was 1,800 different dump trucks, but it was 1,800 loads of dump trucks, so it was like the same 20 or whatever.”

He described the shift in scale as a different job rather than a bigger one.

"It's just been really fascinating to me to kind of dive right into it and learn about how people at that caliber communicate and how things get done."

TJ Schaper

The Lincoln Hill Farms dates announced at that point were Burning Spear with Kabaka Pyramid and Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad on June 12, Xavier Rudd with Bobby Alu on June 14, Donna the Buffalo on June 21, Umphrey’s McGee on July 7 and The Infamous Stringdusters on July 19.

Near the end of the episode Schaper disclosed a hip-hop bill for Sunday, June 9 that had not been announced yet, naming Slick Rick, the Sugarhill Gang and the Furious Five. He named a fourth act on the same bill, which is not rendered clearly enough in the recording to print here.

Duct-taped to a tree at the first rehearsal

Schaper started trombone in seventh or eighth grade for a reason he does not dress up. “I was super lanky, still am,” he said. Upperclassmen recruited him into a ska band before he knew what ska was.

“I was like, wow, there’s trombone in this music that I like,” he said. Getting his parents to drop him off with a senior who drove took some convincing, and the welcome was not gentle.

“They actually duct-taped me to a tree at the first rehearsal,” he said.

The band had him gigging through high school in clubs, makeshift venues and basements across the Northeast, which is what made him take the instrument seriously. He applied to Ithaca College intending to become a music teacher, got in, and then spent a good deal of time not in class.

“I was even cutting class and just playing with bands,” he said. “I’d be on this stage a lot where we currently are.” The room was Castaways then, and later The Dock, before it became Deep Dive.

Quitting in a principal’s office

After graduating, Schaper moved to Queens and taught high school on Long Island: concert band, jazz band, music theory. He had started a master’s in classical trombone at Purchase College, partly because New York State requires a master’s within a set window to keep a teaching certification.

He kept driving up to Ithaca on Wednesday nights to play reggae night. That is what ended the teaching career.

“Because of that, long story short, John Brown’s Body got in touch with me, do you want to audition for the band,” he said. A separate invitation followed from a bandmate: come to France.

“And so then I went into my boss’s office and quit,” he said. He put the year at 2014 or 2015.

A festival that started as a homework assignment

The master’s he eventually finished was in arts presenting and live entertainment management at the University of Miami, an 18-month online program he took one or two classes at a time, in seven-week blocks, while touring.

The program produced a working festival. One class project was to create one.

“That’s where that came out of,” he said. The result was Finger Lakes Thaw, a multi-venue Ithaca festival that ran for a couple of years before the pandemic ended it. Schaper said the model was New York City’s Winter Jazzfest rather than the South by Southwest comparison the hosts reached for, though he allowed the resemblance.

He also described watching the business from inside a touring operation, including a run with Dispatch that traveled with semi trucks alongside the buses.

“You go to a different venue and you see all these new people working behind the scenes and trying to figure out without asking, what is that person doing here right now,” he said. “Are they the promoter, are they the production manager, are they the owner of the venue.”

The part of the job that weighs on him

Asked about the hardest part of booking, Schaper did not name money first. He named the number of local bands who want a slot.

“One of the things I think people take for granted is how fruitful this place is where we live when it comes to creativity, specifically music,” he said. “There are so many bands. There are so many bands starting. There’s so many people who want to play.”

"That's one of the toughest things, navigating that and trying to hold space for everybody and give people opportunity and set them up for success. That has been incredibly tough and it weighs on me a lot."

TJ Schaper

He described the other half of the difficulty as explanatory: getting across, without condescending, what it costs on financial and emotional levels to keep a room open. He noted that the building he was sitting in has been named about ten different things.

Having been the artist first is the part he says carries over. “I can relate to when there’s a touring band, they’re getting out of a 15 passenger van,” he said. “I know how they’re probably feeling when they had to get here for 1 p.m. load-in when they had a show in Brooklyn until 2 in the morning.”

Red Rocks on Father’s Day, and a solo nobody heard

Asked for memorable moments, Schaper gave two, and the second is not a triumph.

The first was a sold-out Red Rocks with Nahko and Medicine for the People and Trevor Hall, on Father’s Day, under a full moon. The band pushed the members’ fathers out on stage and had them wave phone lights.

“My dad was doing like SOS, like so quick back and forth,” he said.

The second was in the Czech Republic, at a festival the band arrived at without knowing its size, on a stage The Cure would play later that night. It had a runway roughly 60 feet long.

“I was like, screw it, I’m going to run to the end of that and take my solo, and I ran to the end, dropped on my knees, I felt like a rock star,” he said.

His manager met him afterward. “He’s like, hey, that looked great, but your wireless mic cut out, no one heard you.”

What he tells people who want the job

Schaper opened his answer to the advice question with “don’t do it,” then withdrew it and gave a straight one built on a line he attributes to a local bandleader: community is a verb, not something you belong to.

“If you want to be involved in a scene you have to actually be involved,” he said. “And not be involved because you want to be involved. Be involved because it’s important to be.”

He put the ratio at “80 percent hang, 20 percent ability.”

Asked when he is most in his element, he answered without any of that.

“Ten a.m., second cup of coffee, behind my computer, home alone,” he said.

Two years in, and a plan to leave town

The forward-looking part of the interview is modest. Deep Dive was approaching two years open, and Schaper described the coming stretch as a chance to stop acquiring and start running.

“Maybe you can kind of breathe a little bit and go through your routines and your rhythms without trying to establish and build everything,” he said. He said he was working to delegate and to get more people invested in the operation.

The other item on his list is to tour again, and his reasoning is about the day job.

“Some of the best teachers I ever had were actually like the science teachers that went home and actually did experiments,” he said. “I think that’s really important for me, to go back on the road and see what’s going on and then bring it back here.”

He struggles to switch off, he said, particularly in a small town where going out means talking shop, and he deals with agents in Australia, on the West Coast and in Europe. Asked whether he sets a day or a time as off limits, he said he had tried both and had not solved it.

“I’m still pretty fresh into it,” he said.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

The author co-hosts the Pulse of Ithaca Podcast and took part in this interview. Quotations are transcribed from the episode audio and lightly trimmed for filler. Speaker, band and venue names have been corrected against published listings where the automatic transcript garbled them, and names that could not be verified against a published source are omitted.

Pulse of Ithaca Podcast, Episode 14, “Interview with TJ Schaper, Talent Buyer and Trombonist,” running 32 minutes and 45 seconds, recorded on the main stage at Deep Dive in Ithaca, New York and published to the show’s YouTube channel on May 26, 2024. The recording date is not stated in the episode. Internal references place it in April 2024, after John Brown’s Body’s April 13 show at The Cabot in Beverly, Massachusetts and before an April 26 date at The Range.

Sources: Pulse of Ithaca Podcast, Episode 14, Pulse of Ithaca Podcast channel, John Brown’s Body, Kabaka Pyramid, bandsthatjam.com, John Brown’s Body 2024 lineup.