In my opinion, it’s a real act of courage and confidence when a musician chooses to make a living making music full-time. But it can be extremely difficult to make ends meet, and there can be a lot of uncertainty in figuring out how to make a decent living. Unless you have a gig or two that pay a living wage, your life is a series of scrambling from gig to gig to make enough money to pay the rent and to feed yourself.

It’s usually a hard life—but then most creatives have that difficulty—so what are the alternatives?

This is an interview with a musician who was not able to make enough money to live, and decided to do something about it. He is LaQuay (Quay) Frazier, who thought he could play music full-time, and found that he was just unable to make enough money, so he turned to doing tours of Frenchmen Street, a strategy that has created an entirely different source of income for him, while using his talents and connections as a musician at the same time.

Quay Frazier: I came to New Orleans when I was 18 to go to University of New Orleans to study jazz because Ed Petersen was in Arizona where I was living at the time, and said, “I want you here in New Orleans.” So I came here to study jazz. And during my years at UNO, I played with Delfeayo Marsalis, and then I played with Irvin [Mayfield] and people like that. Then after school, I

continued playing music. That’s when I got immersed in the Frenchmen Street scene. I played a lot with some brass bands—Free Spirit Brass Band and a couple of others. And then at that time, right when I graduated, I met Derek Villavaso. I remember him going to VASO [now-defunct bar on Frenchmen and Decatur] and he was standing outside. I was looking to make more money and I said “Hey, do you need help with booking?” He’s like, “Yeah!” So then I started booking there at VASO and became pretty immersed in the Frenchmen scene— I was the youngest kid doing booking. So for a period of time, people hated me because I was booking the gig. Musicians don’t usually like booking managers.

So I did that for a minute. I remember leaving New Orleans for a couple of months and coming back to be with my son. And when I came back, I worked with OffBeat for a short period of time. Then from there, I continued doing the booking for places like BMC. During that period of time, I was so poor. I had no money, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Then my girlfriend left me because I was so poor, and took my son. So I was real down—real down and out. I started working at this little visitor center on Decatur Street. They present it like it’s an “official” visitor center, but it’s really a bigger company—they sell a whole bunch of tickets. Basically, the people they have working are there just to sell the tickets to mostly their tours.

They pay you zero dollars if you don’t sell anything. So I was there a couple of days. I didn’t sell anything, so I made nothing. And one morning, I was like, “Man, I don’t see any jazz music tours.” I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I started a business? I’ve always wanted to start a business. So I woke up the next day, started working on a website. It took me about two months to get it all written. And then I got my tour guide license, all the stuff needed by the city.

Was that license hard to get?
Pretty easy. It’s really easy, actually. I say it’s almost like if you’re in fifth grade, you’re trying to take a test. That’s how easy it is—everything you already know. That’s why anybody can do it.

Entry level to pass that test is very low. So I passed the test, and then I put my tours on Groupon, and I was basically doing tours so I could go buy sandwiches, so I could keep myself going. Rather than busk on the street where I could make $20, $30, I could just do this tour, and I would do the tours.

My experience at the “visitor center” showed me that people would come up and say “Do you do tours on Frenchmen Street? We’ve heard about this place, supposed to be the capital of music in New Orleans…” So I started it by thinking “Let me start a Frenchmen tour. Nobody does that.” So I began thinking about it. I talked to other tour guide people, and they said “Oh, that’s not going to work. Why would you do a tour with somebody else? They could do it themselves. It was kind of discouraging. I thought “Maybe you’re right. I shouldn’t do that.” But then one day, I think I remember, I was like, Let me just put this on Group On. Let me see…” And people started buying it. I remember talking to one of the owners of Maison. He said, “That’s a great idea, bro, you should…”. He had a website that focused on Frenchmen, and he said “Let me sell the tour there.” One of the reasons it started was because his website was starting to sell the tours, which was back in back in 2018. It didn’t really start to take off like it has now until 2019. I also started putting my tours on TripAdvisor.

And how did it go?
When I put it on Airbnb Experiences and TripAdvisor, I was able to really take time to take a step back and ask myself, “What kind of tour am I trying to run? What are people getting from it?” I tried to create a tour that I thought people would leave thinking, “Oh, we got more than what we paid for.” I started with BMC. They started giving them a cocktail demonstration. They go in the back and teach them how to make a drink. I organized all these with all the venues on Frenchmen to give discounts with their wristbands, things like that. From there, it just has gone to a point where on every one of the experiences, the tour has the most reviews of any tour on there. They said I was one of the top nightlife experiences in the world. Another company is partnering with me and I did a tour with them— they’re going to be unveiling it on their website, things like that. It has really grown.

So is the tour business that you started growing pretty rapidly?
This past year, I started working with King Garfield. He runs the House of Brass on Broad, right off Esplanade. And I started doing these seminars at the House of Brass for musicians where I’d say, “Come here, and I’ll teach you how to get your tour guide license and how to become a tour guide to make extra money.”

We had musicians and other local people show up. Specifically, I said, “Musicians, please come.” I can see the world differently now. I’m looking at all these musicians, and a lot of them are sad, and they feel like some of them are going through a lot of things. And when I think about what they’re really going through and what’s really changed me, and why I’m doing well and I’m sober, having gone through rehab. But it’s also because I’ve gotten more money. If I was still poor and broke, I would still use my last dollar to go and get drunk or something. Because I have benefited through having these tours, I’ve been able to change my outlook on life, and I realized that I think a lot of musicians don’t view tours as a viable way to earn income. They just want to play music and when they don’t or can’t play music, they don’t necessarily understand what they can do to supplement their income, and still be able to play.

So every tour guide I do have now, I’ve had to convince them. I’ve had to be like, “You know what? Why don’t you come see what I do? Let me sit down and show you how much you can make over a period of time. You could compare that to what you’re making at your gigs now. My whole goal is not to interfere with the gigs you’re playing—it’s just to supplement in between. And it’s taking a long time for some of these musicians. Sometimes, it took me six months to convince someone to just to do it because it’s just not a thing you usually think about doing.

I hear you. I understand what you’re saying.
Yeah. I think my goal now, where I’m at now, is that I’ve gotten a shuttle doing city tours now. I’m trying to get more shuttles because my tour is billed as a “Citywide Tour with a Local Musician.” People are really buying it. That’s more than the tours I do during the day by a lot. But it’s got to a point where I’m having to settle down on it because there too many bookings, and I can’t do it all.

So you need help? Have the classes that you’ve given at the House of Brass helped you get people that you can train and to do tours?
Out of those classes, I had three tour guides. I actually have four that have gotten their tour guide licenses. I would like to do it again because that was last year. One of my main reasons talking to you is just to really get out there that I think my goal is that I want to help musicians, too, whether it’s with me or in their own paths, get their tour guide licenses. The crazy thing is people come in New Orleans, yes for the food, yes for the French Quarter. But when you talk to them, people just say that they want to talk to musicians and learn what it’s like. There’s the allure of people wanting authenticity and there’s a lot of interest from visitors…say, if they didn’t play an instrument in school or something, they want to know what it’s like to have excelled at something and becoming a professional musician. You know what I mean? And it’s bigger than what you think. So that’s why when I’ve included in the tour title things “local musician,” “jazz musician,” people want to just hang out with you, and they want to ask you questions.

Of course, you have to humble yourself. I thought “Hey, will people really want to spend time with me?” That’s what some of these musicians don’t really understand. They think they just want to be on stage, do the gig, get paid, go home. People are coming to New Orleans for a special experience. They want to dive into that world and wish they could be you. So they ask questions. They want to learn about what your life is like.

That’s very astute of you to recognize that—because I think you’re right. Visitors are attracted to food and music, etc., but you are giving them something special and authentic that they can get very interested in.  Banu Gibson [local jazz singer] really had a great idea. She called it a “traditional jazz camp.” What they would do is they would get a group of people— lot of them were from outside the US, It would be, I don’t know, 30, 35 people, and set it up where they’d come to New Orleans at the same time. And then they would do the same thing you’re doing, except that these people also wanted to play. They had their own instruments, and they wanted to play New Orleans music. So it gave them the opportunity to play with a local musician, which was a big thrill for them and gave the opportunity to learn more about New Orleans music and musicians. I don’t know if they do it anymore, but she did it for several years. This is something that can work during the summer, because the summers are good for visitors from outside of the US. Europeans get a lot more vacation time, than Americans do. And they come here and spend a couple of weeks. We have family and friends in Europe, and we are aware that they have a lot more time for vacations and travel. I also think there are some really great markets for New Orleans music in Scandinavia. Scandinavians travel more than any region in the world, and they have a lot of money to spend as leisure travelers; they come and they stay here for a couple of weeks. And they’re crazy about our music.
Yeah, people are crazy about the music. It’s also not just about hearing and experiencing the music, it’s the behind-the-scenes aspects, too. What’s going on? How did you become a musician? What was your life like? It’s real interesting to address those questions and to connect with people.

You can definitely mine the European market for sure, if you can. The Convention and Visitors Bureau [New Orleans & Co.] is more focused on conventions and meetings. I used to bug them all the time, being a gadfly: “How are you trying to get this specific market of people over here? This is a proven market. They travel; they love the music; they have the money. Why not go specifically after this group of people with some direct marketing instead of depending on travel trade shows for group business?” They could specifically target jazz clubs [not venues, but organizations of jazz music lovers]. There are a ton of them in Europe, and all over the world.
Yeah, good idea.

I think that their mentality—and I understand because it’s a business with limited resources—is to first and foremost try to get the biggest numbers of visitors  possible to the city: tour groups, and conventions and meetings and stuff like that. We have the Superbowl in 2025, and understandably, they are focusing on that.
Yeah, that’s something I haven’t done. I’d like go to arrivals and these different conventions for just specifically for tours. That’s probably what I’m going to do next.

You should join and get active in New Orleans & Co. They do have people on staff who deal with leisure travelers. There are also activities and help they can provide. I think they could help you. I just read an article online that said in 2024 “Music tourism has emerged as a top travel trend due to its ability to create emotional connections, provide unique cultural experiences, offer memorable experiences, therapeutic and wellness benefits and social media engagements.”
 But let me tell you, there are people who know about music. But I would just be honest with you, the other 80 percent of people that travel and do things, they don’t typically know much about music. That’s the other side of things. When I first titled my tour, Frenchmen Street Live Music Tour. The reason why I do that is specifically because I know many people don’t see live music ever unless they go to a casino or something like that, and they’re probably not really experiencing it like you can do here. Then I started putting the words “Pub Crawl” in the title. That’s going to entice the younger crowd. That’s what I’ve seen a lot through my tours, just because of the name, “pub crawl,” what I’m seeing seen a lot in the those tours is younger people, 21 to 35, a lot of whom have no interest in live music, especially jazz. But by the end of the tour, they do—they just have to be exposed to it in a way that they can relate to. During the tour, what I have myself and the guides do is to do jazz history. I took time to look at what documentarians like Ken Burns [Jazz] has done and the way he explains it and his idea of what jazz is in the first episode.

So you are targeting audiences by the different ways that you market your tours?
I’ve been able to try to get my guides to get it down to about eight minutes of explaining how New Orleans created jazz, because you might lose somebody’s attention. It’s very complicated. But we break it down into marching band music, the blues, and classical music. And we do all the little things in between. And I like my idea of how classical music got involved in the creation of jazz—that’s the Creole people of New Orleans. So I add that element into there as well, the history part. I really enjoy these people that I know, that I could see on Bourbon Street that don’t listen to live music. By the end of it, they’ve really felt the enjoyment of it. So my goal has always been to create appreciation—to get people who ordinarily would never have come to Frenchmen Street. And you’ll see that in a lot of reviews. You’ll see that people say things like they probably would have never gone to Frenchmen Street, would have stayed only on Bourbon, or that because of this tour, they’ve enjoyed themselves more than they ever thought they could. That is really beautiful.

Those are great testimonials! I think you have jumped on something that somebody should have addressed long ago. My background is in the hospitality industry, and long ago when I first started doing all this, I used to talk to some of the local tour companies about a music venue tour. Back then, they hadn’t done it, but they started to. But I also don’t I think you can just put 45 people in a bus and go from venue to venue.
I did an interview with a company called Tourpreneur. They interviewed me, they also had this guy who does a Bourbon Street tour. But he was like this douchey dude from somewhere else. He saw the potential for Frenchmen Street. He was like “I’m going to do a tour.” But even if he did, it would be completely impossible for him to do one, get people to enjoy it and all this stuff if the company’s just having these random dudes that do Bourbon tours, come to Frenchmen and try to do it. It’s not going to work. The reason why it does work for us is it has to be connected to local musicians. They understand the street. It gives them credibility when they tell the people, “Hey, I play an instrument,” and then they go see him play, and they say, “Holy crap, that dude’s amazing,” That adds so much authenticity to the experience of the tour. I think the local musicians are really the key to it.

So you’re not afraid of competition, somebody else to start their own thing if they would do the same thing as you?
No. I mean, if they’re like a musician or normal local people, that’s fine. But not these dudes that come from somewhere else and don’t understand the music scene here. This dude was doing tours in Ibiza. And then don’t really understand the local music cult. My goal is to have musicians do these tours and to connect with the venues on the street. I’m also thinking of doing a dinner time tour on Frenchmen because people don’t know that there’s good food to be had there, and that could lead right into the music tour. It’s still in the development process. But musicians are perfect for doing the music tour, they give the tour authenticity and provide engagement for the people they would never ordinarily get from a regular venue tour.