MANILA — For more than 30 years, Josetoni Tonnette Acaylar has been singing and playing the piano throughout Asia.
He has provided relaxing background music and taken requests for pop and jazz standards in more five-star hotel lobbies and smoky lounges than he can recall, in Brunei, China, Dubai, Hong Kong and other locales.
In one job in Japan, he was told to take off his tuxedo and work in the kitchen, washing dishes and scrubbing floors.
“Sometimes they would pull me out of the kitchen, give me a jacket and yell, ‘Play the piano!’ and I would have to perform,” Mr. Acaylar recalled with a laugh.
Mr. Acaylar is just one of the thousands of musicians from the Philippines who are prominent in bars, lounges and clubs around Asia and the Middle East. But the band used to be much bigger. In 2002 alone, more than 40,000 entertainers left the Philippines to work overseas, primarily in Japan.
After allegations of prostitution among some entertainers, however, the Japanese government found that many of the female musicians could not actually play a musical instrument, and that many of the vocalists did not have much of a voice.
After the crackdown, the number of performers who left the Philippines to work overseas dropped to 4,050 in 2006, from 43,818 in 2004.
The figure now hovers around 1,500 to 2,000 a year, government statistics show, with Japan remaining the top destination, followed by Malaysia, South Korea and China.
“We only allow musicians and entertainers to work in legitimate establishments such as cruise ships and major hotels,” said Yolanda E. Paragua, a senior official with the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.
“Not in honky-tonk type places.”
The musicians are among the millions of people from the Philippines who work overseas and help power the country’s economy with remittances.
And the Philippine economy is indeed thriving: in 2012, gross domestic product grew 6.6 percent, surpassing the government’s forecast for growth of 5 percent to 6 percent, data released Thursday showed.
The country had the second-highest growth rate in the world in 2012, after China, according to Reuters. Government expenditure in the Philippines jumped nearly 12 percent in 2012, while private spending, which was bolstered by remittances from abroad, was up 6.1 percent, Reuters reported.
In the past, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration held auditions to verify the legitimacy of musicians seeking to work overseas, said Celso J. Hernandez, the head of the agency’s operations and surveillance division.
After the Japanese crackdown, however, the Philippine government discontinued the practice. These days, the government relies on vetting by licensed recruitment agencies, although it still examines the musicians’ paperwork.
The Philippines has a rich music scene, with bands playing hard rock, reggae, jazz, blues and nearly every other form of music each night in numerous clubs around the country.
Musicians in the country, as elsewhere, often dream of writing their own works, signing a deal with a major recording label and achieving fame and fortune. But many of those who do not succeed on that path can still find regular work overseas.
Domingo Mercado Jr., who goes by the stage name Jojo, wrote and performed original music when he left high school, as part of a nine-piece band called Music and Imagination. Some of his friends have had a taste of fame, but he went in another direction.
“I resigned from the band and took a job in Korea,” said Mr. Mercado, 45. “I gave up on my dream.” Mr. Mercado has performed across Asia as a singer and guitarist since 1994. He recently returned from a six-month job on a cruise ship.
Although singers and musicians from the Philippines can be found performing in many hotel lounges around Asia, the field is actually quite specialized and highly competitive.
“A hotel might need many waiters, cooks and housekeepers,” Mr. Hernandez of the overseas employment agency said. “But they only need one or two musicians.”
According to the employment agency, about 1.6 million people left the Philippines in 2011 to work overseas. About 369,000 of them went to work on ships, with the remainder employed in a range of fields, including as nurses, waiters, welders, plumbers and caregivers.
But the sector that draws the most people from the Philippines overseas is, by far, household services. In 2011, 142,486 people left the country to work as domestic helpers. Nurses made up the second-largest group, at 17,198.
The Middle East draws the largest number of workers from the Philippines, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the top two destinations. But there is no guarantee of what awaits employees at any destination.
“We experience a lot of problems with domestic workers going overseas, particularly to the Middle East,” Mrs. Paragua said.
“They are vulnerable to exploitation.” The Philippine government began helping workers go abroad as a stopgap measure to address high unemployment in the 1970s. Today, it continues to say that the phenomenon is a temporary one.
“We are not promoting overseas employment. We are managing it,” Mrs. Paragua said. “It would be best if workers could just stay here and earn a good salary.”
The robust growth in the Philippines last year has not translated into significant job growth, according to government figures released Thursday.
Unemployment was at 6.8 percent in October, up from 6.4 percent a year earlier, and the number of unemployed in the country rose to 2.76 million from 2.64 million.
A person with a relatively basic education who comes from a rural area in the Philippines can earn the equivalent of about $400 a month, plus room and board, working overseas as a domestic helper.
That amounts to a comfortable income in the Philippines that could put several children through private schooling in a rural part of the country.
Musicians, meanwhile, can make as much as $2,000 a month working in five-star hotels, or $800 to $1,500 a month working on a cruise ship, according to performers and government officials.
But they are also vulnerable to exploitation, Mrs. Paragua said, and some earn $400 per month. The money sent home by overseas workers is an important driver of economic growth in the Philippines.
According to a report released by the central bank on Dec. 17, remittances from overseas reached $17.5 billion between January and October of 2012, up 5.8 percent from the year-earlier period.
The movement of workers from the Philippines is not driven merely by unemployment in the country, however, and thus by a large supply of applicants.
“There is a strong demand for Filipino workers,” Mrs. Paragua said. Employees from the country generally have a good command of English and a comparatively high level of education, and they have a reputation for maintaining good work relationships with their employers.
Musicians from the Philippines are also in demand, said Maria Victoria Kinpanar, a booking agent. But she noted that the improved economy in the Philippines had created some lucrative options for musicians who wanted to stay or return home.
“Overseas work is short-term contract work. It’s not stable,” Ms. Kinpanar said. “Some high-quality musicians are now able to find long-term work here in the Philippines.”
Indeed, after spending 30 years working across Asia, Mr. Acaylar now has a regular job playing the piano in the lounge of the Hyatt Hotel & Casino in Manila. But he is still uncomfortable with the suggestion that he is a traveling lounge musician.
“I don’t categorize myself as a lounge singer or lobby pianist,” he said. “That requires formal training. I just play the piano and sing songs.”
nytimes.com
He has provided relaxing background music and taken requests for pop and jazz standards in more five-star hotel lobbies and smoky lounges than he can recall, in Brunei, China, Dubai, Hong Kong and other locales.
In one job in Japan, he was told to take off his tuxedo and work in the kitchen, washing dishes and scrubbing floors.
“Sometimes they would pull me out of the kitchen, give me a jacket and yell, ‘Play the piano!’ and I would have to perform,” Mr. Acaylar recalled with a laugh.
Mr. Acaylar is just one of the thousands of musicians from the Philippines who are prominent in bars, lounges and clubs around Asia and the Middle East. But the band used to be much bigger. In 2002 alone, more than 40,000 entertainers left the Philippines to work overseas, primarily in Japan.
After allegations of prostitution among some entertainers, however, the Japanese government found that many of the female musicians could not actually play a musical instrument, and that many of the vocalists did not have much of a voice.
After the crackdown, the number of performers who left the Philippines to work overseas dropped to 4,050 in 2006, from 43,818 in 2004.
The figure now hovers around 1,500 to 2,000 a year, government statistics show, with Japan remaining the top destination, followed by Malaysia, South Korea and China.
“We only allow musicians and entertainers to work in legitimate establishments such as cruise ships and major hotels,” said Yolanda E. Paragua, a senior official with the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.
“Not in honky-tonk type places.”
The musicians are among the millions of people from the Philippines who work overseas and help power the country’s economy with remittances.
And the Philippine economy is indeed thriving: in 2012, gross domestic product grew 6.6 percent, surpassing the government’s forecast for growth of 5 percent to 6 percent, data released Thursday showed.
The country had the second-highest growth rate in the world in 2012, after China, according to Reuters. Government expenditure in the Philippines jumped nearly 12 percent in 2012, while private spending, which was bolstered by remittances from abroad, was up 6.1 percent, Reuters reported.
In the past, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration held auditions to verify the legitimacy of musicians seeking to work overseas, said Celso J. Hernandez, the head of the agency’s operations and surveillance division.
After the Japanese crackdown, however, the Philippine government discontinued the practice. These days, the government relies on vetting by licensed recruitment agencies, although it still examines the musicians’ paperwork.
The Philippines has a rich music scene, with bands playing hard rock, reggae, jazz, blues and nearly every other form of music each night in numerous clubs around the country.
Musicians in the country, as elsewhere, often dream of writing their own works, signing a deal with a major recording label and achieving fame and fortune. But many of those who do not succeed on that path can still find regular work overseas.
Domingo Mercado Jr., who goes by the stage name Jojo, wrote and performed original music when he left high school, as part of a nine-piece band called Music and Imagination. Some of his friends have had a taste of fame, but he went in another direction.
“I resigned from the band and took a job in Korea,” said Mr. Mercado, 45. “I gave up on my dream.” Mr. Mercado has performed across Asia as a singer and guitarist since 1994. He recently returned from a six-month job on a cruise ship.
Although singers and musicians from the Philippines can be found performing in many hotel lounges around Asia, the field is actually quite specialized and highly competitive.
“A hotel might need many waiters, cooks and housekeepers,” Mr. Hernandez of the overseas employment agency said. “But they only need one or two musicians.”
According to the employment agency, about 1.6 million people left the Philippines in 2011 to work overseas. About 369,000 of them went to work on ships, with the remainder employed in a range of fields, including as nurses, waiters, welders, plumbers and caregivers.
But the sector that draws the most people from the Philippines overseas is, by far, household services. In 2011, 142,486 people left the country to work as domestic helpers. Nurses made up the second-largest group, at 17,198.
The Middle East draws the largest number of workers from the Philippines, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the top two destinations. But there is no guarantee of what awaits employees at any destination.
“We experience a lot of problems with domestic workers going overseas, particularly to the Middle East,” Mrs. Paragua said.
“They are vulnerable to exploitation.” The Philippine government began helping workers go abroad as a stopgap measure to address high unemployment in the 1970s. Today, it continues to say that the phenomenon is a temporary one.
“We are not promoting overseas employment. We are managing it,” Mrs. Paragua said. “It would be best if workers could just stay here and earn a good salary.”
The robust growth in the Philippines last year has not translated into significant job growth, according to government figures released Thursday.
Unemployment was at 6.8 percent in October, up from 6.4 percent a year earlier, and the number of unemployed in the country rose to 2.76 million from 2.64 million.
A person with a relatively basic education who comes from a rural area in the Philippines can earn the equivalent of about $400 a month, plus room and board, working overseas as a domestic helper.
That amounts to a comfortable income in the Philippines that could put several children through private schooling in a rural part of the country.
Musicians, meanwhile, can make as much as $2,000 a month working in five-star hotels, or $800 to $1,500 a month working on a cruise ship, according to performers and government officials.
But they are also vulnerable to exploitation, Mrs. Paragua said, and some earn $400 per month. The money sent home by overseas workers is an important driver of economic growth in the Philippines.
According to a report released by the central bank on Dec. 17, remittances from overseas reached $17.5 billion between January and October of 2012, up 5.8 percent from the year-earlier period.
The movement of workers from the Philippines is not driven merely by unemployment in the country, however, and thus by a large supply of applicants.
“There is a strong demand for Filipino workers,” Mrs. Paragua said. Employees from the country generally have a good command of English and a comparatively high level of education, and they have a reputation for maintaining good work relationships with their employers.
Musicians from the Philippines are also in demand, said Maria Victoria Kinpanar, a booking agent. But she noted that the improved economy in the Philippines had created some lucrative options for musicians who wanted to stay or return home.
“Overseas work is short-term contract work. It’s not stable,” Ms. Kinpanar said. “Some high-quality musicians are now able to find long-term work here in the Philippines.”
Indeed, after spending 30 years working across Asia, Mr. Acaylar now has a regular job playing the piano in the lounge of the Hyatt Hotel & Casino in Manila. But he is still uncomfortable with the suggestion that he is a traveling lounge musician.
“I don’t categorize myself as a lounge singer or lobby pianist,” he said. “That requires formal training. I just play the piano and sing songs.”
nytimes.com
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