I have known a couple people who managed to make an OK living as a self-employed musician - not great, but OK. You need to be a music teacher and also get whatever gigs you can. But to do that you need to spend a lot of time looking for students to teach, and looking for gigs. It's not for everyone, and I would think you'd need to be really good at promoting yourself.
Have no idea about being an accompanist/collaborative musician, per se. The people I've known have been teachers and gig musicians. They've also sold their music but that's mostly for promotional stuff, you don't make much $$ that way.
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