You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 3 Essential Groove Elements

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Ever wondered what it takes to really sit in a groove? Or perhaps you've been feeling like you're time is stuck in a rut and you want to take it to the next level. Well, in this episode, Peter and Adam lay down the THREE most essential elements to make you groove harder. Don't say we never did anything for ya.↓ Links from the pod ↓Open Studio Pro | WAITLISThttps://www.openstudiojazz.com/proHave a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

Madam Manus. And I'm Peter Barton. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Jazz, Explained. Brought to you by Open Studio. Go to Open StudioJazz.com for all your jazz lesson needs. Yes. Peter, how do you like my outfit, man?

Do I remind you of anybody? Yes, you do. Let's see. What is the famous male model that was just featured in Vogue? Hey, guys, here are my 20 greatest guitar intros of all time. Peter said I kind of look like our dear friend, Rick Biotto. Did I say that? You said I have the work shirt.

I've got the black t-shirt. I think it was just... Dude, it's a compliment, man. Absolutely. I think it was just because you're both successful music commentary YouTubers. That's a wide spectrum you have of success there. If you're talking about Beato on one end and... No, no, no.

You guys are coming from the same place. Shout out Rick Beato. And... Still making amazing videos, by the way. Absolutely. His interview game has gotten better and better. Did you see his reaction to the usher? Or did you know it's not Usher?

It's Ushare. Usher. Usher. I didn't know that. And I did not see his reaction to the Super Bowl. Yeah, he had a really interesting thing where he was basically just like, you know, Usher and most of the artists that were featured in there are like 90s or early two, late 90s, early 2000s artists. That's right. Which is like 20 years plus, which is pretty amazing.

Yeah. And basically how you have to be like current artists that are really huge. I mean, who are the biggest like artists that have been launched on IG or TikTok or or any in the last couple of years. Yeah, any of them. The Billy Irish is up the world. Yeah, like they couldn't really pull off the way that the Super Bowl halftime show is constructed, for better or for worse, but he kind of breaks that down.

It was very interesting. Yeah, that's very interesting. Have you seen, I sent you a little teaser short of him interviewing Brad Meldow at the piano? I was a little jelly. A little, yeah, a little jelly. That's our friend. That's our friend. That's our guy.

Friend of our show. No, I'm actually really interested in that. I know. I can't wait for that. He's going to do a great job on that. Okay, so following up, oh, first of all, as you said, sponsored by Open Studio, go to Open StudioJadS.com, something I just wanted to highlight that a lot of folks may not know about.

Tell us about the next. You know, we have so much cool community stuff going on. That's been like the biggest thing that's evolved over the last really couple of years from the beginning, but like we've been leaning into it even more because we have such an amazing community of really cool people, many of which are here on the pod as well. That's right. Yeah, yeah. We know.

But one of our really cool community events that we do gathering places, is the listening session, as we call. That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's the next one going to be? Well, the next one is going to be the Bill Evans trio live at the Village Vanguard, Sunday at the Village Vanguard. We've been doing a series of trio records,

like the iconic trio records. We just did The Bad Plus. These are the Vistas. We've done some Brad Meldao. We did live at the Village Vanguard, Volume 3. We've done some Oscar Peterson already. We did Duke Ellington, Max, Roe, Charles Mingus Money Jungle. And the very next listing session,

which is the first Tuesday of every month. So the next one is going to be the first Tuesday in March. Cool. And it's going to be Sunday at the Village Vanguard that Tuesday is. I'm vamping. I'm vamping. I'm fapping. It's all March 5th. And it's available for all open studio members. So you don't have to be

in Open Studio Pro members. It's for all members. You can come on Tuesday. And it's live. It's live at 3 p.m. Eastern. We're going to be listening to the entire album. It's like we used to do here on YouTube and Facebook. Remember back in the day, back in the pandemic day? Yeah. But it's kind of, it was It's very hard to do that. I remember those days. We kicked off of these platforms.

I remember standing at my standing desk at my old house, drinking a mock tail, talking to my friend, Peter Martin, interviewing Artemis for some reason. We're interviewing all these people to it during that time. But due to copyright issues, very hard to do that. But on our bespoke site, Open Studio Jazz.com, we can do whatever we, well. Well, we can kind of. We can do whatever. Kind of.

We can certainly listen to this album. And it's actually a lot like when we watch videos here, we're going to watch Waltz for Debbie here in a couple days. Yeah. But when we watch videos here and we talk about. about what's going on musically. So if you're an open studio member, join us over there, March 5th.

Awesome. Okay, today we are talking about... You get that boo-bo-da-boom. Pretty hard there. Yeah. Don't make me call demotion. Demo-e. I'll do it.

I'll do it. I'm actually going to New Orleans next week. Are you? Yeah, partly a work trip to check in with Debocia and associates. Check in with Debocea? Yeah, they're actually suing me for making fun of them because they are a real law firm.

There's somebody pointed out. No. They offer liens against your basement insurance. And you're like, wait, There's no basement. Today we're giving you three essential elements to groove. Okay?

Three to groove. Three to groove. Right. But the thing is I came in with two and you're like, we got to do three. And then you have a surprise one that I, that's unbeknownst to me. We're so confident that we are lockstep and groove as we possibly were on the introduction. I think we were. That we're going to be able to dovetail right into your third one.

But I was just thinking about like, you know, being able to. groove is such a fun thing. Like it's probably the funnest thing that connects a listener with a player. It's the funniest way to play. Yeah, yeah. It's almost like, you know, you're at a basketball game and you got court side seats. And all of a sudden,

you know, the ref tosses you the ball and then you toss it into the player. I mean, that never happens probably. But occasionally, it's like you're part of the game. I think in groove, as players, for us to be able to understand that when we go to listen to music, no matter what kind of it is, like, what is the connection between tapping your between dancing, between feeling that groove with your heartbeat, you know, that makes you want to get up and just move your body. Like, how do we connect with that?

And what are the specific, like, things that we can work on so that it starts to come out in our playing? Because we all, like, look to different players, like, look to different records and we're like, okay, headhunters, that's grooving, right? Secrets. Ever heard of it? Yeah. That's a grooving record, right?

I'll tell you what, man. It's one of my favorite things to do. I feel so lucky because right before I moved to New York when I was 18 and 19, I spent a couple years in a party band here in St. Louis called Son of Star Child. Shout out to Son Star Child. Had many iterations. But we mostly played Parliament P-Funk covers and James Brown covers. You got to. You might get injured. And so I learned on the job there really how to lock in for, I mean, because we would play, you know, the big payback for like 17 minutes and just groove out and let shenanigans happen, you know, and like let the song come.

to us or we played mothership connection for 25 minutes and it was so much fun right and like you got sucked into the groove you get sucked in and it just becomes this trance for everybody yeah it's so much fun it's important and i think sometimes in jazz because we get so uh intrigued and involved with the more cerebral side of or was seemingly cerebral i should say because groove can be very cerebral and we're going to make it a little bit cerebral because we are going to use our cerebellums today but um no I think some of the things like harmony and voicing, all this stuff that's really fun, of course, very important elements too. But it can feel to us like those are easier areas for us to progress in. Because we can accumulate some more harmonic knowledge, some more improv knowledge.

How do you navigate this chord? And then maybe we let go of the progress that we want to make on the groove side as well. Well, it's so hard. So we've been working on this new Aaron Parks course. And Aaron Parks has an amazing way that he talks about this stuff. So he calls, you know, harmony is the intellect. And a lot of times the intellect is the loudest thing. Our mind is the loudest thing in our existence.

And so it can take over. Well, I got to know this chord and these smart things. Melody is the heart. It's the emotion, right? When we hear melody, it moves us to tears. It brings us joy. It gets us riled up. But rhythm is the body, right?

And so, like, to me, groove is a dance. Like, you have to, nothing is better than playing music for people that are dancing. Yeah. You know, whether that's in a P-Funk cover band or, you know, at a swing band or a jazz group or a tango band or a pop band or whatever it is. But when you're seeing people move to your music, when you're moving to your music, there's something different that goes on than it's just being an intellectual exercise. It should be a dance. Yeah, absolutely. So that, I think, really typifies what I'm going to put out there is our number one essential element.

Do you dance at weddings? I do dance. I mean, not necessarily at a wedding. Are you know, bust it out if, like, something comes on that's your jam? What's your jam? You Ohio players guy? What do you got? Oh, I love Ohio players.

I love Parliament. I love, you know, Stevie of course. I mean, all this stuff, you know. Careless Whisper, when that comes on, what you do? No, I don't. I run for cover. No, no, careless whisper is cool. I sing.

I sing more on that one. It's the melody. It pulls your heart. Pulls your heart. No, I was going to say, but the number one, our first element, I think, really is explained well by what you just said in terms of, like, connection with dance. And that is confidence. Like, that's the element.

So, and the reason I want to say this. with dances, I think a lot of people hear you say that, and they immediately are like, I'm a bad dancer, or I can't feel the beat, or I don't have rhythm. My parents don't have rhythm. My character. I mean, like, there's every excuse in the book, but then people that have seemingly good, natural rhythm,

a lot of times can't necessarily put that together to be able to groove on an instrument. So where do we find not false confidence, like real confidence to be able to groove? Because all these other things that we're going to talk about, well, you know, spacing and these days, a little bit of foreshadowing there, aren't going to matter anything if you don't have confidence because you can't fake this, right?

Yeah. So, first of all, I have checked with our attorneys. They are now our corporate attorneys, DeBosia and Associations. They have allowed us to write a license. We can't say that, but okay. Yeah, I get it. No, they have. They have given us license throughout the 50 states and beyond.

This is the international license to all of our dear listeners to be able to develop their sense of confidence in the group. There are no limits for any individual. This is not the type of thing like I want to become a world-class Olympic level sub-two-hour marathoner. Like, I can't give you a license to do that, but you can have a license to be able to develop

your very deep sense of group on a near Olympic level. Yeah, man. And you have to be able to do that in order to have the confidence to be able to pull it off because if you don't have the confidence, even if you have every other skill that's associated with, with it, you're gonna get anxiety. Did we talk about anxiety last week?

We talked about anxiety, yeah. Shout out to all the comments in the anxiety episode too. That was great. Speaking of confidence in dance, man, can I tell you a little story? Story time? Yeah.

This involves, you mentioned, like, if you come from people that don't dance, I am very lucky. Both my parents have amazing rhythm. They're both great dancers. In fact, the night they met was at a disco in South County,

1975. Nice. Disco called Hondos. My dad saw my mom, lovely Deborah Barth. across the room and Lester, my dad, didn't have any money, but there was a hustle competition. Think about this. They're probably 20 years younger than you are right now. I don't want to think about that. I don't want to think about this. I don't want to think about this.

Let me just tell the nice story. I don't want to think about death right now. No, no, I'm saying, just think about the fact that they were so young. They were kids. They were kids. My dad saw my mom across the room, fell in love instantly. He had no money to buy drinks. So, and this is how the story goes. Story keeps getting better year after year. But there was a hustle competition that night and you would win a nice bottle of champagne, nice and many air quotes. And he grabbed my mom, said, Is that one of the Missouri Champains from the Missouri River Valley? I think it's officially a sparkling Budweiser at that point. No, but he was flirting with my mom. He was like, wanted to buy a drink, but instead he said, let's go win this competition. They entered, they won, they had the

bottle of champagne, married three months later. It's been 47, eight years. And then you were born four months later. Yeah, super awkward. A couple years later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that amazing, though? Talk about confidence. Less Manus. Shout out to Lester Manus for confidence. And for the dancing skills.

Absolutely. So, okay, well, now you just killed everybody else's confidence because what I was saying, you don't have to come from great dances, but you did. Have the confidence of a Lester Manus, right? Like, you see what you want. But that's your daddy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's your daddy?

It's good stuff, man. Less Manus. Good guy. Right. Okay. So what do you do? How do you develop confidence with your, sense of groove if you don't have a less madness, let's say.

I think, honestly, am I asking the wrong person? Perhaps. I have an innate confidence in my ability. No, it's one of these things that you can develop it like anything else by spending. Like if you put some value to it, like I want to be able to groove harder. So identify that and then work on that every day. You could do exactly, like if you put on any parliament or funk, bellic record and you picked any tune and you said i'm just going to learn this song they're usually

one or two chords yeah right maybe three or four yep and you say i'm going to spend a week just grooving to parliament or james brown yeah or uh more stay in the time like one of these bands that just is like unstoppable grooves right like you can spend some time in that groove and i mean maybe it's just a paul chambers like yeah maybe it's well i'm gonna say like it doesn't have to be that kind of thing but whatever it is that you want to, maybe it's Metallica. Like it can be a band that is grooving in their own way. Yeah, yeah. So I was going to say, like, number two, the second element I thought was thinking about

that would be helpful for folks would be spacing. So like that's something that is, that has some commonality between Metallica, Stevie Wonder, Parliament, Paul Chambers, like, you know, certain classical music grew, like any music that grooves, which potentially is almost, any kind of music that we're going to be involved with, I think, on a certain level. Even stuff that's more like free form or whatever. I mean, yeah. There's tight grooves and there's not, but there's always some kind of space.

Like, so when we were playing at the beginning. So those notes I just played, like what made that groove? Space between them, confidence. Right. Also, we'll get to our number three later. Because these are very, anyone can learn the spaceline. This is like the most basic baseline, right? That's eight notes.

Yeah. But the spacing in terms of like, what's the temple, right? And it doesn't have to be Metronomic because if you put on a metronom like this, that's not going to be grooving. What makes this groove? Yeah, and in fact, some of the greatest grooves are not metronomic. They wouldn't fit with the measurement.

But the spacing of it. And this is what you can learn from like funk grooves and stuff that are based upon 16th notes. 100%. I think and bring to jazz that are more based upon seemingly eighth-note triplet, right? deck you can also learn

like the spacing has to be the same each time like you can't go you heard I just killed oh you got a little ugly face it was not good I tried to fit in there and it didn't work

it was hard for me believe me but it's like no but because of repetition yeah it was you know what I'm saying could I just say though anytime Peter

ever has to demonstrate something that's bad he can't do it he can't do it but that's the way it should be right it is you're like that too I am not like that no no no

easily play bad No, no, no, but it's, it like, it should hurt you. It's like if you're, it doesn't feel right. If you're an, like an English editor, editor of the English language, and like you see a miss, like the word through written with the wrong, you know, to me, it doesn't mean anything. Oh, that close enough. I wouldn't know that, you know, but it would bother somebody. Like, it would jump out at the page. Totally.

And so this should be. And so I think developing that confidence is about connecting your ear with what your hands are doing. Or your mouth, like what you're playing on the instrument. And developing that sense of space is by, you were saying, by listening to grooves, to playing along with records that have a groove, especially those, like you were saying, funk, funk records where there's like 16th notes happening or triplets happening. I would say, too, like, I've gotten a lot from playing along with Brazilian recordings. Like, play that same baseline.

Right. Just the same when you were doing. Just taking a simple Basanova rhythm or Samba rhythm and, like, most basic version. but feeling that half note playing along with adieu Roberto de Roberto artists, it makes you groove harder than you think you can

for sure and I think you know the intentionality of it and also the attentionality like in terms of like as you're playing along with something like where are you putting your attention you're talking about parliament funkadelic you know if it's like like there's you hear what I did that

like I anticipated there so I already broke up the groove because I was paying attention to the harmony. So it's not that you don't need to know the harmony or play that, but when you're working on the group, you want to pay attention

just repeating the same thing and not being like, oh, well, this is easy. Like, how can I place this right in the group for 25 minutes, like you said, on a gig or something? But how do you do that when you practice? You don't have to worry about the harmony.

You don't have to worry about the notes. It's tune. But what are you doing? Like in between those places, right? Like, you don't have the drums or the vocals. Can I get you to dance? Can I dance with it?

So this comes to our number three, which is my sort of addition to this. And that's understanding sort of the harmonic, the rhythmic vocabulary of the music you're trying to play. In the case of the groove you're playing there, of Parliament Funkadelic, in the case of most black American music,

in the case of the Samba, the Basanova, what you're really feeling, the most important thing is the one. So even when you're playing a groove like that, where everything is off the one, it is off the one, but the one is the, like, this is why James Brown is like, on the one is parliament is on the one right all i mean it all starts with a big crash symbol on the

one every four bars every eight bars right and we're just even lays into it right like you can feel that everything else is off of that off of that one like it has to be on the one if you're doing it so that the one is nebulous the groove gets lost so fast and maybe not for musicians this is how musicians do metronomic things that are crazy and feel weird. It's also why that kind of music is not usually universally loved by a broader audience because people get lost with the groove. And that's not to say that it's worse or better or anything else. It's just saying that, like, rhythm is a dance.

And most people feel rhythm and feel the dance on the one. No matter where you are, things happen on the one. Of course, in Brazil, things can happen on the two. Like, things can happen anywhere. But there's usually a landmark beat. Yeah, there's like a rhythmic pattern indicator, whether it's played overtly or not there, with a lot of these different grooves that we're talking about that would fit into one, even if no one's ever played, even if it's avoided for some reason.

That's right. Even if the clave is like not. Is off from that. There's something there that is like the lock for the dancer, right? And look what you're doing there. You're rocking. And that's the back beat, too. Right.

Exactly. There's a, I mean, if you think about, again, if we go back to Sambu, duns, one's dois. Unz. Doens. Like there's this rock to it that needs to be there for the dancer. So I think for me,

grooving, again, I know we said this 100 times already this episode, it is the dance. It's the hustle. It's like, it's all about finding that rock back and forth.

Yeah. And I mean, it makes it fun. And I think that, you know, the confidence really can come out of connecting with that dance immediately. Like, everybody can do that. Even if you're embarrassed to do that in public,

Even if you feel like you're never going to be able to get on the dance for that's not really the kind of dance we're talking about. I mean, I think it can be manifested in that and it should be in certain styles of music. I mean, if we play like what we started with, you know, I don't necessarily people to get on dance. You know, but you should be like tapping your foot. There should be something like there should there should be that, you know, that thing that brings a smile to your face not just based upon the blues or the changes that you're playing. Yeah. But like, that's a groove. That's my groove.

That's my jam. Even things that aren't like, you know, traditional black American music, but are more like European classical music. Like the waltz. Again, it's still that rock back and forth. You wouldn't go like, one, two, three, one, two, three.

One, two, three. One, two, three. And it's like, it's one, two, three. It's a sway back and forth. It's in all music. It's movement, right? It's forward propulsion. And it's these landmarks of the groove.

And it's the rhythmic length. You got to know, like, I was, we were talking about. Because this is the placement that we put all the other cool stuff, harmony, the mellia stuff. Like, this is what, what are you placing it in? It's kind of like, now, I've got all these different ideas and I'm looking at a calendar of the whole year. I want to go to this place. I want to do this.

But it's just like a jumbled mess here. It's like, how do you place it in there? Because time is just going to be keep going. Like, oh, wait, let's move this around. Let's play. But you have to understand that time continuum, that rhythmic continuum. And you have to understand it in the context of the music you're playing. Like, Peter, we mentioned before the show, like, you have such a great group.

you're such a strong player. But if we put you in the context of like a hardcore band, like a hardcore music fan would probably not find your groove to be in the pocket. Because that kind of music has a crazy

like front of the foot kind of pocket. Same thing if you were to do like even classical music, like we have so many classical music friends from the orchestra over here. Whenever they hear someone who's not a classical musician play like Bach or something,

they're like, nah, it doesn't quite feel right. You know, like it doesn't have the rhythmic. And even though that's looser, there's no on the one for that, but there is to them. There is something that has to happen to make a few good. And with that groove, like,

look at this guy. You know, like, like, when you come to the end, yeah, and the breath actually affects the groove a little bit. Whereas like, doon, doon, like, nothing, like, everything is going to, you might be get, dang, damn, but like that boom, it's like, it's a tighter kind of

this is a different group, right? 100%. But it has to be, you have to find what that is, listen to it, there has to be some part of your body that's connected with that. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. I love. I love it, man. I love a groove. I love a groove. Groove is great. No, no, and it's like we don't talk about it enough, and so we don't want our dear listeners and dear viewers.

Hey, if you're listening to this and you haven't seen us. Hey, lucky you. Come on. No, but go check us out. Leave us a comment. Leave us a gala. Gala. Gala. Gala. Gala. It's a gala. It's gala. It's gala. Which is gentlemen and ladies agreement, which just means that you're going to subscribe. It means that you have subscribed. It means that you have it here. What I don't want to see is people. putting Gala and they haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel. Because that's free. Right? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. That's all we're asking for. Nothing's free. And world peace. That's true. Nothing is free. Nothing in this world is free. But please consider

doing that. We meet over at the YouTube. We've had some wonderful comments. Yet again, we have not gotten in there and mixed it up. But we read almost all the comments. Thank you guys for the cool comments about the anxiety. I had a little anxiety about that episode. But the beautiful comments that folks gave us alleviated my anxiety. I knew it would too. Yeah. I was so happy. that you shared what you shared and we talked about

what we talked about and it's great. So that's the bespoke you'll hear it. There's been a little confusion about that too. So quickly to clear it up, you'll hear it has its own

YouTube channel. Separate from... Outside of the... Open studio channel. Exactly. Yeah. Until next time. Open studio.

You'll hear it. On the one, on the one. One.