You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 4 Fundamental Things You Need to Master - #10

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

Jazz is easy - learn these 4 things, master them, wow the audience. Your welcome.1) Ear Training2) Vocabulary3) Sense of Style4) Communication See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today, we're going to give you four fundamental things you need to master to become a great jazz musician. Only four? Only four. All right. I sound like such a dictator by giving those, right?

So jazz is pretty easy then. Jazz is very easy. Four things. Follow these. Okay. Number one, a biggie, as it should be, develop great ears. So what do I mean by that? I mean ear training.

I mean the ability to hear ears. intervals, I mean the ability to identify chords, the ability to be able to respond and imitate phrasing, the ability to have a great rhythmic conception and be able to identify and play in different time and key signatures. All that's part of having great ears and really good ear training. So anything that you do to develop your ears, and that could just be sitting at the piano and working on your intervals, having somebody quizzing, building it up, working on being able to identify intervals with voicings, learning solos, so important, we've talked about that a lot, playing along to recordings, learning new tunes, practicing tunes in different keys. Anything you do to develop

your ears is going to help you as a jazz musician. So as you look at your practice routine, you should always have a big chunk of it dedicated to doing things that are going to develop your ears, and you'll definitely be on the right track. I think that's a great number one. And number two is vocabulary. Vocabulary is absolutely one of the first of the first of the fundamental things you need to master to become a great jazz musician. Why you might ask? I'm asking. Well, thank you for asking. I always use the analogy of poetry. If I wanted to write poetry in French, I don't just have to understand the mechanics of French. I mean, I have to understand that first and foremost, but I also have to understand the vocabulary of

French. I have to understand the language in and out. I have to understand the clichés and I have to have to understand. The cliche is a French word, I believe. That's very good. That's why I That's why I chose it. No, but if you want to be a poet, it's not just reciting sentences in a bland way. You have to understand the language so deeply that you're able to mess with your listeners' expectations of what's going to happen with that language. And jazz is no different. It's no different from painting or filmmaking or poetry. You have to absorb the language in such a deep way and the vocabulary that you're able to sort of mess with people's expectations about what's going to happen in that language.

Even if you don't want to use traditional language, you have to know what that traditional language is or else you're going to sound like someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. So learn the language backwards and forwards. Make sure you understand the vocabulary first. And that can only be done by listening to the vocabulary. Trebien, bien sur. Merci. Okay, number three are four fundamental things you need to master to become a great jazz musician.

Number three is a sense of style. So this, by this I mean something that's personal to you, something that's personalized in your playing, in your swing, in your groove, in the way that you tell your story when you solo. This music, jazz music, improvised, creative music is and should be based around you telling your story. You coming up with a composition every time that you solo. And so if you don't have a sense of style and who you are, you're going to come across with a bland. story, right? A bland improvisation. And so that's just like if you learn all the vocabulary, that's great. And if you have great ears, that's great. But if you have no sense of style yourself, it's just going to come across in kind of an automated way. I mean, we could probably teach a robot or

some kind of algorithm or AI, you know, good ear training and even give it a bunch of vocabulary. But it's never going to have that sense of style. I think they're already doing that, man. They're doing it. They're placing us. I think Google's already got it going on. Machines are coming for us. So that's when this number three of sense of style is going to become so important. And I mean, the proof of this is if you just think about all the great jazz musicians, you know, Miles Davis, Jellyroll Wharton, Herbie Hancock, Chick-Correa, I'm just spitball. Yeah, I mean, great players.

They all have, you know, and, you know, a great sense of style, great sense of personality and the ability to bring that out in their playing. Absolutely. Think about, you know, Sunny Rollins and Chris McBride, and everybody has a vibe and a style. It adds to it. I mean, I've yet to meet a great jazz musician that has no personality. No, it's not possible. It might have a bad personality, but they've got some personality for sure.

Well, and so you have the style, you have the vocabulary, you have the ears, but this brings us to our fourth point, and that is to be a good communicator. If you can't communicate any of this to your audience, you know, you're never going to reach people. It's never going to land with people once you're on the bandstand. So learn how to be a communicator. And this fourth point, this might also be called Confident. because that's what you need. You need to prove to your audience that everything you're doing

has an intent behind it. Even if maybe it doesn't, they need to believe in you that you're going to take them somewhere where they're safe and happy and they want to go. Would that be a safe, happy place? That would be a safe, happy place.

And if you're not a good communicator, I mean, think about this. If someone's trying to tell you a story but they're talking like this and they don't really have any confidence in themselves, and they're just kind of mumbling, you're going to be out of it so fast, as I'm sure most of the listeners of this podcast who just turned off the podcast when I started a mumbling will be.

You have to learn how to present yourself in a confident way and how to present your ideas in a way that really land with your audience. Big part of it. All right. So there you have it. But when you are a great communicator and you have those earlier points of the vocabulary and the sense of style and the good ears, you'll come across as actually having something to say.

and people will see you as confident and not kind of a wrong and strong type of confidence. Absolutely. It's all four of the things, yeah. Okay, well, you'll hear it. You'll hear it. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast. For more information or to hear more of these podcasts,

go to openstudio network.com slash podcast.