You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5 of Our Favorite "Jazz" Sounds - #162

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

In today's episode, Peter and Adam list their seven jazz sounds. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And this is the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. That's right, man. What are we got going on today? Well, today we have, we're going to talk about five of our favorite jazz sounds. And I noticed you have jazz in quotes.

Tell me about that. Why I put jazz in quotes. No, I think this is, I meant to say, like, these aren't necessarily exclusive to jazz. Yeah. But these are definitely, they're more, they happen more in jazz than any other kind of music. And they're not, it's not like really like a lick or. anything like that, but a specific lick or anything, but really just like a sound that you hear, you know, that really hate you.

Maybe kind of, and maybe for some folks, it's almost like a subliminal thing when these sounds are placed outside of a typical jazz performance where it's like jazz, you know. I think so. You mean, a lot of these actually are used by like, you know, when a classical composer writes a jazz thing, right? Right. Let's go. Let's do a couple bars of jazz.

Yeah, exactly. They employ this could be five of our favorite jazzy sounds, in quotes. Jazzy. That's a great word. Okay. Well, so what's the first one? So the first one is the casino lick. And we're going to shout out my buddy, Matt Villinger, a really awesome pianist from St. Louis, originally now living in Kansas City.

I think he studied with you for a little bit when he was over at SIEwe. Talented kid. Matt is a very talented kid, but he put together this video. Probably about 35 now. I'm not a good kid, but he was. He put together this great video on YouTube. If you just YouTube the casino lick, you'll see it. It's really hilarious.

and it's all these pianists that are doing a similar kind. I mean, it's actually there's different variations of it, but it's this way that all pianists do at some point, basically where you're just running your fingers in the same position. You know, kind of get this. And saxophonists kind of do this too. Every instrument has a casino lick. This is kind of ghetto.

Well, that's the actual. That's the actual casino, yeah. That's Robert Glasper. I mean, why is his like the coolest of all of all? Grass was As Herbie Maniacal Herbie Is that you?

That's Peter Martin Yeah So you get the idea This doesn't It usually happens In some kind of Apex of the solo You know

It's never I've never seen it in a book Or a lesson No It's really just all about You know From your gut I never heard the term

I guess I'm guilty I think Phil Might have come up With that term What's crazy about this This is so well put together What he did But I'm just

looking on YouTube. He has 33 views. Oh, no. I'm shocked. Yeah, so let's get his view count up. Let's get some comments on there. All right. I think he kind of put it native in Facebook, so there might be, it went a little viral. But yeah, just search The Casino Lick. It's pretty awesome. It's a nice little funny video. All right, what's number two? So that's, yeah, that's an awesome sound.

Number two is the plunger mute. I mean, that's classic jazz sound. Classic jazz sound. In line with what I was talking about, whenever, like, you know, a composer wants to do a classical composer like, let's do jazz. The plunger mute, the trombones. Let's get the exact same notes I was intending on writing anyway, but throw a plunger. Yeah, and so it's trumpet, trombone, that's pretty much it. Yeah, I mean, the trumpet plungeer mute, I mean, it's talking, you know,

and that really defines a lot of the sound of jazz is, you know, emulating the human voice. That's a classic way to do that. It's a classic iconic. I mean, even outside, that's what I was saying before about outside of jazz, you know, wamp, wamp, wamp, wamp, wamp, kind of a like. you know, a downer as the sitcom goes to commercial. Classic.

And I don't know if you knew this, but I don't know, what is your brass experience like? Man, I... Hands off or hands on? Hands off. I wanted to play the trombone going into middle school, and I couldn't make a sound on it. Oh, wow. And, you know, like in fifth grade, they brought all the instruments to the library. Yeah, yeah.

And I couldn't make a sound on it. I could make a sound on an alto saxophone, so I ended up playing alto all through middle school and high school. Oh, you played alto? Yeah. I thought maybe it was... You're such a polite guy. They brought the trombalt. to the library.

You're like, I couldn't make a sound because I'm in the library. I'm trying to be. Oh, we're supposed to be quiet in here. But was that the kind of thing, like they used to always do this in band, like, because you're kind of a big guy, large, tall, gentlemen.

I'm not, I'm a large person, yeah. But how they're like, oh, give the trombone or the big guy, give the piccolo to the young girl. Yeah. And you know what, when I, so in high school, when I wanted to join the marching band, I couldn't make a sound with any presence for all these. So I played drums and I got really in the drums.

And I wanted to play snare drum, but I was the big guy, so they gave me the bass drum. But I eventually moved up to snare drum. I mean, band directors is just purely, it's not like interest or talent. It's all about physical appearance. But I got to say, man, and I know we're kind of diverging here, but that bass drum, you know, we had five bass drums in our marching band. We had kind of a big marching band when I was there. And I was the top bass drum.

So even I had like the littlest bass drum. But it's very complicated to do like, do, like we were doing all those things. It's really cool if you can get it going. I did the trip. This is how understaffed my high school marching band was. I played triple tombs for a while, which, you know, is the three of them. But I think it's kind of heavy and it's got that whole harness thing. Yeah.

You got a walk. The big polyester uniform. Not a good memory. Yeah, yeah. All right. So, number three. So we got Casino Lake, plunger, mute. What do you got for number three?

Number three is the brush swirl. I mean, this is such a sound that's iconic to jazz. Yeah, I'm specifically thinking about, you know, the ballad, just brush. Kind of sweep. Yeah, the sweep. Just kind of making this texture over the music. I mean, of course, it's used in other music. but you really

this is used mostly in jazz and is very common. Well, I'm thinking about like, man, these truly are iconic sounds. I'm glad you said favorite because this is one of my favorite a great brush sound. Like, I guess it's Jimmy Cobb

on someday my prince will come at the beginning of, man, when is the ballot? One of the ballads, I think it's the second tune on there. You know, you just like before when Kelly even plays the chord, you hear the beginning of that brush sound so beautifully recorded.

like this fog in the sense. I mean, it's just such a cool idea. It is. Whoever the drummer was who first did that. Yeah. Yeah, I hope he gets recognition. Probably not. Probably not the way things are going now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so now we're at number four, our favorite jazz sounds. I think for this one, we're just going to say swing, just the general and, I mean, kind of typified by the ride symbol, stick hitting the ride symbol, but also the bass. I guess it would be the bass walking with that, just that swing, fiend, kini, Ding, ding, ding. Yeah. And you can't see me now, but I'm with my right hand.

I'm swinging. You look like I'm swinging. I look like I'm swinging. Like a rusty gait. Yeah. But I mean, that is really, I love that feel. Like, I still remember, like, connecting with this music because of that. I was like, it's a groove, it's a bounce, you know.

For me, there's no better feeling than when you're watching a band that's truly swinging. Right. And everybody's. Well, listening to a band. That's it even better. Yeah. You know what I mean, though? No, but no, I mean when you're actually at the club and you're in the room with a band that is like in there and they just feel amazing and they're building up and the drummer's free.

And I mean, it's just like that's golden right. This is probably the jazz police wouldn't approve of this comparison. But to me, it's not that different than when you go into like a kind of Euro dance club and like a really good DJ and it's just got like the right BPMs going and like there's an energy there. To me, it's not like I don't connect with that kind of groove as much. Yeah. But it is a similar kind of thing, like when you're connecting with the audience in a groove, that solid feel that just really typifies what's going on. That's got nothing to do with like the harmony.

I mean, the thing is, jazz, we kind of layer a little bit more than just the bass drum kind of grinding on you. Yeah. Yeah, no, there's more than just the rhythm, but that rhythm is infectious and super important. All right. So our last one, number five of our favorite jazz quote unquote sounds. And that's going out and landing in. And what we mean by this is a harmonic. concept of you're in the changes, you're in straight down the middle, diatonic, scale matches the

chord, and then you take that out for sometimes a split second, sometimes a little bit longer, and then you come back in. It's such a gratifying feeling. And I can't think of another kind of music where you do that. I mean, classical music, you can, you know, modern classical music maybe can do that, but it's certainly not improvised. It's atonal. Like that's the thing with what the sound we're talking about, it's so specific to jazz because the bass, because it's improvised, the bass player and the drummer are staying in a diatonic key. I know I'm probably

generalizing this too. No, but often it happens like that. But it happens most often in jazz where you stay in this diatonic key and then the soloist goes out and comes back in, uses that as a tension builder. I think when people do this in other kind of music, it's one of these things where Let's be jazzy. Let's be jazzy, yeah.

Usually falling flat on. Well, there's some Stravinsky. He does some of that. And I don't know if he was being, I mean, he was definitely influenced by jazz and American music, but I almost think of it as just sort of breaking it down to the three building blocks of music, rhythm, melody, and harmony

and like the checking it out, as you said, it's just a harmonic thing. So like the groove stays there. Yeah. And then normally people do this well, it's very melodic. Yeah, absolutely. And like if you think about that, what's the Coltrane 12-tone row Miles mode.

Like the second part that goes out, Yeah. It's super melodic. You know, even as it goes out. It's the blues, yeah. It's the blues. That stays there. But then, so the outness part of it, the going out part of it really gives it that drama and that flare. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, it's such a jazz sound. Yeah, it is. You know, and I think, you know, I mean, it's such a deep and very, the fact that we are on day 160 of talking about this music, you know, it's a lot of fun that we're still like finding. I feel like we could go on for years like this. Are you up for it? I'm down.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think it really speaks to jazz being such a deep art form that it has all these great elements. Oh, yeah. Do you hear my chair squeaking? Do you're not crazy, man. Stop that. Sorry about that.

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