You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Things to Listen to When You're Playing in a Band - #75

Episode Date: April 15, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam list 7 things to listen to while you're performing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Today we're going to give you seven things to listen to when you're playing in a band. Oh, man, I don't need that. I just tune out and just listen to myself. Oh, you're feeling it.

You're feeling it. No, the crux of this is that we're always telling you to listen. It's usually number one on any list we give you. Is it going to be number one on this list? Well, it's the whole episode is about how to listen. So we wanted to give you some specific things that you might think about listening to. You know, when I was in, at the new school, I had a great teacher named Hal Galper, pianist, and a really good educator. And he used to do this exercise about listening to different

things. And one of the first things that he would always talk about, and one of your main focuses of listening should be the time. It's the, it's the most important thing in making you sound like a cohesive unit of making you sound like you're in the groove. So listen for the time first. And, you know, if you're a pianist, you can listen to the ride symbol and the bass player and hear how they're locking up. You can listen to the group as a whole. You can listen to just the bass player. You can listen to just the hi-hat. You can pick whatever you want to listen to, but try to feel that time first and foremost.

I love that. Yeah, and I think that, you know, bass and drums, that's really where it's at. You know, if you're a singer, instrumentalist, guitarist, you might be thinking piano too, but I would say everybody, the more you focus in. And if you look at kind of advanced bands or groups that play at a very high level, everyone's listening. They're not necessarily talking about this, but in general, they're listening for these essential elements from the same places. So they start out on the same page, so to speak. So that's great. Number one, for time.

So number two, I'm going to go with groove as being an important thing to listen to. Now, a lot of you might say, well, you just said that with time, but groove is different. And I would say groove, your primary place to listen to this is going to be the drums as opposed to the bass and drums. Now, obviously, great bass and drum rhythm sections are going to be grooving together. But the drums has the most control over. And really, in terms of groove, the optimal place for it to be emanating for normally is going to be from the drums. And so really recognizing what the groove is, it's kind of like how you would dance to something, how you would feel the beat, how you're going to think about placing what you're going to play into the groove

is really about locking in with how the drummer's grooving. That's right. Is it laid back? Is it on top? You know, is the eighth note swung just a little? Is it swung a lot? Is it grooving? Yeah.

I guess that's number one. No, there's a lot to listen to for sure and how you relate to that also. Yeah. And it's not like it's not just, you know, as you go through this checklist, groove say, oh, I can hear he's playing Boston over, can now I can go on the number three. It's not about, that's the most surface level in terms of the style of the group. This is really, as Adam you're saying, you know, the nuance of how the drummer feels the group. Because you can play it differently than the drummer, but that's going to be at your own peril.

And it's going to be hard for the group to really, like we're talking about how, you know, how to listen when you're playing in a band. So you have to find that space and everyone has like little different responsibilities. If you feel how the drummer plays the groove, maybe they're laying back on that swing feel, You may be able to push that or even play against that or do some fun things, but you first have to listen and hear where he or she is coming from with that group. Yeah, I mean, you could play the same thing at the same tempo. Babadababababab do da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ba-dab-dab-dab-dab. And that's, you know, coming from where the drummer's setting up

and how they're feeling it, where they're placing some hits, where they're placing that eighth note, how they're swinging. And it makes a huge difference. Great, great. So number three, the third thing to listen for, when you're playing with the band to really lock in is the melody. I know we try to ignore it as might as my tone. Well, this is jazz. Is there a melody? No, there is melody? No, there is melody. And you,

you even want to hear this when you're soloing even. You know, it's really the biggest part of the song is the melody. So you want to listen to the singer, if you have a singer. You want to listen to the horn player. If you have a horn player, if it's a piano trio or a duo, you want to listen to the right hand of the piano. Everything else is going to be, you know, coming around that melody and in support of that melody. So make sure that you know the melody if you can, make sure that you're hearing the melody and that, you know, if you're a pianist, you don't want to be putting voicings down that are clashing with the melody and making it sound, you know, terrible. You want to

try to make it sound as good as possible. Good. So number four, I'd like to bring up so melody kind of the opposite end of that is the baseline. Yeah. Or the root movement. It's kind of like the counter melody. It's kind of the counter melody. Yeah. And a lot of styles of music that we play,

I'm kind of almost thinking of those two counter melodies as being the outside kind of boundaries of what we're doing. And it's not to say that the baseline can't take over as the melody, but that's why we're saying, like, great bass lines and great root movements are their own melodies, and they're normally counter melodies. But they do take over sometimes. regardless, you have to listen for it. You have to really be able to hear it. And this is hard to hear baselines as opposed to hearing something that's more on top. Like if your main

melody is a singer-horn player or, you know, piano right-hand or something, it's going to be on top. It's going to be more clear. It's going to be easier to decipher and kind of figure out what's going on. But the baseline and the base note, that root movement, everything harmonically emanates up from that. You know, there's a lot of different possibilities and variations you can do, but you have to be able to hear where that's at. I remember playing with Betty Carter many years ago, and she always made it a point to be able to hear the bass line, to be able to hear the bass player. Like she had to have the monitor or be able to hear it from, and actually, no, that's right. She didn't want to hear it from the monitor because she wanted to hear it from the bass player. So she wanted the amp or his bass or whatever for it to be clear.

And sometimes we play these big festivals outside, and she would like really kind of, you know, spent a lot of time during sound check. I got to hear the bass. I got to hear that. She wanted to hear that because she wanted to be creative harmonically and melodically. And she knew that that all emanated with a solid foundation of knowing where that baseline was going. That's right. Like you said, you have the baseline, you have the melody, and everything in between is kind of up to us. And that brings us to number five, which is harmony. Now, as pianists, if we're hearing the melody, if we're hearing the baseline, we have a lot of options in between.

If you're a bassist or you're a horn player or you're a singer, you have to listen to what the pianist is playing in this too. and hopefully they're listening to you and reacting to you, but you also need to be able to hear where the harmony is going because sometimes a good rhythm section is setting up harmonic devices that's going to take the tune in a cool place, and you've got to be able to go with that. And I mean, as we're going through these, just think about, you know, normally you know,

one knows one's own deficiencies. So some of these are things you might want to work on when you get on a gig or listen to in recordings or live gigs of others to see if you can improve on some of them, because they're really just all essential skills and elements to have, and we don't necessarily have them all at the same ability level, which is fine. That's right. I think we're on number six now.

And I'm going to say as far as something to listen to when you're playing in a band, I'm going to go with silence. Hello, darkness, my old friend. Exactly. You know, listen to the dark side. Follow the dark side. So, you know, the silence, and that could be your, you know, you're not playing, the drummer not playing, whatever.

if someone's not playing, you don't zone out and not listen to them, like recognize and listen to why they're not playing. And also be thinking about when you need to provide silence, you know. I think it was Mozart that talked about the art of composition and how choosing when you're going to have rests for a certain player. It's just as important as choosing what notes are there. So it's an integral part of composition, integral part of band improvisation, and you have to hear the silence. And a lot of that kind of, you know, goes back to groove and time and tempo in terms of like the silence has to, fit in with those things. So it's just a very important part to always be listening to the silence. I think it's as important as what you play is the silence around it. I mean, if you look at any

great painting or photograph or film, there's negative space, right? You see the primary subject and the negative space around it. That really makes the complete picture. And it's the same way on a tune when you're playing with the band. Man, you're so dark and negative, Adam. Yeah, no, I'm a full of negative space. That's super important. So that gets us to our last thing to listen to when you're playing in the band. And I think there's a reason why we chose this last. And that's yourself. You know you're playing.

You have to listen to how you're fitting into this. All these things, though, you should be listening to before that. The time, the groove, the melody, the baseline, the harmony, the silence. And then finally listen to what you're adding to that. If you do that, if you take those steps, I think you're going to find that you're playing changes, you know, vastly from just running scales to actually making music and helping to create, you know, some kind of, some kind of real sonic portrait that has negative space and feel and all this great stuff. It's super important, man. I would say that I pull, you know, 80% of my

ideas from listening to what other people are doing in the band. That's great. I actually pull 81% of mine. Well, you're better than me. Well, I'm just only one percent. You know's that, Pete. Come on. Well, so yeah, this is great. And I mean, to your point of we listed this last, I think if you go through and really concentrate on honing your skills and listening to those other things first, that when you listen to yourself, then you're going to be coming from that place of where do I fit in.

Now, we're coming as piano players. This is especially important. But it's really for everybody. I mean, you know, how you fit into the band. Once you do find that place and when you have to play, you have to be then listening to yourself as much as you're listening to everything around you. That's awesome.

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