You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Burning Questions: Peter's Horror Gig Story

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

Peter and Adam are going to be streaming and taking your questions live on Open Studio's Instagram every Saturday for the duration of the global health crisis. On today's edition of Burning Questions, Peter recounts a tale of Italian horror and also discusses his favorite Phillip's Exercise.Links From This Episode:Open Studio now has an app! Getting your regular practice in has never been easier thanks to our Guided Practice App - featuring Adam's daily Guided Practice Sessions, lessons from our Piano Finger Independence course, and more practice adviceThere's a new course from Open Studio: Rhythm Section Workout is available now! Play along with Peter Martin on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Gregory Hutchinson on drums as they teach you the tips and tricks to playing with a bandToday's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Adam's Guided Practice Session for non-members on Facebook and YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkIn light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey Peter. Hey, Adam. Tell me your biggest gig hoarder story. Horder. You know what? I've got some great gig horror stories. I'm going to tell mine as soon as we start after this beautiful music. I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Daily music and jazz advice coming at you. Coming at you today, sponsored by Anytoon. Go to Anytune.us.us slash you'll hear it to check out the greatest music. tool besides your musical instrument to make you a better musician. It's really an astounding tool where you can slow down all the music that you want to learn. It doesn't change pitch. You can isolate instruments in the most beautiful interface. You could set markers. You can set how long you want to go back or forward. It's so customizable. And it's just a great way to easily learn any solo you want to transcribe. It's great for voicing because of that isolation. It's so awesome,

man. Yeah. And what's wonderful, I keep learning new things about it. And the way it's set up, You can just start with the most basic functionality that you're going to want to start, which is probably slowing things down for transcribing. But then it has this loop trainer where you can start slower and then speed up, still staying the same key. The thing we discovered the other day about changing the pitch, keeping the time the same to learn a solo in another key if you want to go next level and hope to be a Warren Wolf level someday.

You know, so it's really, it's got, it's just a cool software, really cool people that make it. And music practice perfected. What can we say? Go to anytune.us slash you'll hear it all spelled out. Link is below. Now, we're still live on Instagram. And yesterday I told one of my horror gig stories

because we had a question about what were our most horrific gig stories. And you said you had one you were saving for today. So let's hear it, bud. Okay. So, I mean, I've had many horror stories. I mean, nothing like horror as in, you know, the zombie apocalypse or anything. But I look at it more as kind of funny things

at the time they were kind of, you know, horror stories. But one time with a mutual friend of ours that we will, promoter in from Sicily, Italy, you know, Sicily, the island, which is kind of part of it. I left out Italy, but there's a whole, it's a whole subsection. Yeah. Sicily, you know, those of you that know, Sicily, it's not really Italy. I mean, it is Italy, but they kind of consider, I mean, for a long time, it was a separate country and separate territory and everything.

I mean, it's, it's, it's southern Italy, like on over. And it's one of the most beautiful places on the planet with some of the greatest food and wine and people and music and everything. But there's a promoter we work with from there who's let's just say is is a little bit. His attention to detail is, uh, leaves a little bit to be desired at times. Great guy, though great lover of the music. But one horror story was about getting to the airport when we were leaving from Palermo. And this is with the Christian McBride inside straight group. Um, first of all, he came to pick us up, you know, our flights like at 90.

We did the gig the night before. There was a whole horror story about that. The gig was actually great on the beach and we had a fun time. But then we're leaving the next day and I think he's supposed to pick us up at seven. And we're down there waiting. We've got, you know, Christians got his base. We've got, you know, equipment and we're just starting a European tour. And, you know, we're down there at seven, you know, no, no promoter.

We're calling him and stuff. And then I kind of go over and I look sort of over at the bar at like, I don't know, 7, 20, 7.30. I was like, wait, that's the guy there. And he's like, you know, smoking a cigarette, drinking an espresso. He's like, hey, pizza, you know. I was like, man, I thought we were looking for you. He's like, oh, no, we'll go in a minute.

And, you know, everybody's just, yeah, everyone's like, come on, we got to go now. We got international check-in. And, whoa, sorry about that. Hey, he's coming after me. He said, he says, you know, so we're thinking we're going to go right then. But he's like, no, I'm having my van brought here from my friends. So just relax. Yeah, just have espresso.

You know, it's like, so we have a thing. We're like, come on, man, we got to go. So finally his vans brought over. You know, it's one of those little Eurovans. It's not a real van. It's kind of like he borrowed it or whatever. So we barely get everything packed into the van. It's like 8 o'clock now.

You know, we're sweating it getting to the airport. And, you know, the base, like the end of the base is sticking out the back of the window. We're all packed in here, one vehicle, you know, five musicians and a manager and everything. So we get rolling, you know. and we get I'm sitting in the front seat right next to him because I've known him I've tour with him before

everyone else in the band didn't really know him and I know you got to stay on him and he's like on his phone smoking driving stick shift you know like running over people and I look over

and we just left the hotel and his fuel meter is like the lights on and it looked like it had been on for a while you know and I was like dude you're empty he's like oh no it's okay

I said no come on man we don't want to get stranded and he's like okay so we pull up over and get some gas, get some diesel. And he puts like three euros in, of course, you know. And he's like smoking at the pump while he's, you know, on the phone. So we get out, we're kind of on the expressway.

And all of a sudden we're driving and it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Flat tire. You know, you know, that horrible feeling when you're at highway speeds. And I'm like, come on, dude, man, we got to pull up. He's like, oh, it's okay. I was like, no, man, we got to pull over. So he pulls over. We get out.

We look, of course, flat tire. So, you know, at this point. it's like 30 minutes to the flight where you know we're like what are we going to do and so in order to get the spare out we have to pull all the instruments out it's already like 85 90 degrees it's like july and palermo you know middle of the mediterranean and we're out on this highway you know cars are flying by nobody's slowing down nobody's slowing down so we had to pull all the base out the equipment the symbols everything finally he finds the flat tire and the jack and he starts doing the jack and we're like calling you know christian's managers like calling to try to get a tax you

try to figure something out but you know we've got all this equipment and um i'm over the help and i come back to make sure that the guy is on his thing and he's turning the jack to lift up the thing and then all of a sudden i look over and he's turning the other way like counterclockwise i'm like dude you got to keep going that way it's not going to go up and he's like oh it's so much easier to go this way though it's just easier i'm like doesn't matter i was like get out the way so i'm like I'm doing the jack, doing the jack. And then, you know, he's taking smoking breaks while he's doing the, you know, so I was like, come on. He's calling his mistress.

He's doing it. We finally get the, we finally get the jack up. And then I was like, go get the spare man. You know, so he pulls it out from the thing. And he brings it over because he didn't know how to do it either. So we're having to like. And so he hands me to spare it. I'm starting to put it on.

I'm feeling it. Spares flat, of course. So by this time, you know, Andre Christian's manager is, you know, arrange some taxis, but he has to tell me, he's like, we're in the middle, we're on the shoulder of this expressway, if you could just pull over. Like three little taxis show up. We're shoving everything in.

We made it, we made it to the airport. So not a total horror story, but that was one of the funest stories, actually. And you know what? There's actually a YouTube video highlighting some of this. This was my early vlogging days. If we can find it,

I'm going to put a link below if I can find it. I think that's still on YouTube. Square video and everything. While we're waiting for that, let's take one more question, because we're almost out of time. I know. Sorry, that was long. Hi. No, no, no. The better the gig story, the longer that it is, the better it is.

Hi from Spain. I don't know if this is the right place it is to ask, but I'd like to know which of the Phillips exercises has Peter worked on over the years. I'm in the middle of the second page and it's tough. Agreed. Yeah. Which of those did you hit most, Pete? Well, the first two pages. I actually went through the whole book at various times, but I've spent more time on the first two pages. But as you saw, I think, Adam in some of those notes from a great teacher I had for a while, Leonidas Lipavetsky, when I was in Florida for a minute, he kind of had this whole program. And it was really based around, I mean, you can do it over a number of the exercises, but it was really like you could just practice this way over those first two pages. And there's a lot in there. And so I know that you started to incorporate some of that into the daily guided practice sessions.

And, you know, I think it's like anything, like any exercises, I'm more familiar with Phillips and McFarron than, I mean, yeah, McFerrin, you know, Churny, Hannan. Hanan, I did quite a bit too. But like in general, piano exercises, and I've heard this is true for other instruments too, the really good ones, it's more about like finding the ones that really resonate with you

and then figuring out or learning from others and picking up the knowledge on the best ways, different ways to practice. those same exercises. It's not about going through the whole book and then you get everything just magically. You could take just two pages from Cherney. That's such a weird name. Chirney.

Kind of like schnucks. Schnucks. Weird. Yeah. But you could take just two of the, you know, Chirney exercises and practice those with many different articulations and different hand positions and, you know, all different ways of going through the piano technique and get a lot of value out of there.

So I think it's not, and I've heard Greg Hutchinson talk about that with certain things from the Chapin drum book and the different rudiments. It's like you don't need, it's more quality than quantity when it comes to exercises. Agreed. And we're doing all of the Phillips exercises from the first two pages over on the Daily Guy of Practice session. We're only one into the second page because that's a bear, man. That's such a bear. But we're going to go deep on them.

When I go back to Phillips now, I actually, it's been years since I've gone beyond the first two pages, to tell you truth, because I don't even have time to go to get into all the different ways I know to practice those. you know. Yeah. Oh, this is a great question from Alisa. I think it's Alisa. Peter, your net is bad.

At first I was thinking my hair net, but I don't think he's talking about that. I think he's talking about my internet, my intranets. Your net. I haven't heard it called The Net in a long time. What's up, Maurice Carnes? Maurice Carnes.

Yeah. Wasn't there the movie with Sandra Bullock? That's right. It's called The Net. It was like the Big Bad Brother was coming after you. That's right. Well, we only got a couple minutes before Instagram's going to kick us off.

Thank you, everybody, for joining us on our weekly Instagram Q&A for the You'll Hear It Podcast. We'll be back here again next Saturday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. So join us, tell your friends, get your jazz piano questions, or you're just questions ready for whatever. We answered YouTube questions today. That was fun. That was fun. And then, yeah, of course, go to anytune.us. You'll hear it to check out the amazing Anytune. What a great tool for learning music.

And, yeah, anything else, Pete? No, just everybody, you know, stay safe, say inspired, you know, try to do something with this music that inspires you every day. You know, we're always talking about practice and different techniques for sure, but make sure during this time, this pause, this formata in the world that you take some inspiration because that's what the music is there. It's so giving, you know what I mean? And so we don't talk about that enough all the time, although we do. We're always throwing different records around and different things. but take 10 minutes at least every day to glean some inspiration because it's there and we all need it. That's going to give us the energy and the life force that we all need to continue.

Agreed. Well said. Until next time. You'll hear it.