You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Can You Learn Jazz Online? - #36

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam discuss the questions of online education. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. What's up? Are you digging these little intros that we just started this week? I haven't heard them yet, but I'm going to check on them. Wait, how about you? I don't like them. Okay. I'm Adamannis.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Brought to you by Open Studio. Now, this is an interesting episode. This episode contains a word called the Panopticon that I just recently remembered what it was. I remember a movie about a panopticon. I swear.

Interesting. But it's a, it's a. prison, right? It's a prison. Actually, when I saw this word, whatever, a couple of weeks ago, I don't think I'd ever seen it or heard it or anything. I had no memory of it, so I was immediately like, what do I do? Is there a place called Google I could possibly enter this word into? So I did. Yeah, it's a prison where, or some type of detention facility where the warden, where the guard is able to see in all the cells what everybody's doing and keep control of them. But in individual cells. But everybody, the architecture of it is that everybody in the cells can't see

each other and they can't see when they're being watched and when they're not. Interesting. So it's kind of like it's got a certain amount of control, I guess, along with it. And creepy. And it's a little creepy and a little scary and a little negative. But our friends over at the New York Times turned it into a positive, I would say. Yeah. How's that? Well, so we were featured, Open Studio was featured in an article actually in the opinion section of the New York Times a couple weeks ago, September 15th and we've got a lot of questions about this here at the you'll hear at podcast so we thought we would just kind of talk a little bit about it and how it came about and just about the article but the title of it is piano lessons in the panopticon right right right um by elias muhanna who is

actually one of our students a long time member of jazz piano method of my my lesson series i started a while ago and um Elias asked us about coming to interview and kind of seeing the operation and a little bit of peek behind the, peek behind the curtain here of what we do and about a year ago. So this has been kind of a long time in the making and we've actually sort of forgotten about it. And then all of a sudden the article came out a couple weeks ago and it's been a lot of fun because we've gotten all this sort of, you know, feedback and attention from a whole,

well, it's not a whole new, well, it is a whole new audience. People like, oh, I heard about you in the New York Times, calling up here and stuff and interested in our different lesson offerings. And I think the author just did a wonderful sort of firsthand account and walk through about his experience, which was really instructive to us as well in terms of, you know, we're producing the lessons. And we never know exactly how they're received and used. I mean, we do because we talk to people.

Yeah. So the gist of the article was more about, you know, can you learn jazz piano online? Can you learn anything on these online courses? Which, you know, obviously you and I are going to say, yeah, of course you can. Yeah. we have an online jazz lesson website. But, you know, this is all still so new. So we're still learning.

I mean, even up to like emails today about how people use Open Studio, how they use these lessons. Right. How we can make it better for them to learn and get better at their instruments. Yeah. Through these things. It's kind of a different error. I mean, it's really like. It's uncharted territory.

It's uncharted territory. You know, there've been like, I mean, I remember. old VHS cassette masterclass kind of style stuff. But this is, you know, I think as our listeners can tell, because we're literally, like, talking to them in their earbuds right now. Right. Most of the time. We all up in there.

We all up in there. Most of the time we're talking them about stuff that they've sent in requesting. And, like, it happens fairly fast. And then, you know, when we get feedback on Facebook or on email, like we're quick to kind of respond. So it's different, I feel like, than the VHS stuff or the DVDs from past as far as, you know, we can like, and it's kind of the beauty of how fast things are with the internet is we can kind of like help mold their curriculums as we're going here.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And there's a kind of a feedback loop there that's actually shorter than I think we realize and still realize because we always, you know, as you're producing content, there is that feeling of a one-way street on like giving somebody a lesson. Yeah. And so I think in a way we kind of discount that personalized and, instruction. But what I think he showed in this article, at least with his journey, and we've

gotten this from talking to a lot of other students, is that when you kind of self-curate both your time and your access to this information and how you utilize the tools like repeating different things. And then, I mean, like Elias has even gone into like, you know, learning and doing things that we didn't say to do in the lessons, or we didn't say you have to. It was kind of like present the material. And then he would take certain sections and then transcribe them himself, even if we didn't have them transcribes and then learn them and then cracks them in certain ways that's really interesting and then working into things like what you were saying in terms of people having requests about anything from just a small subject to how do you play this tune and that kind of thing

and so there is a certain amount of customization that really we just sort of tripped over in a way because people were nice enough to talk to us I mean this is like a whole story about it which is really cool to you know to see it from his view but people people from the beginning, when I first started lessons, it was just me, you know, other teachers or help or anything. Like, people were always, even if it was just like a little email or whatever, text and like, oh, that was cool, if you thought about this. And I was just like, so humbled by that, I was like, all right, cool, I'll try it. And I just, I wanted to be helpful. You know, I wanted to be helpful in a way that comes from that same point of being a teacher when you sit down with somebody every week.

But the nature of this, and we talked about a, you know, a previous episode about, the thing of being a hobby and stuff with the other article in the New York Times, the nature of learning this music and how you consume instruction can be, there's so many different ways that that can happen, both known and unknown. So, you know, in terms of what we said uncharted, like we're charting some of it, but there's a lot more that still needs to be charted. Yeah, it's a really interesting time. Do you ever watch any of those, like, I belong to that website Masterclass,

and there's a lot of great cooking classes that you can take. And I think one of the big advantages that that we have with this right now is that immediate feedback you can get, you know, from other people, too, who are on that site. You know what I mean? As far as just like, how are they absorbing the lessons? That's something you actually, you don't get a lot of, unless you're at like a music school. Yeah. You know what I mean? Of like someone being like, oh, yeah, well, that knife technique, if you like rocket back this way, that's what he's doing.

Like there's even like a little bit of like self, uh, amongst the, amongst the hive mind. Yeah. A little bit of like self direction. But hasn't that always been a nice thing like if you think about, you know, my daughter's at university now. And, you know, she's starting to do these study groups for different classes and stuff. Like there's the presentation of the lecture and then the teaching. But that interpretation, that sharing, that discussion group and that thing that happens amongst your peers. Yeah.

You know, and then the office hours and the different things. Like all that kind of goes. It's not just the dissemination of information when we can make a book. And we do that too where it's just like, here's the finger for the scale. This is the nuts and bolts. But a lot of the things that we like to get into and try to inspire folks with in the world of jazz are, you know, we're either going to miss something or maybe we'll, you know, I'll hit on it just briefly.

And someone's like, wait, what was that thing that he played? And to me, I'm like, whatever, that was just a court. And someone else will be like, oh, no, that was this. Yeah, yeah. That was this thing. It's a thing for that. Yeah, that community element can be very important. And it could unlock something and someone who's reading it.

Yeah, it's very cool. You know, we preach here about finding a community, but, man, there's no better time, I think, to be alive and trying to find communities than it is right now, almost dangerously. Oh, man. Well, yeah, now it's like... Because if you're a real jerk, you can find a community of a jerk. Exactly, exactly. But, you know, we have a lot of, plenty of squeaky wheels that tell us how we should be doing

things, but, you know, we're always looking to get better, even with this podcast. So, you know, if any of you out there have some ideas. for like, you know, things we can do to help make your jazz journey a little bit easier. Yeah, because I think that, um, let us know. Haven't you felt that this podcast has been more, I mean, we've kind of played around with the edutainment, you know, thing. But we definitely started out more entertainment, we thought, but then we were hearing from folks like, man, I've been learning so much.

We're like, wow, really. And so we've tried to work more of that in there, but we wanted to be fun to listen to we don't want this. It's not supposed to be a lecture series, you know. Yeah. And it's so funny. Some people are like, some people are like, I only listen when you're talking about specific musical things. And some people are like, I'm just in it for the fun.

Right, right. Like there's like camps on either side. Maybe we could pit them against each other someday. That would be good. Game show. Take each other down. There will have no audience. A true panopticon.

Yeah. Exactly. That's great, man. Well, if you want to give us a suggestion for how we can help you on your jazz education journey, you can go to you'll hear.com. And please leave us a question. Leave us a suggestion. and we're happy to accommodate. That's what this is all about.

That's right. That's right. Until next time, you'll hear it.