You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Communication on the Bandstand

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

Peter and Adam answer their first SpeakPipe of the week about communicating on the bandstand. Wanna send a SpeakPipe of your own? Check out the bottom of the page at http://www.openstudionetwork.com/podcast.Today's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. The Oxford American is a magazine dedicated to documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Its award-winning annual music issue comes with a CD sampler and digital download - a must-have for any serious music fan. Recent issues have featured Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, and John Cage. Visit https://www.oxfordamerican.org/yhi today for a special subscription discount!Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. I'm not very good at communicating. Well, I just sent you a text. Why did you answer me, man? Come on. I'm not very good at communicating. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily jazz advice, communicated to you freely across the internet. It's coming at you with communication. And we're talking about that today for a reason. You know, when you have a lack of communication skills and interrupt. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just saying. What I met was communication is all about listening.

You know who's good? You know what I'm saying? No. You know who's good at communicating, though? What? The incredible writers and editors over at the Oxford American. Oh, yes, you're correct about that, my friend. Which is great and coincidental because this episode of the You'll Hearer podcast is brought

you by the Oxford American. Go to Oxfordamerican.org slash YHI for some very special deals on a yearly subscription. This is one of the coolest literary magazines that I've ever read, and I'm so happy that there are charter sponsor. Check it out. I just read this article. It's one of their music issues, and it's all about. James Brown and Georgia.

Yes. You know, because it relates everything to Southern culture. It's great. It is great. And the writing is top notch. The poetry is top notch, man. It's just like,

it's a wonderful literary Southern magazine. I know they got some great slogans over there. They don't need my third-rate slogans, but I'm going to be like, get your culture on. Come on, y'all. Come on, you'll hear it. Listeners. We know your culture.

Get your culture on. Southern culture. Again, Oxfordamerican. org slash Y-HI for some great deals. Check it out. So today we're talking about communication. because we have a speak pipe. Actually, we have a week of speak.

We have more than a week. I know. We're not going to do a full week now. Depending on if we're using the Roman or Greek calendar. I don't know which one you use. We have a week of Greek speak. What? But we're not going to do the full week because we do have special guests this week.

Yes, that's coming in what, just two days? On Wednesday. Yeah, on Wednesday. I don't even think we can. Yes, we can announce. Yeah, we can announce. Do we have them on contract? We do.

It's Kelly Martin and Heather Manis. The wonderful spot. We were going to call, can we talk about what we were going to call this? Because we're not going to call it, right? Yeah, we were going to call it the real house. The real housewives of you'll hear it. That got shot down by our legal department. By everybody who mentioned it.

Yeah. It's a horrible name. No, Andrew didn't shoot that down. Andrew liked that idea, but. I mean, the only thing that would make that cool is if Andy Cohen himself came and did the episode with us. St. Louis's own, Clayton, Missouri. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. Also, our, our. our lovely spouses are in like nowhere near that kind of show. Exactly. Or housewives, in that matter. But that's going to be really fun. So look out for that on Wednesday and possibly even Thursday.

We're going to see if we can get him to come back two days in a row. We'll see. We'll see. A little bit break. So today we have a speak pipe from Mark Melis. Mark is a longtime friend of the podcast. Yes. Open studio member.

I met Mark actually in Reno. And he's a great guy and he had a question about communication. All right. Hi, guys. Mark from Arizona here. Early on in my jazz career, I went through a jam session and played through a tune. And towards the end, the bass player looked over at me and started saying, Duke, Duke! And I had no idea what he was talking about at the time.

I thought he was like talking about March Madness or college basketball. Obviously, it was the Ellington ending, but I had no idea about that at the time. But it got me thinking about communication on the bandstand. I thought you guys would have a lot of good things to share about that. know it's super important. So yeah, maybe you can just share, not just endings, but ways to communicate with other band members, especially between the rhythm section players. All right, seven stars, guys, I'm out.

Awesome. He's out. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much, Mark. And fond memories of a few years ago, I don't know if this might even be pre-Adam Manus. Mark actually stopped by here at the studio headquarters, and we had a little time together when he was in town a few years ago.

Very cool. So, yes, I mean, communication is so important. Actually, the only reason we started doing this podcast so that we could become better communicators with each other. Remember, we used to sit at desk next to each other, never talk to each other. Yeah, that's right. And now we're forced into this every day.

But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's communication and then there's kind of given direction. And I think what, you know, like yelling out Duke, you know, for the ending or things that you want, if you're the leader officially or if you're just the leader of the moment or whatever, and look, we're all trying to at times direct things in the music to make it better. Well, all the piano players are.

Exactly. So that means us all the time. But yeah, actually, that's an important point. I think it's an important skill for everyone to have, but especially pianists. Whether you're leading a trio, whether it's a co-op trio, or whether you're playing with a singer or a saxophone or big band or whatever, a lot of times just by the nature of the instrument and then what that does to the kind of personality, how it develops as pianist, it, I'm going to take the headphones off. You want off the headphones? Yeah, I'm not saying you have to. Is it weird if I keep them on?

No, I like it. Okay, I'm going to. The, that as pianists, we are, it's probably, I don't know about required, but it would behoove us to up our communication skills, even more importantly than other instruments. Yeah, I think so, because we have, you know, we have, we're like, we're not the quarterback, per se, but we are kind of, we have our hand in everything that's going on in the bandstand. So it is important. I will say that one thing that I learned early on that I think is a crucial communication skill in the bandstand is to keep your head on a swivel, especially at when things are coming around.

So if the form is coming back, I mean, I'm looking up pretty much going to every new section. Now, do you mean physically looking up or just kind of mentally or keeping your ears open or combination? It depends on the situation. It depends on who I'm playing with. If it's people I really don't know, I'm really making eye contact. I'm really trying to, even going into like the second A, a B section. Like, I really want to make sure that we're all doing things together, you know. If it's with my trio, with the guys I play with all the time, I mean, we can just like raise an eyebrow and totally change directions because we play together all the time.

And probably, and actually I've seen this with you guys, even when you think you're raising an eyebrow or raising, you're not even doing that. No, it's so subtle. And you could do it even by just things you play. Things you play, exactly. I know when Montez has set something up, what's going to happen there? And that's kind of next level and highlight what the goal is, because that's, I think, a combination of great musicianship, great communication, but also in openness.

Like communication is so much about being open to listen. Totally. Really. You know, we always think of communication as being, you know, yelling out, Duke, Duke, ending or whatever. Pass me the rock. Come on, you know. But it's as much listening so that you know what to communicate back.

It's that two-way thing. And I think that you see that manifested in a great trio like yours in a building up that, it gets to the point where it's totally nonverbal and it's musical. And then there's almost the element of you all trust each other to know what needs to happen next on an intuitive level. So you don't even have to communicate. And that's just relationships. You know what? Well, it's talent plus relationships.

But maybe this analogy of a quarterback is it's closer to a point guard. You know, you mentioned basketball because there's more of an equal relationship between the players than a quarterback has all the control and holds the ball or whatever. the point guard is kind of setting up the plays distributor. The distributor takes the ball into the offensive court. Yeah. And I think part of it like us as pianists, we always get the thing of like, oh, you guys think you're so smart, you read both clefts. Why do you have to be in charge and whatever? I don't see this as necessarily being in charge thing. Like you say,

the point guard a lot of times is not scoring the most. He has his ball and balls in his hands a lot, but it's during the most high pressure times and then you're distributing it out. But I think like the pianist because we, I mean, in a lot of ways, you would think of the rhythm section, bass and drums as really being kind of the quarterback in a way because they're playing all the time. They can control it. But because of the fact that we can sort of stop playing and even to yell, I mean, could you imagine playing bass and having to yell stuff out or drums? I mean, you can do it and sometimes they do it, but that's harder. We just have that flexibility to kind of jump in and out of the rhythm section. We can be one-handed. We can be no-handed. That's right. Yeah, it's true, it's true. But it's such an interesting thing. Now, in terms of actual, non-verbal but overt communication. What I was thinking of is the great Ahmad Jamal and his hand signals. Are you familiar with those?

I've heard about them. I've never seen them live. I've seen them live a few times and I don't totally know the code. But he has a very well laid out communication there. That's something that's not done a lot. I can't even think. I'm sure other people do it. I know working with Diane Rees for long time, she has a few kind of hand signals but they're pretty standard. I know it's stuff

that she saw like Sarah Vaughn and Elefis-Gerald do too. I think there's kind of a lineage of that. Betty Carter, I remember working with her. She did a lot of like conducting. Yeah. But not all the time, but at like key points, but she wouldn't do it where the audience could see it. She'd do it like on the piano side or the, but she had this intuitive way of doing it kind of behind her

back, kind of an up and down, sideways and just stuff that was very clear. She never had to explain it. It was never like a code. It just made sense. And so you had to be kind of watching for that. And she would turn around too at different times to communicate to really, that would signal kind of like

like, all right, we're not necessarily going to do a duet, but we're going to really be interacting just the two of us as the others are playing. She would turn to the drums a lot, even to the bass, to the piano, whatever. So that's a nice physical manifestation of it. I love that when people you're accompanying, like vocalist or even horn players,

a saxophone player will kind of lean into you and you know that, okay, I can really cue in on what you're doing. You want me to give you things, you know, so that's a great feeling. Oh, they want to give the things. I just want to say, remember we have our ultimate tip. So stay tuned at the very end.

the episode and that just reminded me of a good one we're going to have for the ultimate tip in terms of that. But continue on. Okay, we'll do. As far as communication between the rhythm section, again, just to reiterate, always keep your head up, especially when you're changing or recycling the form. Like if it's at the end of any form, whether that's the first time through or the ending, which you should always have your head up or your ears open so that you can communicate what's going to happen at the beginning or the end. But even, you know, for me, for me, me, even just going between a form, I want to let them know in some way that especially if it's people I don't play with often. I want to let them know either I'm continuing on or I'm ending my solo. You know what I mean? That kind of thing.

So transition points? Transition points are super, like there's nothing worse when you play with a bass player drummer and they don't have their eyes on you during transition. Or they don't have their ears open during transition points. And you got to yell something. They just kind of barrel on through and you're like, oh, okay, I guess we're not transitioning the way

that the base player and I thought we were. You know what I mean? Well, it's interesting. I never thought about it like this, but think about you in a restaurant. It doesn't even have to be a great restaurant, but it's a great restaurant when any time you're, like, at a transition point,

like you've finished your food, maybe you haven't put your napkin on your plate, but you maybe want some water. You know, like the different transitions they can have in a meal, and you look up and someone's kind of there ready to look. You don't have to yell out to him,

hey, hey, come over here and help me. Yeah, that would be sort of the equivalent. To have that intuitive sense, you know, which great. restaurants have with their staff. Exactly. And it's not just like, they've had their entree for 20 minutes. They're probably done eating. Yeah, that kind of thing. And I think that, yeah, so the transition points, I think, let's talk about those that would be

between choruses, for sure, between solos, obviously the beginning and the ending. When you're coming, but not the ending as in it's finished. You don't really need to communicate anymore. It's done. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, don't wait to like look up then, but like the point where you were getting yelled, Duke, Duke, you know, once you're coming up to, and that's like an interesting thing. of like the point guard again. It's like they don't call the play right as they're starting them.

That's right. They do the signal right as it's about to transition. That's right. But you don't want to do it too early before that. That's true. You don't want to be in the middle of your solo and be like, Duke, Duke, Duke. What is, you know? Yeah. It's kind of like you got to do it a couple seconds before, but not too early, but not too late. Well, and there's also some other things you can do that aren't even like eye contact communication, but communicating with the music. Like, if I go into my solo, like, off the back, just like, like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, like super rhythmic, super intense or whatever,

I'm expecting that the bass play and the drummer are going to somewhat help me out and understand that we're going in hard on this one. Yep. You know, if I start off like, you know, I want them maybe to, I'm communicating something. Yeah. I don't even know what that is, but I'm trying to communicate,

like, let's figure out what this vibe is. You know what I mean? In space. Like, you're communicating, let's play with some space. like or I'm giving you some space to fill in. You shouldn't be like, but do it. And then be like, okay, play now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't, I don't want to, I don't actually want to tell them what to play or kind of dick. Yeah, you do. I want well a little bit. But I want it to be open, but I'm trying to communicate a vibe and see what they're going to add to that. And then I'll also, and I've seen you do this too when you play with anybody, is there's body language for sure that can happen.

Like I will, if I want things small, I'll kind of get small. I kind of hunched down a little bit. Yeah, I start small, so that's not a problem for me. Yeah. No, but you know what I mean? Like, you kind of like get down a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

It's conducting. It's a little conducting. You have to have the body language. So think about that. And I think, you know, what's good with the body language, too? Some of that can be reaction stuff just to, and maybe this could be the last kind of area of communication we talked about. I would talk about it. And this is just kind of making it feel good and trying to get to a point maybe sooner than, yeah.

Okay, if you're playing with your trio for years and you know each other and you've hung out, you don't have to do this because you've got that feeling. But maybe with some new. players like or at a jam session or the first few gigs of a tour or somebody's new and like how do you make it like how do you give acknowledgement and kind of pats on the back to keep the let keep everybody interested and encouraged and like yeah atta boys sort of you know oh that's easy for me i just give a big yeah yeah yeah across the stage yeah well no that's and that's kind of the ultimate level but if you do that for if you're like someone's like but you did and you're like yeah it's a little bit patronizing too right no but i think like once you really nail kind of like an

interaction and I'll do this with drummers live. You know, like some kind of resolution then. you don't want to be like, yeah, because you got to keep playing. But sometimes I'll just be like, you know, it's like you give them a little wink or a little like head nod or something.

I like what you did there. Yeah, yeah. And it's not like, someone could be like, why are you acknowledging it? That's part of their job. They're supposed to be listening. But it's just kind of you're bringing together personally. You may hate that person off the bandstand.

No problem. But on the band. understand like you're you synced up so you're acknowledging that you're like I heard you I saw you know so that kind of a thing yeah that can help the next that's not necessarily you're not signaling something to happen because it's already happened no you're communicating what you like though and you're kind of given positive reinforcement so for the next course the next tune that's going to make a better gig and you talk about leaders and music um miles davis probably the master of this have we mentioned him on the podcast i think we have a couple times yeah but i mean like i saw him live a few times at the end there but

he was such a master i mean people always think of like the negative things, but he was a great communicator. Yeah, he was. It's fun to, like, focus in on, like, when he turned his back to the audience and stuff. But that was a lot of times was, he was turning towards a player. Yeah. You know, and you look at those videos of him playing with Kenny Garrett in that band, like when they would get right up on each other and communicate things.

And when he was vibing Herbie Hancock or when he would cut somebody off. Like, he was the master of communication without words, you know. It's so true. It's so true. Well, thank you, Mark, for the question. It's a great question. We have our ultimate tip coming up. But first, just want to remind everybody to go to the Oxford American.

Oxford American.org slash Y-H-I for our special. You'll hear it. Yes. And we are, thank you for the speak pipes. Keep them coming. We used to call them voice memos. We went full in with our corporate, because that's the company. We're a startup, man.

We're a startup. We're helping there. I don't know. They might be owned by Google for all. They might need our encouragement. Judging by their interface, I'm going to say no. Ooh, shade on the speak pipes. Not shade.

It's just not very Googily. But yeah, please leave us a voice message. You're free to send in. Are we still doing viewer songs, Andrew? Should we send those in to? Yeah, if you have something you like to be featured on the outro. And it's good. And you think it's appropriate for the outro.

Please send those to Andrew at openstudio network.com. Coming up soon here, we have our ultimate tip on communication of the bandstand. But we'd also like to just remind you about Wednesday. We've got 48 hours to our big wives' spouses episode where they're going to be sitting in for us as special guest hosts. Adam, you look a little sheepish. You're worried about their performance? I think they're going to kill it. We'll see. Well, you know what? Actually, now we've put it out there. If they don't

kill it, what are we going to do? I don't know. You know, we'll just do a regular episode on Wednesday, and you'll know that they didn't do that good. The only thing I'm worried about is my wife isn't really into music or me. Well, we'll just have to guide the subject to something else. But that'll be fun. That's coming up on Wednesday. Please leave us

a rating and review before Wednesday, and after Wednesday, if you enjoy it. But you can do that wherever you are listening to this podcast. Seven stars is required. Yeah. But just do the max that you can. Give us a thumbs up. Like and subscribe on YouTube. Our YouTube's blowing up, bro. Is it? Do you know, bro? I mean, that's what we call each other in New Orleans. I try not to hang out on the YouTube's. Yeah, man, it is blowing up. We got some interesting comments with some of our regulars and some new folks. We got some member, I mean, member, listener created transcripts. I saw this. I saw this. Amazing.

Great stuff from the episodes last week. So check in on there. And now for our ultimate tip for communication on the band stamp. You ready for this? You want to do it or you want me to do it? You got it. Okay. So this is kind of like if you want to rig the system before it even starts. We talked about the stuff that you do as you're playing after the chorus, during the transitions, all that good stuff. This is how you're going to make sure everybody wants to communicate. But right before you start the gig, I mean, I'm talking about right before you're on the bandstand. I'm about to count the tune off, the leaders. You're going to turn everyone and say, hey, right after the gig tonight, drinks are on me for the whole band. Just listen to me, okay they will you will be communicating you will be a communicating they will you won't have to

worry about them listening to you let's put it that way and then after the gigs over just split as fast as possible well you know depends i guess you'll hear it