You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Elias "Do you play what you hear?" - #2

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam take a listener question about hearing what you're playing before you play it. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Here podcast. Season 2, Daily Jazz Advice, coming at you. You're still on the season 2 thing, man. Well, it's only been one day. I mean, really? You're going to abandon it that fast.

We're very excited that we even made it to season 2. Right, right. We didn't know. We weren't sure we were going to make it past the first week. We didn't know if we're going to make it to episode 2, much less season 2. That's the truth, actually, right there. Big shout out to iTunes, Apple, for not kicking us off. What's up?

So, yeah, what do we got? Well, we're going to, as promul. us, we're going to get back to some of these great listener questions, and we're going to Elias up in Rhode Island, the great state of Rhode Island. Great state of Rhode Island. I like Rhode Island. I love Rhode Island. You know, Rhode Island is not an island. Well, it's a collection of many islands and some mainland. It's an arpegate, arpeligo, archaeologist. What is it? Archipelago? Archipelago? Yeah, well, I don't know if it's actually that, but it's a lot of mainland, and it's One of our smaller states, but not small in heart.

Well, and Elias is a longtime open studio member. He's a great guy, great pianist. Like, he's come and hung for a little bit. That's right. When he was through St. Louis, that was really fun. So he's our friend. So we're going to listen to his question right now. Hey, Adam and Peter.

It's Elias. I have a question for you guys about playing what you hear. So do you play what you hear? Is that a realistic goal? Are we always trying to hear our lines before we play them? Do we ever just kind of not do that? You know, because you also hear that from players that you don't want to plant things out so much,

that you don't want to, you kind of want to go into a state of like meditative flow when you're improvising. So, yeah, that's kind of my question. this all the time from from players that like you got to play what you hear but that seems really hard yeah anyway thanks all right great question thank you it's a great question and actually elias did post this on um on one of our our facebook groups and there was a good conversation about it i didn't chime in there but i do have some thoughts about i don't know what you think about this

go ahead well my my initial thought on this is that uh i don't always play exactly what i hear and i don't to hear exactly what I'm going to play. That would mess me up, I think. But that doesn't mean you can't communicate an idea. Like, I'm communicating an idea to you here, and this sentence could change in the middle, and I'm still going to convey this idea. I know what the idea I'm trying to convey. The language I use is very much improvised and on the fly, and it's not planned out. I'm not thinking of every sentence I'm going to say. Maybe I should more often, I guess. But I'm not like thinking about every word in the sentence, and then I'm going to spit it out. I have a general idea.

I have an ambiguous idea in my head. And I'm using the limited English that I know to try to communicate that to you. And I think it's for me playing jazz, improvising, being in the moment is similar. I'm absorbing what's happening around me. I know what I want to say. I know the spirit of what I want to say. And I'm not planning the individual notes or even the individual phrases. I'm letting that kind of happen, but it's in that idea of what I want to get across.

Does that make sense? No, I think that absolutely, and I think that the element that one of the elements that may be in common with having a discussion as we are, as you said, with improvising as we play, is that unexpected thing of not only what we're going to say or play, but what someone else is. In fact, as I was listening to Elias's question, I was kind of thinking about my feelings and my answer and what you just said now kind of changes what I would say about it as it should. Right. You know, just the same way as if we're playing music together, I can't only think about

what am I hearing and how am I going to express that and you'll, you know, I'll hear, I'll play what I hear because I have to play what I hear within the context of everything that's going on. So you might think, okay, when we're in a solo situation, that would be the only exception to that. and maybe so, but there's also then even responding to how what you just played. So like where you are in the flow of the moment, how that sounds. You know, because I don't see this as like we own the notes of what we played.

As soon as we or what we hear, we're just kind of borrowing other things that we've heard and the gifts that we've been given, hopefully. And then we're working at that. That's the technique part, the ear training and all that, to be able to get to an accurate representation. But I would say to Elias' kind of first part of his question as far as asking us, do we play what we hear? That for me is the goal. Yeah, absolutely.

Now, I don't do it 100% of the time. If I did, I'd be a master and I would have left this and moved on to astrophysics or something, some other pursuit. That's what makes it fun. And I think what we're learning and talking about and developing and what I always try to check out in other players and in talking to other great players to learn better, how do we get to that closer to that 100%. but there's no shame. Not only is there no shame, there's no possible way, I don't think,

to ever getting to 100% playing what you hear. And I guess we should probably define that too, especially since the name of the podcast is you'll hear it. Right. Well, so there is that idea of playing melodically. Now, I do, you know, I can hear what I'm going to play melodically. Yeah.

And I know now enough about my own language that I can play a melody and know what's going to happen while it's happening. but I definitely don't plan out every single note. Just as I'm talking to you, I want to get the word melodically out because that's the best word. And I know in my brain that that's the best word to describe what I'm talking about. But how I get there to melodically could be different. Man, you say it's so good. Say it again.

Melodically. Melodically. Melodica lowly. No, you know what I'm saying? It's like I kind of agree that the goal could be to hear everything you're going to play. Yeah, I think it's just unreasonably. realistic with any kind of, I don't know, with any kind of like... Well, we've talked about before, like, this idea, because it's very hard, like,

if we just say play what you hear, or, you know, that doesn't totally define maybe, there's some gradients in there. I would say one way to look at it is if you hear, if you play a solo or play a whole tune or even a whole gig, and then you listen to a recording of it, an audio recording of it back, Like how close is that to how you experienced it in the moment? Yeah. Like to me, that shows you're getting closer to being able to hear it. You'll hear it.

Yeah. To play what you hear. And so it's less about planning it out more about kind of accuracy in the moment of what you're planning. Because just like when we're speaking, there's this element of like we're always moving forward. Like you always, as you're playing a solo, as you're playing a gig, as you're playing the next gig, you cannot look in the rear view mirror. No. Like that will be, you'll mess up the form and the time, and that's the recipe for a horrible performance. But at the same time, everything that you play, you hear it afterwards.

And you might be like, ugh, or like if you say melodically, and then, you know, you can't really go back and fix it. Yeah. But you are making an adjustment for the next time that you're going to say that, even if it's just a subconscious kind of a thing. I think the word planning, that's the one that's kind of irked me about, like, you know, trying to hear everything you're playing. Yeah. Sean Jones, when we had him in here recording some lessons, talked about using space in your solo and using that space to kind of think of your next idea. I think that's a great way to think of it. Yeah.

Not thinking about, he didn't say thinking about your next note that you're going to play. No, it's not like G minor. I'm going to start on the ninth. To me, that's the crux of it, though. Right. It's like when you're hearing it, you're letting the idea come to you in the moment. You're not intellectually hearing it. No.

You know, you're really letting, and I don't want to get too metaphysical or whatever, but you're kind of letting the, you know, the environment, the world, the spirit, something kind of give you something. Like you're opening yourself up to hear something, not from within you, just kind of from the moment that it needs to happen, you know? Yeah, I don't think there's enough time to plan that kind of stuff. No. Especially if you are engaged with the other musicians you're playing with.

Right. And you're accepting things from that. Yeah. And you're accepting what's happening. You know, there's not enough time to really be like, I'm gonna try to hear every phrase before I play it. They just happen. Yeah.

And you know, I think what you were saying about, you know, trying to hear, trying to hear everything you're playing, that comes more with like experience of knowing where you are on the instrument, being able to hear melodically where you might go or rhythmically where you might take it. I mean, it's like the concept of you'll hear it and playing what you hear. It's almost like, are you,

willing to totally unconsciously create something in the moment and constantly stay in the moment and not plan out anything and not feel that you need to pull something out that you're good at at any particular time that you're able to just speak through your instrument whatever it is that comes into your mind but not coming into your mind in an intellectual way just kind of blurt it out. It's almost like, you know, you go to, you meet someone and you start talking and you just say, what, this is, this is probably horrible, I'm going to do this, but isn't there like a syndrome, the people that just say whatever they think and they can't stop themselves? Tourette's, Tourette's syndrome. Yeah, it's fair. It's a serious thing. It's a serious thing.

So a little bit of Tourette's and jazz could be good, though, like with, where you're willing to just speak, not to be like, oh, I shouldn't play this or this won't fit. Now, the, what has to go along with this is the technique, the air training, the musical sensitivity, this musical sensibility to be able to create something. Like, you can't just pull somebody off the street that's never played a saxophone and be like, you know, go Tourette's crazy on this now. Yeah. It has to be, you know, the better you are, the better that this is going to work, of course. That's right. But I really think that that's the kind of mentality that's like you'll hear it. Right. Well, and that's why we work on getting, you know, as an improviser, it's different than as like a

classical player where you're playing something that's predetermined, right? We work on getting, you know, these scales in our hands so we don't have to think about them. Yeah. And the idea with that, you know, like the famous Charlie Parker thing, right, is like learn the changes and then forget them. The idea with that is that we don't have the time or the bandwidth in our brains to process all this information and then make good music out of it. Right.

You just have to, it has to be so ingrained by the time you get on the gig. Yeah. That you're just talking. that you're just, like we're talking to each other now, none of this was scripted, although it sounds so scripted. No, but you know what I mean? It's just like so that you can have a conversation, so that you have your cliches and you have your cadences

and you have your, you know, sentence structure. Yeah. Engrained in you as a language, as any language. Well, I think that, you know, what you brought up with classical musicians, although they know the notes, I think when they hit a very high level of performance, the idea is that the performance feel, as though they're just hearing, like there's a separate,

there's no separation between the composer and the notes and the music and the performer and then the live. And when it's done well, that's why a live classical performance can be so much more exciting even than a recorded one, you know, because you're bringing it. And that's a little bit of a different skill. And, you know, both of us haven't performed a fair amount of classical music. I think, you know, you start to learn that.

It's a different thing than classical music. A lot of the technique, depending on the instrument, is similar, but the spirit behind. it you're trying to bring something else and make it you know feel to the audience that you're creating it for the first time yeah so within jazz it's almost like you know whatever we do it's gonna be created it feels like that yeah and so we what we don't want it to do is to feel too much like it's it's programmed you know we but but we want it to be authentic and i think that's the whole thing with with to me like playing what you hear is is being authentic yeah being yourself not intellectualizing

not trying to show off, not just trying to play the, you know, trying to say what you have to say. It's like if you meet someone at a party and you feel like you've talked to them for 20 minutes and you really were honest about who you are, you found out something about them, what you said was affected by what they said, and you feel like you really showed yourself, showed your spirit, your soul. Spirit of the moment, man. Spirit of the moment. That's what it's all about.

Yep. Well, Elias, this is a great question. That's right. And I mean, this could be talked about at length by smarter people than us for sure. But, I mean, it's. Let me a link to that podcast, buddy. A. No, but I mean, it's the crux of what we're doing here. That's right.

You know, and it's always great to think about this kind of stuff and analyze. And, you know, the answers we got on the Facebook page were varied widely. Some people, you know, talked about having perfect pitch and the ability to hear everything they play. And I think that's cool, too. For me, it's just a matter of staying free with it, you know, as much as possible. I mean, I think all the things that we talk about from episode to episode and in the lessons and everything and just learning to be a better musician is really. really about us getting closer to this freedom of being able to play. That's what it is.

It's a great word. And, you know, playing what you hear is freedom. You know, just like being able to speak. If you live in a place where you can't say anything, then, I mean, it's, you don't have freedom, you know, and if you are somewhere that you can't play anything, you don't have freedom. If, you know, if you want to play, if what you hear at some point is the corneous phrase, but it's just like you kind of hear it, just play it. Yeah. You know, there's a reason. We all have something to say, let's let's let it out. And let's work on all these different elements of our playing, our technique, our ear training, especially, so that we can get closer to whatever it is we do here being able to come out. It's all about that preparation to get that freedom of.

I thought it was all about the base, about the base. No, it's not. Okay, my bad. That's good. That was nice. So, well, good. Well, we are so appreciative of the ratings and reviews for season two already flowing in. We're not ready to divulge them yet, but they're coming. I can feel them. Yeah, that's right. And that's very exciting. Thank you guys so much for sticking with the journey. Please go to iTunes.

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