You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Finding Your Identity

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Find your inner pianist with some help from Adam Maness and Peter MartinCheck out Russell Ferrante and see some serious piano chops. Ever heard that Miles Davis track Peter was referring to? Check it out here. Did you miss Peter's rant video? You can find that here.Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

Hey Peter. Yes. You know what we're doing today? Yes. What? A podcast. Okay. I'm Adamannis.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Two pianists talking music. Oh, he says it so casually. I've been saying that for years. Love it, buddy. Love it. So, yeah, I'm talking music today.

We've got a really good question in the speak pipe. Yes. And if you would like to leave us your own question, you can go to You'll Hearit.com and just leave us a speak pipe. Yes. And as the cup runeth over at the speakpipe. Some of these may show up on the podcast. Some of them may show up on our brand new Monday. You'll hear it live Helpline, which is at 4 p.m. Eastern time. That's New York City time. Say it with me. Jazz Helpline live. What did I say? Branding, Peter. Jazz Helpline live. You said you'll hear it. Jazz Helpline live. Well, I'm trying to, you know, we are the You'll Hear at podcast. No, but we are over there on the you'll hear it YouTube every Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Yes. And we are answering questions. If you're in Open Studio a member, you can go to Open Studio Pro and you can actually leave us a question and we give preferential

treatment to our Open Studio members. Right. Because we love them more. We want to. No, we know. But yeah, so you can do that. But you can join us live and ask a question in the chat. And you can leave a speak pipe in advance and that might show up over there as well.

Absolutely. Yeah. We're going to listen to one right now, right? We're going to definitely hit some speak pipes over there. But let's hit a speak pipe from Amy. This is a, I'm excited about this. This is a good question. Yay.

Hi, Adam and Peter. Thank you so much for your podcast. My question is for you is how important is it to have a strong identity as a pianist? I am 52 years old. I've been playing my whole life, both classical, starting in classical, and then after college got more into jazz and have just been, continue to study, but teaching as well for over 20 years, and recently taking some lessons with Russell Fronte,

But what I'm struggling with is my identity as a pianist. I don't really feel like I'm specifically a jazz pianist or, you know, only a classical. I've played a lot of funk in R&B. So sometimes I struggle with like long-term goals, what I'm trying to accomplish. So wondering how important you think it is to have a very clear identity of what type of pianist you are. Thank you so much. Looking forward to hearing back. It's a good one.

That's a great one. Thanks, Amy. And interesting, so she's, Amy's studying with Russell Ferranti. It's amazing. I want to be studying with Russell. I know, me too. That's not a bad teacher. Yeah, that's a really good teacher.

But that's also somebody that probably doesn't struggle with, but I would struggle with describing him as a jazz. I mean, obviously, he's a very accomplished jazz pants, but he's well beyond that in terms of his arranging, R&B, a class, you know, many different things. So I don't think that there's anything wrong with it, first of all. And I know that that doesn't, going to answer the question. of how do you kind of, you know, overcome that struggle in terms of identification. But I think an inclusive approach towards music in general is to all of our benefits.

And it's about finding that balance or maybe middle ground, wherein you can feel like you're not spread into so many different areas that you don't know who you are, but also that you're not constricted to, I'm a jazz pianist now, But you know what? I'm interested in something else. So I feel like I have to become this other, an R&B pianist or a gospel pianist and leave that behind, wherein we can see that cross-pollinization, I believe, especially with jazz to almost anywhere, can really be to your benefit and a really exciting and edifying part of your development. Absolutely.

Yeah, Amy, this is a, first of all, super common problem, especially when you get to, you know, where we are in this point of life of like, okay, I've done all these things. you know, there's a feeling of like, what's my story? Like where and where should I? Who am I? Yeah, exactly. But imagine this, Amy. Like you mentioned classical. You mentioned jazz.

You mentioned funk and R&B. You mentioned a bunch of different styles of music. But imagine that you were just Amy and that all of those things made up the kind of music that you made. That's what I want to hear. I don't want to hear Amy trying to be something that she thinks she should be, right? I should be this. Or maybe if I just focused on this.

I'm interested in your experiences playing funk or playing classical and how all of those things come together in you. Yeah. You know what I mean? So if you can, you know, and for all of us, like, no matter if you're 20 or 52, you know, if we can work on allowing ourselves to really lean into all the things that we're interested in. If, you know, can you be the type of pianist that doesn't get boxed into, I'm a jazz pianist or I'm going to play classical? Like what if you just made your own thing out of all of your experiences instead of trying to be something that you think you should be because maybe my life would be better. Maybe I'd have more success if I whatever. You know what I mean?

What if you did what made you happy and only what made you happy and then you let that music come out of you. I assume more people would want to hear that. I'm more interested in that than hearing someone try to be something that they think they should be. Absolutely. You know what I mean? And I mean, you know, having said that, I have a little bit of experience with this because I am a 52-year-old pianist as well. It's right up your alley, buddy.

So what up, Amy, 1970 in the house. But I think that... That's a good year, by the way. It was a very good year. It was a very good year. The idea, though, that, you know, for me, when I'm confronted with this often is when people say, oh, are you a musician, or what do you do?

I'm a musician. What do you play? Piano. Oh, what kind of music do you play? I usually default to jazz because I'm a fan of... jazz. I'm not a fan of jazz. We'll see, I am a fan of jazz.

But I don't feel like I have to give a huge explanation after that because I know that, you know, I'm very inclusive in terms of styles of music, but I'm also a little bit in touch with what my specialty is. You know what I mean? So I think that we're able to, like, let's just remove ourselves from the kind of artificial constructs of genre that are placed by, you know, either sort of the business of music or the classification on Spotify or just the layman's approach or whether like, well, I like jazz or I don't like this. A lot of times people are a little bit misinformed when they say that because if you really dig into what, and I'm not saying that you have to know specifically have this, you know, precise knowledge before you're allowed to say what you like.

I just think it's a matter of like people saying, oh, I love Italian food. And maybe they've, what they actually have experienced is sort of a specific type of Italian-American food. On the hill. On the hill, which is great here and say, look. But it's not Italian food. It's going to be, well, I mean, it has its roots. It's certainly related to, you know, somebody coming from Italy would be like, oh, I see

some sourcing in here. But they'd also be like, but he's not. Well, yeah. And depending on what part of Italy they came from. They came from Sicily, they would be more familiar. We may not have been exposed to the diversity and the variety of all these different types of, you know, from the north of Italy down to Sicily is like two different things. So I think sometimes when people say, oh, you play jazz, oh, that's so cool.

Like, what are they thinking of? I'll just tell a quick story years ago when I used to, when I had a brief career as a jingle writer, which I don't even know if they used that term. Hey, hey, writing commercials and crap, not crap like that, but it was called licensing now. You know, you just make your stems. Right, right. Well, it used to be like they would come, you know, like I work with this adag agency in New Orleans and they would say, oh, we, we were doing this 30 second spot for Cheerios or regional spot, whatever, blah, blah, blah for radio ad, back when they had radio ads. That's a crazy sentence you just said.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Cheerios. Radio ads. Radio ad. And so they wanted me to do this thing and it was like, they wanted to hear a demo for it because they were still putting it together. And then we're going to go in and record it live. This is back when this stuff was still. So I basically, they were like, we want a jazzy, kind of upbeat, kind of, you know.

I'm not a fan of. Upbeaty kind of jazzy. Yeah. Yeah. So I had to kind of decipher what they were saying. And so, you know, I don't remember what I did. I just did, I just programmed a quick like trio thing. Maybe with some trumpet on top on the keyboard. And this was back when it was like, I mean, yeah, you could program stuff and sequence it. But it wasn't the highest quality. But it was good enough for a demo. Sure. So I gave that to them and they, they laid it in with the, they'd already, you know, done the whatever, the voice acting and stuff. They gave me that. So I knew what it, what the commercial was. I mean, it sounded fine, whatever. And it had to be original, of course. You can't play. a, you know, a lot, you can't be a licensed tune. Yeah. A published tune. So, um, they got back and they said, that was good, but we wanted a little more jazzy.

And, you know, so we kept going back and forth. And finally I just said, um, because a lot of times they would come and say, here's, you know, um, Miles Davis sketches of Spain. We want this sound, but not this. But sound as close as you can to this. Yeah. This is what, this is what we're thinking of the atmospheric kind of thing. That's helpful.

I said, just give me the kind of thing. They're like, you know, kind of just Miles Davis, Jazzy, whatever. you want. I kept saying Miles Davis. I was like, okay, that's why I had the trumpet on there. That doesn't help because of Miles's career. Like, what is that, you know? Exactly. Well, and my idea was, because we were recording, we were actually doing some TV stuff around this time. And Nicholas Payton, we were working together a lot. And we actually scored this couple episodes of this ABC television show. Just me and him. Well, he was scoring it and playing almost everything. I mean, I wrote some of this stuff and he would play like drums and over the bass and trumpet. And I

play piano. And we do the stuff really fast. So my idea was like, oh, this is we grow out of Nick. So I'm putting the trumpet stuff down. I'm putting the trumpet stuff down. whatever and finally said just give me which Miles Davis recording you're talking about yeah so it turned out they had do-wop I was gonna say do-wop like is if you have that cool mo d on it which was basically a hip-hop record with Miles playing on top of it help us out bro they thought they were like you know Jazzy like Miles Davis I was like oh no no I'm playing birth of the cool over here yeah but it's just to say that there's like all all these words just don't really mean anything at all you know they don't well Amy good luck with everything again like I I

I think it's not about finding your identity as a pianist. I think it's actually about shedding identity and shedding the story that you think you should be telling the world and just allowing what's here to happen and allowing all of your experiences as a musician and as a person to come through in your music. And the clear of the path we have to accept that from our hearts outward, the easier it is to make music, you know, because then there's no wrong notes, there's no wrong genres, there's no what's my pianistic identity. It's just here's what is here. And I hope you enjoy it. Yeah. Here I am, Whirl. Love me as I am. But you know what? I do think that one angle,

and this is what I was kind of alluding to, is that as jazz pianist, that's a very inclusive thing. If we allow it to be to say, well, I'm a pianist, I'm Amy the pianist, but I'm primarily, I'm not to say primarily. I'm a jazz pianist, you know, which includes influences from country, from R&B, from gospel, from blues,

from classical. I was classically trained. I mean, that's very much my story. Yeah. A lot of influences from classical, a lot of gospel. I heard you on the violin last night, buddy.

Oh, that's all classical. That was good stuff. That was good stuff. That was not good stuff, but it was something. But, yeah,

so that's the great thing about jazz is there's sort of an inherent and implied inclusivity reference my rant against, that's available on YouTube now for a lack of inclusivity so anyway hopefully that answer will link to that rant below

please yeah all right well thank you so much if you'd like to leave us a speak pipe you can go to you'll hear it dot com and don't forget to join us over on the you'll hear at YouTube every Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern for what is it called Q&A no jazz helpline helpline live thank you you'll hear it you'll hear it