You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - From Sonata to Stank Face

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

The ultimate musical showdown: jazz vs classical. We bring in conductor Josh Weilerstein from the Sticky Notes podcast to compare, contrast and find the common ground among these two very different schools of music. From Duke Ellington's swinin' take on Peer Gynt to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, we explore the tunes and the musicians blurring the line between jazz and classical. Josh, Adam and Peter each bring their own picks to the conversation, and have the best time breaking it all down.Nerdy? Extremely. Snobby? A little. Fun? Heck yeah!In this episode you'll hear:- Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major: Herbie Hancock vs the Cleveland Orchestra- How Duke Ellington made classical standards swingin'- Why Bartók matters to modern music - Two very different interpretations of Rhapsody In Blue- Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk: no improv, still loose- Miles Davis and Gil Evans doing AdagioCheck out Josh’s insightful dives into the classical canon on Sticky Notes podcast

Excuse me, Peter. What's up, man? Yeah, I've heard that jazz musicians can have this affliction called Stank Face. Yeah. Could you demonstrate that for the people, please? Well, it just has to be natural, but it's kind of... Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we say, uh, too.

Yeah. But, I mean, classical players happen as well, right? Yeah, I mean, sometimes you'll see, like... But pretty good. Let's combine the two, maybe. Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to The You'll Hear at Podcast.

Music, Explored. Explored, brought today by Open Studio. Go to Open StudioJadioJazz.com for, oh, your jazz lesson needs. Yes. Peter. Yes, sir. We have a special guest on the show today. I realize that.

I'm feeling like I'm not dressed appropriately enough, but I see him dress similarly. So I'm excited. What's up, Josh? Hey, good to be here. From our favorite classical music podcast, Sticky Notes. The infamous. Josh, Wilerstein is here. Josh, thank you for being here.

We love your show so much, and we're so honored to have you on our show. and encourage all of our listeners to go check out sticky notes if you're interested in classical music at all. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. I'm very intimidated

to be on a jazz podcast, so I hope it goes okay. Well, we can talk about it. Maybe at some point we'll talk about who is more intimidating and snobby. Jazz purists or classical purists. I think the stobometer is going to have to be...

I hate to say it's overloaded. We're going to use the snobble meter today, for sure. No, but we thought with having you on the show, we could just listen to a lot of good music, specifically music that has some cross-pollination between our respective genres, because there's just been, I think, since the inception of jazz in the early 20th century, there's just been this amazing cross-pollination between jazz musicians and classical musicians with composers and players and improvisers on both sides of the genres. And so I thought we could really have fun listening to music that draws inspiration on either side from jazz musicians' perspective and from classical musicians. That sounds great. Yeah, and I'm always thinking like the other angle of it, obviously in the music that we're going to listen to some of these compositions on both sides.

And also, I think jazz musicians, so many, especially pianists. Okay, we're biased here. Can I put that out there? Everybody knows that, right? We're biased as pianists. Yeah. But there's so many wonderful jazz pianists that I think we all admire and have followed, learned from trained under through the records and everything coming up in the lineage

that were really, some of them very accomplished classical players themselves, certainly a lot of classical training. So I think that's such an important connection just in terms of the way we approach the instrument, the technique, and the foundation of that. I think we're going to hear that if we get into some of this Herbie Hancock Revelle stuff and different things.

You really hear the foundations of where we're coming from, certainly as jazz musicians. I know myself, I was classically trained, I know you were to a certain degree. We came up in that. So it's sort of that shared lineage. of approach to the instruments, especially the piano. Yeah, Josh, why don't you tell us a little bit about your relationship with, first of all,

maybe just music in general, but your relationship with jazz as a classical musician. Yeah, so I grew up in a very, very musical family kind of family circus. My parents are both musicians. My dad's a violinist. My mom is a pianist. My sister is a cellist. We definitely also listen to other music, other than classical music at home. a lot of like 60s pop music like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, which is music that my mom was obsessed with as a teenager.

And definitely a lot of jazz too. There was a lot of Miles Davis playing in our house. And it was always something that I really enjoyed and loved. I didn't know much about it. I never really studied it. And, you know, classical musicians are trained in a very, I mean, to, you know, as many people know, We're trained to read music and to follow that music. And there's no greater sin than to not follow what a composer put exactly on the page.

And it's interesting we're going to be talking about Ravel, who was apparently the most neurotic about this. I was just reading a story about him because I'm actually writing a podcast about Ravel and Gershwin right now. And apparently Ravel was on his deathbed, and somebody played one of his pieces for him. And he, like, raised himself off of his bed to point. at a dynamic that the pianist had not followed to the letter. So, you know, that is, our attitude is like, our attitude is the composer is sitting in the corner watching us and evaluating everything we're doing.

So this is very much like the classical training. And there's some classical musicians that don't follow that as much, but that's sort of like the main way we are trained. So when we started encountering jazz, certainly when I went to New England Conservatory, there was a big jazz program. There still is a big jazz program there. There was a lot of attempts to kind of bring those two things together.

Like I took an intro to jazz history course, things like that. It always felt like there was this divide that was very hard to overcome without a lot of effort, I think. And that's something that we didn't like. I remember talking about it with my friends at school. We wish we could be more involved in the jazz department and contemporary improvisation, that kind of thing. Yeah, and I think that's, well, I was just thinking, like, some schools are doing a better job of that than others. And I don't want to, like, necessarily, it's not about calling anybody out, but I know what you're saying, because I mean, NEC's jazz program has been wonderful for years and has, you know, so many particular wonderful attributes about it. But I know when I was at Juilliard, there was no jazz program.

So you talk about a wall. It was more like a cliff that you would just fall off. But my teacher, who was amazing, legendary teacher that I learned a lot from, he heard that I played jazz too, which was really the reason I kind of Julia, was to go to New York and get on the jazz scene. But he said, if you're going to be in my studio, you cannot play jazz. And I said, I'm thinking, of course, I'm not going to play it in here. I'm here to learn Beethoven, Abak and Bar-Tock and all that.

And no, he meant, like, not practically, he was old school. It was like, it's going to mess up your technique. It's going to mess up your mind. It's going to mess up your family. It's going to mess up everything. I didn't say that. No, but he definitely felt like it was going to take away focus and he was adamant. So I had to kind of, I was a little bit of a fraud. I was like, I will not think about jazz or practice it at all. You know, in a little bit in his defense, the problem with it, I think, in general, is that both disciplines really are a lifetime worth of work to do at the highest level. Like, it's so hard to rob Peter to pay Paul on either one of those things. It just takes so much time and effort to be a top shelf classical musician or a top-self jazz.

musician and the disciplines are different as we're going to talk about a little bit. Haven't you ever heard of a, what is it, the decathlon or the heptathlon? They do all those different things. I mean, think about the very few players who do both well on both sides. Right. I mean, if, like on one hand kind of thing, you know, so it's a very rare feat. So let's get into maybe some music. So, Josh, your first pick here was Rivell's Piano Concerto in G major, specifically the first movement.

So amazing. Yeah. You want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, well, this was a really interesting, you know, as you said, there was this cross-pollination, and Ravel was somebody who got really into jazz. He wrote this, he went to the U.S. in this big tour, and he encountered Gershwin, and he encountered lots of other jazz musicians. I mean, he really sought it out, which was something that not a lot of composers were doing.

And he wrote this big article, which I've been searching for online for weeks, because I'm writing this podcast. I never could find the full article, but I found a quote from it, which is he wrote, personally, I find jazz most interesting, the rhythms, the way melodies are handled, and the melodies themselves. And so he really embraced it in a lot of ways.

It wasn't just in this concerto. It was also in the second movement of his violent sonata, which is called blues. His other piano concerto for the left hand, it's a little less jazz influence, but it's definitely there. And then this concerto, Yeah, I often think of it as the most jazzy classical piece because it has,

and it's not jazzy in the sense of improvisation at all, but it's jazzy in the sense of the harmonies that he chooses to use that have that color to them. Yeah, you could hear his influences popping out during this time for sure. Yeah, and it's interesting, Josh, you said in that in the quote from Ravel that he talked about the rhythm and the melody. I think for jazz musicians, we're always, the first thing I'm hearing in a lot of Ravelle's music, even some of the stuff much earlier

that had to have been before he'd heard, certainly before he came to the U.S., I don't know what kind of recordings, but I'm thinking like the preludes and the imaged for piano and stuff that I believe were like before 1910 that have a lot of harmonic material that we would definitely, I would feel like

it's got to be jazz influence, all those dominant ninth chords and stuff. Or the other way around. But I'm starting to think, maybe it was the other way around and the fact that he doesn't mention hardly but he says specifically rhythm and melody was maybe more exotic or jazz to him

is super interesting. Well, let's listen to a little bit of this piano concerto in G major. Can you tell us about the recording here? We've got the Cleveland Orchestra.

Yes. We've got the Cleveland Orchestra with Christian Zimmerman. I mean, this is like two very unjazzy. Yeah, one of the greatest pianists, whoever has walked here. But Cleveland has some good,

you know, Ohio's got some great jazz roots. So maybe that pulls a good. Yeah, for sure. It's just that if you the, I mean, the Cleveland Orchestra is one of the greatest orchestras ever. Yes. But they, they are a real keeper of tradition. Right. Among American orchestras, and from the tradition of George Zell to Dochnani to Franz Velsermost, like this is a real traditional orchestra and Christian Zimmerman is a very traditional pianist. So I kind of chose this partly because it's such a quote-unquote conservative performance of it. because you can find recordings of this piece

that really try to lean into the jazz side of it, which, I mean, something maybe we can talk about later. It's something that I often don't think works when classical musicians are like, oh, I'm going to try to be jazzy now. Yeah. I love this pick for that reason, by the way. I think you nailed the recording of it. And we got to also

talk about later is jazz musicians trying to be classical. I've got a whole thing. We can figure out which is worse, which way you go. All right, this is Christian Zimmerman, the Cleveland orchestra, Ravel's piano concerto and G major. I like it, Josh, getting the score out.

Checking to see if the jazz is documented in there. It's kind of what I was doing. Jazzy bassoons. Avec piano. Definitely heard Gersh. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is pulled directly for Rhapsody and Blue, you know. It's fun to hear.

I hear Zimmerman play this stuff, though. It's really fantastic. I think it's great that he's not leaning into like overly, like, trying to swing it. Like, you can tell it's a very accurate reading of it. That's what I'm saying. Straightforward. Yeah. This is why this recording is such a fun pick for this because of the sort of, as you were saying,

the conservative nature of these artists. By the way, if you get a chance to pop over to Cleveland to hear some Beethoven or Mozart, do yourself a favor. Or Ravel. Or Ravel. Go enjoy that because it's as good as it gets. here in America. Absolutely.

I know that's your hometown, Josh. And like, is that, I've always felt like, and this is going back sometime, like Cleveland was always sort of the most traditional and European of the American orchestra. Is that sort of still the case? I mean, it's hard to say if it's still the case because some, I mean, orchestras all over the world

have become so much more homogenous. I mean, with so much more influence from, you know, people from different countries. But Cleveland, they have something a bit, which is that they've had the same music directors for a really long time. Like, Zell, George Zell was, he sort of built the orchestra into the most, you know, well-known orchestra

and made it very European orchestra. And then they had Dachnani for a while, who was in the same kind of tradition. And now Franz Velsermost, who's also in the same kind of Austro-German tradition. He's been there, I think, 25 years. And it's very rare nowadays for music directors to stay with orchestras that long. Right. So they definitely have held on to that tradition.

Their names sound traditional. Just their names. Exactly. Yeah, they sound unique, which is also unusual among orchestras. Which is funny, they sound unique in their conservatism because every other orchestra is trying these wild things, and they're like straight down the middle every time. And there's something really special about that. It's a really fun experience, actually, to go there. Yeah.

And the hall is so great. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. So great. Sounds so great. And kind of breeds a certain type of. player wanting to be there, I'm sure. So, Josh, after you added this to our playlist,

Peter added a different version of this from Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World album, what is this, like 90, like 96, 97, 98. Yeah, late 90s. Same piece, Herbie. Second movement. Second movement. I've never heard this before.

So this is like, it's totally new for me. What's interesting about this, is in the original, the Revelle original, the rhythm is completely hypnotic. It just goes on beam under all this. And he's taken all of that away to make it sound so much freer, which is really beautiful. Yeah. And I mean, if you really know the original and you don't know Herbie at all, this is like, it's a little bit shocking.

It's jarring. Yeah. Yeah. If like me, you know the Revelle, the original and you really know Herbie, it's like, It's like two worlds coming together. Because I think what you hear is, and I really recommend folks to check this out, whichever camp you're in,

or maybe you haven't heard either, is that you make, and I was playing this for Adam yesterday, and Adam was just like, oh, that's like, you know, young Herbie must have been checking out a lot of Revelle, you know, because his touch,

there's so many times I've heard him live, and certainly on recordings, going back years, do a kind of introduction that almost sounds like that, just a free form improvisation. So I think there was, obviously a lot of, I mean, Herbie, you know,

was an accomplished classical pianos coming up and never totally gave it up. I mean, he played with the Chicago Symphony. When he was in high school, yeah. He played, yeah, I'm just looking it up because I remember this. He played the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 and D major at a young people's concert on February 5th, 1952 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by George Schick at the age of 11.

Yeah. That's his And I think of all the, like, obviously, Oscar Peterson. Yeah, their love of classical music comes through. Yeah, you can hear the technique. But I think with Herbie, what you hear, what he was just doing, like the finger control, the balance, like all the really nuanced classical, like he had, you know, that he had really developed and applied to jazz.

It's fun to kind of hear him come back to classical and apply it, but then bring all his kind of harmonic ingenuity and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, there's a long tradition. I think especially of piano players in jazz of starting out in the classical tradition and then somewhere around adolescence moving over and beginning to learn how to improvise and Peter Martin's one of them,

Herbie Hancock's one of them, Brad Meldow, so many come to mind. But this is great, man. Let's go on to maybe on the jazz side of things. I mean, we have our own canon of composers. And the one that comes to mind when we first started talking about this episode, Josh, was Duke Ellington, right?

Who, one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century in any genre, And we have this fun. I mean, we could have done so much from Duke, and we have a couple of things here, but I thought it'd be fun to play his version of Grieg's in the Hall of the Mountain King. Here's the thing about Duke Ellington is he did a lot of this stuff.

We were both talking about playing the Nutcracker Suites in various... I've done it a couple times, and it's really fun. He always made them legitimately swinging. Like, he always kept a real pulse, on this isn't a gimmick or anything. He made them into like something that real jazz heads are like, that is hip and that is not corny.

It works the way that he's doing them. So incredible. And I'm just noticing, you know, his given name is Edward Ellington. And so he's playing the Pierre Gint sweets here by Edvard Greig. And on the cover of the album it says, Swing in Sweets by Edward E and Edward G. Oh, that's fantastic. It's a great album cover, too. it's so

you know it doesn't sound corny from a classical perspective either because it's so it takes the sort of that original theme and then just takes it into a whole different direction and I I love I basically I just love his whole approach to music in general

agreed I said like like some people think music is like black and white but music is music and there's two kinds of music good music and the other kind and I think that's so that's really great and it I don't even speak of respect to the original piece because I don't think that's what it's about

but it has like the color of the original piece and then just this whole new world attached to it so it's just so fun to listen to. That's a great way to put it. And I almost liken this to the way that like Grieg and I'm thinking like Bartok and a number of classical composers, especially 20th century composers, that took folk songs, especially from their

culture or their country of origin or region or whatever and then turn them into classical. I think they weren't necessarily thinking of it like that. But I think that when it's done well, I mean, when it's not done well, it's like a corny thing where you're mocking it almost, you know. But when it's done well, like the way Bartok did it in Greig, and I think Duke Gallington, it's a similar kind of thing because you're really taking the element of it, in this case, the melody, and then just like wrapping it up with the jazz elements. Like you say, it's like, he's not.

trying to make it a little bit swing and bouncing around. And I mean, really, you know, Gershwin, who's kind of looms over all this is I think probably what most people would perceive as the great connector of early classical and jazz, you know, the one that did that, certainly did that. I mean, he came under some criticism too for maybe trampling too much in certain ways upon the different traditions,

but certainly had a lot of success with it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the Greek itself, which I actually didn't know until a year ago, is based on Norwegian folk, And you bring a Bartok who was, I mean, he basically invented the term ethnomusicology with Kodai in going into the countryside in Romania and finding and Hungary and out all over the place and finding all of these melodies and recording them. And then I think Bartok would, this is a completely different, I think, approach to jazz. But he would take hours and hours and hours transcribing every little nuance that these singers would do. And he said he was out of respect to them because he didn't want to just.

stylized this music. You know, like, Brahms, Hungarian dances are really famous, but those aren't based on actual authentic folk music. They were based on music that he would have heard in Vienna, which was played by musicians who may have, like, way back, come from the countryside, but had come up with their whole kind of coffee house style. And so Bartok was really trying to do something totally new with that, and it worked. And I think that's... Bartok is also a name that a lot of people outside of the classical music, music world don't know, but he's so important to all of 20th century music. Oh, totally agree, totally agree. Yeah, and I think I wonder if that's the thing with Gershwin, if we look at, maybe that's

almost like the Brahms with the Hungarian dances, like Gershwin took the blues, which he definitely had like a very, you know, deep understanding of from a musical perspective, from a theoretical perspective, but maybe not from a, you know, as much, I think probably emotionally too, maybe not spiritually. I don't know. But he was, there is a certain, and you hear this coming through to the Ravel that we heard before, there's a certain surface level, you know, attraction to the blues and the way that he uses it, that could be seem a little bit simplistic that later on it was kind of more nuanced, the different composers, not only classical, but just jazz composers and stuff in general, would approach the blues and how you brought it in. It was almost, it was never,

I don't think a mockery of it, but it was a little bit of a simplistic approach to it. Yeah, I mean, you're also talking about just a couple, maybe a decade and a half of the recordings of the blues when Gerswin is learning about it. If that even.

So it's all fairly new. We're coming at it from a perspective 110 years later, so it's a little different for us. But I agree with that. Before we get too far away from Duke Ellington, though, Josh, I want to play another one of your picks that is related. So this is Harlem by Duke Ellington, and tell us about this recording and why you picked it for this playlist. So this is a big piece. It's about 15 minutes

long, and it's a piece that Ellington and his band played all the time. And there's a bunch of different performances on YouTube of it, which, and I think Spotify as well. And it was really interesting for me to listen to them, because he wrote out a score, which has been, arranged by different composers like John McChary did an arrangement of it for a pretty big orchestra and it's written out. Everything is written out. There's no improvisation. All the solos are written out to the last note. And then you listen to the Ellington play it with multiple different performances and it always sounds totally different. And there's always something new that they put in or

a different thing. And so this recording was done by the Detroit Symphony with Nemi Yarvey, who is an Estonian conductor, and these recordings were made in the early 90s, and Nemi R.V. is responsible for rediscovering a ton of American music that people had just forgotten about. Like, for example, the William Dawson Negro Folk Symphony, which is an absolute 20th century masterpiece, William Grant Still Afro-American Symphony.

He specifically chose a lot of works by black composers that had just been really popular, and then it just kind of fallen off the map. And one of them is Harlem. And it's just an absolutely wonderful recording that I think really shows an orchestra that is totally comfortable in the idiom and doesn't exaggerate it.

I mean, from my perspective, I'm actually really curious to hear what you guys think about it. From my perspective, it seems like they get it. Well, this will be the second time that we'll have the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on the show because we just did an episode

on Marvin Gay's What's Going on. on. And that string section is the string section of those Motown recordings. So not unfamiliar to our concert master. Including the concert master. So not unfamiliar to our audience here. This is the Detroit Symphony Orchestra playing Duke Ellington's Harlem. So what do you think, guys? Do they get it? Man, totally. 100%. The trumpet player, that trumpet player really, like, that must be somebody pretty well versed in jazz. I mean, it's got to be. Yeah. Well, with this piece, often, you bring in a lead trumpet player, classical trumpet players are not always trained to play that high. Right, right.

And I think the last note of the whole piece is like a high F that... Yeah. My first trumpet player in Denmark, he was like, no way, man. I'm not playing that. That's like a perfect fourth above where they stop usually. Yeah, I run a lot of pop's arrangements for our local orchestra here, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and they don't like that. Yeah, yeah.

I don't appreciate that, even though that's what I want. Yeah. But I mean, even the, and I don't know if it was the same, the lead player that was doing the solo stuff too, probably was, but like that way of, like, even we heard on like the Ravel, the way the trumpets are playing, you know, you might say, okay, well, that's from the late 20s. That would be appropriate, like very classical style, but some sort of jazz type of idiomatic stuff. But I always think about like the late 20s, think about like what Lewis Armstrong, like he was kind of inventing the jazz. It was still super early. I mean, yes, there was like blues, Bessie Smith, those recordings from around that time, like the way you would bend stuff and everything, and you definitely heard it in that recording brilliantly. Let's go to something we've been hinting at here this whole time, and that's George Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue, which I think is probably, if you were to say, what's a jazzy classical

piece or a classical jazzy piece? 85% of Americans would apply George Gershwin's Rhapsody and Blue. So we have a couple of different versions here. And the first one is the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. It's basically the New York Philharmonic. Yeah. This is, do you know what year this is from?

I'm trying to find the year on this one. Rhapsody of Blue. I don't. This is early, right? I think it might be. This is Rapsine Blue conducted by Bernstein. And played by Bernstein, too. He's playing the piano part.

Oh. Oh, is he? Sorry, let's try it again. One more time. Sorry, I should, I didn't mean to break in. there. That's good. Yeah, piano and conductor. That's a heavy lift.

That's paid birthday, you know. Right. You probably contracted the show also and wrote the liner notes. Hosted the party afterwards. I think a whole two generations of clarinet players have learned how to play this off this version.

Exactly. And everything. Yeah. Well, well, sorry, I'll wait. Oh, we talk over music all the time. Yeah. We're known for that here. Well, I'll just wait till the big United Airlines bit.

So I find this so interesting listening to this recording. I haven't heard this recording in really long time. And it is sort of the record, like the standard recording that you learn this piece off of. It's Bernstein. It's the basically the New York Philharmonic. You know, it feels like it couldn't get any more. authentic. But I actually recorded this piece with Martin James Bartlett. And in preparing for it, I went and listened to the original recording of Gershwin playing this with the Paul Whiteman band.

Yeah. And it was, I'd just say it was a revelation would not be a strong enough word. Like, first of all, it's like five times faster. Right. The clarinetist is completely, plays it totally differently from what we quote unquote understand of this piece. And I've talked to... with multiple clarinetists about it, and they say they would actually, to play it like that, they would have to completely change their whole technical approach to the instrument, because it's just so worlds apart from what clarinetists are trying to do nowadays. And so on that recording, we tried a couple of places to kind of kick the tempo close to where

the Paul Whiteman band plays it, with Gershwin as the pianist. And the other thing that I find is so interesting is that in Rhapsody and Blue, you have these huge cadenzas for the piano, where they're just playing alone for two or three minutes at a time and i mean bernstein himself called this piece like kind of a weird pastiche like orchestra plays and the soloist plays and the orchestra plays and it was gershwin's first piece that he ever wrote for orchestra and in the original the premiere performance with orchestra gershwin hadn't written out any of the cadenzas so he improvised them and then wrote down the improvisations and now 99% of classical musicians play the improvisations as if they are, you know, a Beethoven piano sonata.

Right. And there's a few pianists who now do their own thing. Aaron Deal is one of them. He's amazing. Makoto Ozone also improvises his own cadenzas. But they always kind of, what both of them do is they kind of go in and out of the original Gershwin. And which I've really, I've done it with Aaron and it's just so much fun to do it that way. but it's a piece that has so much improvisation baked into it and so often that improvisation is ignored by classical musicians so it's fun to talk about it.

I pulled up here the version with Gershwin playing with Paul Whiteman's band. Let's hear a little bit of that from the beginning. This is my favorite part. It's much more like silent film score style, you know? It's a whole other animal. It's so much lighter. Yeah, exactly. And Gershwin's like slightly swinging it too.

It's a totally different piece. It doesn't have all of that bombast and over-the-top feeling that the orchestral version does. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. You know what's interesting? I think as iconic as this piece is and as influential as it is, and maybe more so than anything else to bridge, especially early on classical and jazz,

I think what ended up happening, like, if you look at sort of, how jazz unfolded after the 30s or 40s, you know, B-B-Bop and then post-bop and whatever else we're going to say. Like, I think Gershwin's mark as a writer of songs that were adapted by jazz musicians later on. Absolutely. Became kind of his biggest influence strictly on the jazz side. I think within the classical world, it's always like he's one of the authentic jazz composers that can fit into the classical world and put these influences on in a way that was

certainly different than Revelle. and you know where it's more like just a little peek around and they're already doing some of the harmonic stuff or Stravinsky who you know we should definitely talk about him super influenced rhythmically and things but you're right he's probably more influential on the 32 bar ABA form

than he is on anything else and one in particular I got rhythm exactly like he wrote the blueprint for what would become bebop changes essentially and and he was very not a BBO player or composer but yeah his composition became the framework for that

Yeah, really interesting. Yeah. Okay, let's move back over to the jazz side a little bit. That was fascinating to hear Gershwin with Paul Whiteman's band do that. Let's move on to a 1959 classic. We're going to skip ahead a little bit, and this is the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and this is definitely... 59 or 60? 59, but I'm going to talk about that later.

This is definitely pulling jazz musicians, Dave Rubeck, Paul Desmond, and that incredible band, pulling from classical tradition. And this is Blue Rondo Aliturk from Time Out. I mean, we were talking about Bartok earlier. And like, this was so obviously just a nod to that influence and how fashionable it was during this period, you know. But also the way that they play is how I always dream classical musicians could play, not in the sense of improvisation, but in the sense of horizontal versus vertical.

Yeah. You hear like these like, these like, They don't have this kind of vertical bar line on each. You feel like this incredible momentum through each measure. And that's so great to hear. Yeah, and there's definitely like a groove element to that, that propulsion going on. And when they actually, if you keep playing it until they,

when they go into the swing. Yeah, yeah. It's just like immediately goes to a different groove. Because this is all written out. Like there's, I don't think there's been one outside of the drums, maybe one note of improvisation yet. Okay. But I bet the drummer does very similar things.

Right. You know what I mean? Right. He keeps it in the pocket. But once he goes to the solo section, it's like immediate improv, but it's at a totally different groove. Hmm. It's just like, and this is just blues, but then it's jumping back and forth.

I believe this was our Desert Island track off of this album. This was a super influential record. Okay, so this record, I know from my dad, he was a classical musician. this was like a record when it came out that a lot of classical musicians were like, oh, I like that kind of jazz. Like this was a real, I mean, it was a super popular record. This was like a billboard pop chart. It was very unusual for a jazz record.

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. I'm really struck by like just that rhythmic groove that is so, yeah, it's so inevitable. and it just keeps on going and these rapid changes and that kind of something that I've in playing

with some really great jazz musicians I've been lucky enough to have worked with Wayne Shorter and Chick-Korea and the sense of looseness and total precision is remarkable because often I find with classical musicians we have

to choose and those two certainly were not choosing and they're they had both simultaneously. Yeah, and I think that there's Chick-Korea is a great example. And what I was saying, he's very similar in his background

and his age and everything to Herbie Hancock in terms of like their exposure to classical music and, well, I mean, Chick-Korea record. I mean, Herbie recorded some, Chikari recorded a lot. You know, and wrote what a basically classical piece is totally written out. But I think that they were able to bring that,

the thing that some less nuanced jazz players, they might have a strong groove and as you say, sense of inevitability in terms of where things are going. But they do struggle. We do struggle sometimes when it's loose.

And like every time, I remember when I first started working with the orchestras and doing stuff that was sort of jazz, pop types of stuff. And I mean, I knew this from playing classical music earlier,

but all of a sudden you get in the jazz thing when the conductor's like, and then the notes coming and there's this beautiful blend and we're like, where's the beat, you know? But there's a beauty in that for a certain style of doing things.

And when you can match that with a drum, that's sitting there with the brush is and the strings are, because if the whole string section and when I first started writing, I had to understand this, if they all come in together on a ballad

exactly the same place as the bass and the piano, it sounds whack. It sounds like, you know, it's too vertical. So to give it that, to give it that flow to it, you know, is a real art.

Folks like Chick, Greer, Herbie Henka, Wayne Shorter for sure. Like, they really understood both worlds in a way that was not like, this is here and this is here. It was like, no, this is music. Yeah.

Yeah, Josh, as a conductor, do you recognize the fear in the rhythm section's eyes of the jazz musicians that come in to do this? Because it can be very, maybe we could talk about this now because it could be very, very intimidating for us if any jazz musician has to go play with the orchestra, which we often get the chance to do, and it's often a real treat,

but it is very intimidating to step on that stage. Well, so I think the intimidation, goes both ways. And it's silly because we're all just there playing music together. But I think I had one experience with it wasn't strictly jazz. It was Ray Lima, who's

more in like the world music realm. And he was playing with a German orchestra. And this was, it was like quite a culture clash. I mean, everybody was trying a little too hard to make it work. I think that was kind of, that ended up being the problem. And these, I

vividly remember one of the player, I think he might have been the bass player, sitting with these two flute players trying to teach these two flute players the rhythms, and they were all so desperate to just get it right. And finally, it was getting kind of tense because I was, I basically, I just kept saying, follow the drummer, follow the drummer, and the drummer would try to

follow me, and it was just like, everybody was at cross purposes. And finally, Ray, who I think was very experienced, he just got up and he was like, guys, just keep it rolling. Just work together. Just keep it rolling. Work together. It'll be fine.

Yeah. And somehow, like, his being totally relaxed just got everybody to calm down. And it just kind of clicked. And I find as a conductor who, I haven't done it a lot, but as a conductor with when I'm working with jazz musicians, especially with the rhythm section specifically, I find I have to get them to trust me that I'm going to follow them that they're kind of the boss.

Yeah. And that I'm going to be always, I'm not leading them, they're leading me. That's often the challenge. Yeah. Yeah. It can be very challenging if a conductor doesn't understand that. Yeah.

Because the rhythm section can just go and they'll take it no matter what. Yeah. Exactly. And I think for conductors, you know, we always want to be involved in like control things. And actually working with a rhythm section is, I mean, and it's not just in jazz music. It's also like when I do West Side's. story, for example, symphonic dances from West Side Story, I always say, like, from 10 minutes into the first rehearsal, I say, in this passage, I am not the boss, the drummer is the boss. Like, this is what has to lead or else it's just, especially with something like this, which is not, doesn't have a fixed, fixed point. Right. Yeah. I can be the most precise conductor on the planet, and everybody's still going to listen to the drummer. So if I'm not with them, then it's just not going to work. Yeah, it's really going to be hard on everybody if you don't give the drummer that.

that power that's a great point yeah and i find all different types of musicians instinctively listen to and feel if it's a good drummer you know like so regardless of what they can i've been in a lot of different situations where you know conductors were not as uh incifely as you are josh in terms of realizing that and they're like i'm not in control i'm like if people are going to go with like you know what i mean it's like that's they're going to go with what they hear yeah it's like a basketball team the point guard's going to be dribbling the ball and the center's going to be going you know you can drop the plays all you want yeah yeah yeah yeah and and and And I mean, some of the most successful times I've had,

some of the times when I've conducted and been playing, it really helps because it keeps, like, there's very, like, I would only, and this was usually stuff that I'd arranged too, so I knew the stuff. I would only be conducting at the places where it was needed. The rest of the time, the drums are leading, are conducting, you know, and, like, you cut out the middleman a little bit. But you've got to have an orchestra that really,

really gets it to be able to do that, I think. Well, let's listen to a band and a conductor and an artist that really get it. We'll make this our last selection. And please leave in the comments, all of the atrocities that we left out. Let us know how we really messed out. There's going to be lots of criticisms. If we mention them, does that count even? Yeah, go, roll them off.

Well, I'm just thinking one person we would be derelict if we didn't mention as Wint Marsalis in terms of, especially over the last 25 years as, you know, bridging classical and jazz, his swing symphony the you know he's written a bunch of pieces one pool losers winton is also amazing at teaching classical orchestras how to sound like a jazz band that's really fast absolutely he has he had i watched him work with the new york phil i mean the new york phil gets a lot of this anyway but yeah he had very practical technical advice that was just like boom boom boom and he transformed the orchestra within five minutes yeah absolutely amazing um what other ones well i can mention one thing you

from the classical side really quick because we didn't get a chance to talk about it. There are some very wacky, quote-unquote, jazz classical compositions by composers who I don't know if they'd ever heard jazz before. For example, the Shostakovich jazz suites are hysterical. I don't know what jazz Shostakovich. We have a little cute up right here, yeah. Swinging. Okay. You know, in the Soviet Union, I don't know what jazz Shostakovich will.

it might have got mislabeled. And there's another composer, Erwin Schulhoff, who is a wonderful composer, who wrote a suite for chamber orchestra that has some, again, quote-unquote jazz. It also has, like, quote-unquote tango in it, and it's a lot of fun to listen to. There's a lot of that stuff going around, I think, on both sides of things. Also, shout out to the Claude Bowling Suites, I think. Yes. Reaches for it.

It kind of doesn't quite get it, in my opinion. But those pieces are beloved. They are beloved. We might not love to play them, but people love to hear them. Yeah, yeah. And Stravinsky, I think Stravinsky is important. Yes, yes. Absolutely.

And I know he didn't, I don't think he talked about a lot or I don't know, maybe you've seen something, Josh, where, but I mean, he was definitely obviously, you know, influenced by jazz. And when he went to L.A., like, you, I mean, I think he would refer more to the influence that folks had from him on, like, Hollywood film scoring and things like that. but in terms of like rhythm even getting into almost some early R&B like R&B

Rhythm and blues or whatever that became rock and roll you can definitely hear that in his compositions Oh absolutely Yeah and Copeland I mean there's so many names For sure and one more just shout out the French in general Yeah so you know Frank Sati

Yes exactly Ruffel all those folks Making it happen and really Kind of a huge harmonic And melodic inspiration for early jazz musicians and even into the stuff we've already heard in the 50s. Well, it would make sense because you had the, the earliest musicians outside of the U.S. that could actually play jazz. Well, I mean, very earliest.

We're French. You have, you know, Django, Ryan Hart, that whole tradition. 100%. And jazz musicians traveling. I mean, Louis Aronson, he first went in the 20s to France, you know. There you go. Well, let's end this. Thank you, Josh.

You're a delightful conversation list for this. We love to have you back on anything you want to talk. about but let's sure let's end with maybe talking about the incredible collaboration between miles Davis and gill Evans and specifically sketches of Spain by Joaquin rodrigo um this is the famous adagio from the i'm not even gonna go ahead you pronounce it Pete no josh josh had it actually i don't know i mean i've concerted the aran with oh that's way better i can have said yeah know which one. I was with.

It's special for me to hear, too, because I was going to perform Chick Korea's version of this, Spain, before he died. And I never got a chance to do it with him. And this was really coming out of, you know, Miles' earlier involvement in Gil Evans, of course, with that birth of the cool stuff, the third stream, like that whole scene in New York. Was it at Evans' apartment? One of their apartments.

Gil Evans' apartments. Yeah, on 54th Street or what. Like, that was a very heavily influenced classical group of, you know, and Miles, you know, I know he wasn't at Juilliard for long, but I think he kind of fit in with that too just in terms of his interest in a different sound, you know, and really gravitating all through his career, but particularly in this period. Here's a version, Pete, that you put on the playlist.

Same movement, same piece performed by Paco de Lucia. Yeah, yeah. This is the original. Oh, this is the original. The original, yeah. But amazing to hear... It moved from a guitar key to a tropic key. That's right, yeah.

Well, but that's the thing is... I think Miles was so... Throughout his entire career, you know, and talked about his influences with classical music. Yeah. Really openly. It's in everything. It's in even things that you might not think of directly,

but things like, so what? Yeah. You know, we were talking about... Oh, yeah, there's so much Japanese and so what? Yeah. It's actually what him

and his pianist on these albums, Bill Evans would like bond over are those French harmonies. There was this one last quote from Duke Gallington that I had brought with me

because I thought it was so appropriate for this. He wrote or said, I'm not sure. He said, I'm not a jazz composer and I'm not a classical composer either. I am a composer of contemporary music. I think that, I mean, certainly in terms of 20th century classical music, I think that sums it up.

I mean, one of the greatest books about music ever written is The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross. And he just talks about this just like hot house of influences from classical music expanding all over the world and into so many different corners and taking from so many different influences like jazz. And so it is just contemporary music and the divide between, jazz and classical music is there. It exists. Obviously, it's different kinds of music, but it's still music in the end.

Yeah. I think some of that, I was just thinking of pianists that I've just been listening to a lot recently. It was it Igor Levitt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know he's been, actually my son was at a recital he did

earlier this year at Carnegie, and he said he did as an encore, he did several encores, and one was a Bill Evans composition. Oh, amazing. And did some little bit of improv, but he said he felt like he was improvising a little bit over it. So, I mean, I think that that's always been there.

And I think with this generation now, is going to continue to be beautiful cross-pollinization, which brings us to something that I know you're hoping we're going to avoid. Can we talk about, can we have some kind of a snoboff before we? The snobometer? Okay, let's do it. The snobometer. Let's do it.

Okay. So, Josh, we have a thing called the snobometer. We used to call the snobometer. And my dad, Bill Martin actually, he said, you know what, you should call the snobometer. make it class it up a little bit you know now caveat we don't know what it actually means well no you i've never known you started out knowing it but you've been pulled down and so we've always said that the that a one is something that is very accessible and not very snobby i've used the avatar of my

wonderful sweet aunt linda who whose favorite band is or favorite album would be probably like some methodist hymns you know just something very you know easy to swallow not challenging and then our other avatar. I don't know if you know the great jazz pianist from the bad plus Ethan Iverson. He's got an incredible point of view, amazing taste in music. The ultimate snob. Lovingly refer to him as the ultimate jazz snob. So that's a 10, right? And so anywhere in between. So what are we rating? So wait, let's just say maybe, first you could give us just, we'll put you on the smart.

Like, who's a classical Aunt Linda and then Ethan Iverson? Like, who would be one in the classical world? And you can go back to like, because I mean, like, let her own shit. Leonard Bernstein pops the mind as more like a one of the classical role, but whoever you want, you know. Well, I mean, I think maybe I definitely should stick with people who are no longer alive or else I will get into big trouble. We didn't. We didn't. Both of ours are alive. I think Bernstein is a really good example of both, actually. Because if you go, like his young people's concerts are like, these were the concerts that opened up classical music to a generation of listeners.

And my mom talks endlessly about. how much she waited for them every Saturday and all this. But then you watch his, if you watch them now, he includes, he's like, ah, and this is in sonata form, which I don't need to explain to you because of course you know what sonata form is. And then he modulates to A flat manger in the second theme. And you know what modulation is, right? And all the kids just kind of stare glassy-eyed.

And he says, oh, you, yeah, you know exactly what that means. And it's so sophisticated. And it's on such a high, and he just assumes these kids are going to come with him. and they do. And I've learned so much from watching them, not just from his incredible charisma and his personality. And I've learned a lot, Leonard Bernstein is the reason I have a classical music podcast

because I thought if he was alive, he would have a podcast for sure. Totally. Totally. Totally. And so his way of not, quote, unquote, dumbing down a thing, but also talking about it in a way that made you really excited to learn about expositions and developments and recapitulation,

and modulations and all this. That to me is like, you don't, you can be a snob without anybody knowing you're a snob. You know, you can know all this stuff and have all the background and also make it seem like the easiest thing in the world to understand. And so for me, it's like, I mean, it's the talk about not a snobby thing, but like I always compare it to that great Pixar movie Ratatouille, you know, anyone can cook.

Yeah. I'm always like, anyone can love classical music. You just have to learn how to embrace it, like any great thing. it takes some time. But for me, like Bernstein is the ultimate at that. I don't know if we've clarified the snobometer or added another layer to it.

Actually, we were just talking about Witten Marsalis and I feel like if there's a version of that on our side of things, someone who's a great communicator, charismatic, though. He can be snobby, but he can also do a kid's concert

and make it entertaining. And then he can go, you know, release black coats from the underground this like really playing some stuff kind of thing. like a little bit of both. There, there you go. Well, everybody go check out Sticky Notes. Go subscribe to Sicky Notes.

It's a wonderful podcast. And Josh, you're a wonderful sport for being here and listening to this music. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for generously sharing your time with us. Yeah, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's such a great time.

That's right. We'll do it again. Until next time. You'll hear it.