You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Good Players Copy, Great Players Steal - #166

Episode Date: July 27, 2018

Today, we talk about jazz theft and how important it is to your development. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

And I'm Peter Martin. And this is the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Coming at you all day, every day. Wait, not all day. No, once a day. Once a day. Five days.

Well, last week we did two and one day. That was interesting. We did do two and one day. We had our webinar, so we did a little special bonus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then yesterday we did a list of 10, which is wild. That was crazy. Have you recovered from that?

I didn't sleep last night. I got to be honest. Well, that was the four Iced Americanos that you consumed. But, yeah. What are we got going on today? So today we're going to talk about, well, I gave this the title. I didn't even okay it with my partner here, Adam, but hopefully you'll be agreeable to this. Good players copy, great players steal.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. Okay, you'll hear it. So this is, you know, I don't know who first said this. I know it's been attributed to, well, I kind of adapted to players part, but like good artist copy, great artist, steel, I think was Picasso, supposedly, and Stravinsky. But you know, a lot of times it's misattribution and everything. I mean, it was probably happening with the French monks who invented the notation. You know what I mean? It was like, that's a platitude that is worth repeating throughout history for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And so I think that the idea here is, I look at it a couple of ways. The first way is maybe not the typical way, but that is that when you're good and you're not great yet, like you're still developing as you develop, you copy. So like, you know, in the jazz idiom, we would typically see that in terms of learning, solos, copying specific licks, copying certain styles of playing, especially on your specific instrument, even copying the way somebody dresses and acts, like, depending on how big of a personality they are.

And then you think, okay, once you get to be great and fully developed, you're not going to copy anymore. But that's when you actually get confident enough to just straight out steal from a lot of people. But I think what it is is you're not really, like what it is you start to realize, for me, I started realizing that I'm not stealing. from that player. I'm stealing, it's not even stealing, but I'm connecting with the music. You know, so the way, like, you start to get less into, like, how they look and stuff. Like, I remember Harvey Hancock, I listened to him so much and looked at pictures of him playing,

and then when I saw videos, like, even if it wasn't a conscious thing, I wanted to look like him because I was like, I just wanted to be him at the piano, you know? And so then you get to the certain point where you don't care about copying all that other stuff. You realize that has nothing to do with it. Yeah. But what you've taken from him, what you've stolen. from him in terms of the music, is the same stuff maybe that he stole from the music anyway. So it's more like you're passing it around kind of a thing.

Yeah. That's my legal justification at least. No, I mean, the idea though is that, you know, you should have a strong enough personality of your own that whatever you take from another artist, you know, you do it because you love it and then it becomes part of you and it comes out differently through you. I mean, we've talked about this, you know, your own musical fingerprints will hopefully come out. I mean, people, if you play just exactly like, Herbie Hancock. People are going to be like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a Herbie influence thing,

but it's not to sound like Herbie Hancock. It's going to be like you. And then the more mature you get, the better you get at this, you start to borrow from more obscure places, the deeper you get into this. That's the idea, right? Like, you know, Herbie borrowed from, if you even read his biography, he borrowed from all sorts of players that were around him when he was a kid. And you don't hear that a lot in his playing now because now he borrows from, you know, obscure classical composers and, you know, whatever is in Wayne Shorter's head. Well, sometimes Herbie will just break out some straight Herbie Licks. And then he'll just break out like some straight up like he's borrowing from himself in 1972.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's a great concept that it's not necessarily, there's more, it's more gradient in terms of like as we're moving along when we go from the copy to steel phase. It doesn't just happen overnight. We kind of segue. way we adjust to that. But I think what's maybe instructive from this kind of silly

title, copy and then steal, like copy is more maybe surface level, not quite as deep as stealing, actually. Like copying is just kind of like taking certain attributes or facets of the playing, a little phrase here, an affectation,

a sound. The superficial parts of it. The superficial parts, you know. And then as that starts to get deeper, deeper, And then it gets into the point where you stole it all concepts. But it's interesting because once you get to that great player steal place, you actually don't necessarily sound like that because you've stolen from a lot of different things. And you've used your own musical sensibility to filter it into your story. I had a great dialogue on The Hane, our in-house social network at Open Studio with one of our members about what does it mean to tell your story? Because we're always talking about that.

And I think that we don't give it enough explanation. We kind of make it so easy. And it's a very esoteric thing in music. If we talk about telling the story of where you got this wonderful iced coffee, that's a little easier because you can say I walked across the alley. I stood in line and then I ordered this. They were out of this. And so when we said tell your story with your instrument,

and I remember this when I was young, I was like, how do I do that? I hadn't copied enough things. I hadn't stolen anything to know how to put my story together. So it is kind of esoteric in a way. But we do all have something to say. And we find that just the way Picasso did and Herbie and the greats, we find that through this bigger world of music and art that's out there. It's never just us.

It's never about us. To me, like when you're stealing and copying it open to doing that, you're being humble, actually, you know. Yeah, you're saying that I don't have all the great ideas. Yeah. I'm not the torture artist that's just going to sit here and wait until in front of a blank typewriter or blank notation page and let the magic app.

I'm going to go out there and engage with the music and take from it and then be ready to give back. Right. Be ready to give back. You know, and when I think of stealing from a great artist

or, I mean, the stealing sounds so negative, but of actually like taking a concept that really resonates with you, you know, when you really make it your own, when you really run it through the ringer of your process of working it out, you know, of your process of working it on the tunes that you like,

your process of taking it through, keys or ingraining it with like you said the other things that you've learned from other players it becomes something totally different you know a concept that can be you know a trope becomes all of a sudden something very personal i think it's i think it's okay and i think it's a necessary part of it it and there's a reason why it's uh you know it's a famous quote yeah for sure absolutely yeah uh well good well i think we nailed it it i feel like we nailed it today i feel like we nailed it today see what i did there that's good but it was little different it came across oh you really obscured that thievery by by parroting back at me

it's good so speaking of stealing things one thing we don't do is steal reviews from others we beg for them here we don't steal them we beg for them here i'm a shrill for reviews um yeah we've been having some good ones coming in but you know what i don't want to say it's been slowing down but i haven't the fervor pitch of last week and all that that that 10 and a half star review That was big. That was big. So it's like, come on. You know that's fake, right?

No, it can't actually get ten and a half stars on iTunes. I'm saying, but they put that into the review. So it's like what they're saying is if the system would allow for it. All right. Yeah. Anyway, feel free to leave us a stolen or not stolen, borrowed or not borrowed review and rating wherever you get your podcast. iTunes Podcasts, Google Play, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. I don't even know what that is.

You can also go to You'll Hear.com and leave us a voice message or, you know, leave us a comment and ask us, you know, your question, musical or otherwise. Yeah, yeah. We get great questions. You know what? I think we've answered almost, we got one, can I talk about the one we didn't answer? Can I even put it out there? We got a morally questionable question. We did get a moral.

Like, you wouldn't think, like this, the subject matter, daily jazz advice, just. just seemed so above board that we wouldn't attract and morally questionable. But it was clearly beyond the pale of what we were even comfortable of addressing on you. We definitely couldn't have answered that question and lived with ourselves. Slightly offended by it. A little bit, yeah. Also tickled. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, if you have morally questionable questions, feel free to leave them. Yeah, we may not be able to answer. But it is entertaining for us. It is. Yeah. Yeah, but no, we love hearing from you guys and we're really invigorated here. and we can I announce that we are coming to the close to the end of our first season. We're not quite there yet.

Yeah, we're not quite there yet, but we are going to take a bit of a break, maybe like just a week where we'll run some best of episodes. Yes. From our first probably 200 or so episodes that we're making here. Y'all, that's a long time, by the way. It is. It is. It'll be a nice little kind of summer thing.

We might even take a little vacation ourselves, not together, because, you know, we've had to save it for the podcast. We got to save it for, yeah. Because you imagine we're sitting at the beach with our, our families together and like, you'll hear it. Peter and I used to hang all the time. Now we just record this daily podcast. We've got to save it for the podcast.

That's right. Yeah, and also we still have our special going for our loyal. You all hear it listeners. You can save 10% on an open studio, annual All Access Pass. That's every jazz course that we make. That's pretty like stealing it from us. It is like stealing. No, but you can steal, then exactly steal from these great artists.

Peter Martin has a bunch of courses. Jeffrey Kieser, Christian McBride, Diane Reeves, Sean Jones, Warren Wolf. Who am I missing? Gregory Hutchinson for our drummer friends. Ulysses Owens. Ulysses Owens. I mean, we've got more coming to Steve Wilson on the way.

Steve Wilson coming very soon. I actually just saw one of his first last, well, we were there for it. Dude, they look great. Saw one of the edits on it, man. Talk about some tactical bebop and saxophone knowledge. That guy, yeah. Breaking it down. Breaking it down.

So you can save 10% on an annual all-access pass by entering. You'll hear at 10 in the offer code field when you check out with the annual All-A Access Pass. So that's about it. About it? Yeah. See you tomorrow because you'll hear it.