You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Groovin' Inclusively

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Adam and Peter take a Speakpipe question on how playing different genres and instruments can effect one's playing. You can find a link to the YT channel 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. Hey, Adam. Something is different about where we are. We are in the lounge. Can we call this the pod lounge? Yeah, I'm so comfortable. I might fall asleep. I love it in here.

Let's do it. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Music explained. Music explained? You know, there's never going to be a consistent tagline. Well, no, but this is tied into what we're talking about today.

It is, actually. Yeah, because we're going to be talking about all kinds of music. By the way, just for our YouTube folks, I don't know if you can see my awesome new Open Studio Pro hoodie. The two is just the five, Peter. You know what that means? I do know what it means. That's great. Drop two, right? Nope. Shout out to all of our Open Studio Pro folks. Yeah, no, we're in our beautiful lounge here at Open Studio H2. We are lounging in the lounge. Gosh, just we got a turntable. Anything can happen. I don't even know what to do though, because we don't have the keyboard, but then I've got my hands and arms. I mean, it's a little bit like, I know. What do I do with my

hands? No, but this is good. I mean, I've got my buddy Adam here. We're going to listen to a speak pipe. That's going to pull us back into the zone. Oh, we got a speak pipe. We do have a speak pipe. Let's do we listen. Yeah, let's do it. Caleb doesn't know that you have to refresh the page. I'm going from Chicago, and I am a fan of jazz. One of my goals in learning about jazz is to improve my playing and songwriting in other genres, such as rock, pop, funk, and others.

And you've done some episodes about the benefits of playing other instruments. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how learning jazz, or being a jazz musician helps to improve your understanding or appreciation or playing of other genres or vice versa. Anyway, I'm a big fan, so please keep it up and talk to you later. Thanks. I love this question because it's topical to some of the other videos and episodes we've had recently. Yeah.

But also, I think that this idea of folks coming to jazz, not just to live, learn to play jazz as the be all end all. For us to understand this and to talk about it and to celebrate it per chance is so important because I think for us and for a lot of like hardcore jazz players, we look at it as we're studying jazz because we want to be jazz players. Yeah. You know, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I'm starting to realize there's a lot more people perhaps, or there's certainly many

people that are coming to jazz just to learn the mechanics of music to further their ear training in a, you know, a cohesive way, in a fertile way, to be able to, you know, learn about different grooves, different rhythmic concepts, different, you know, harmonic forms, different changes, whatever. The basic musical skills, kind of contemporary musical skills that go well beyond what maybe a traditional classical training would give you, give you, to be able to take to rock, to funk, to country, to whatever these different genres. are. What's your feeling? I mean, is that kind of what's happening?

No, you know what? Here's where, this is, I think, a great instance where, like, I think the name, the very narrow name of jazz really fails us here, and actually talking about black American music and its connective tissue to just what you were talking about, rock and funk and country music. That helps R&B, but even like adjacent to Broadway tunes and Gershwin and the great American song were the people that were influenced by black American music early on have had a direct line to modern pop music, right, to heavy metal, to R&B, like all of these genres that are now, you know, past what you might say post when jazz was edited, quote unquote, jazz is edited, hip hop, like all of these came out of that black American music

experience from the early 20th century. So getting to know that, I think really gets your foot in the door for a lot of different genres. And actually, I'll say that it's just learning about music in general, going deep on any genre of music, you're going to run into the same 10 things. Yeah. Right? You're going to run into rhythm, melody, harmony, arranging, like all these different things that we all use.

The basic elements of music. The basic elements of music. So it doesn't, it almost doesn't matter what, you know, sub-genre, it doesn't matter if you're going through bebop or funk or whatever. If you get into it and you get into the guts of it, you're going to get the essential skills to help you in whatever other genre, you know, you want to participate. in. You know, of course, there's differences, and especially amongst, like, rhythmic language and harmonic language and melodic language, everything's very different. But learning how to learn that

is the key. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm starting to think or just starting to realize the importance of learning to improvise just to really be able to elevate your musical sensibility, no matter what you then go into. I always thought of it as, and it is a specific skill that you need to have to play jazz to be able to, you know, it's such a big part of the expression of what makes jazz what it is. I think it's kind of the biggest part of it

beyond how is it supposed, what instruments you're supposed to play, is it swinging, whatever. To me, you know, and it's not to say if something is not heavily improvised, it's not jazz, I'm not saying that, but like that's kind of what typifies and sort of defines,

I don't even want to say defines, it just sort of associates, you know, different types, sub-genres or whatever, to go under that umbrella of jazz or black American music, it's like the improvisational element to varying degrees is so important. But it's also, you know, learning to improvise, learning about improvisation, transcription of improvisations is such a vital part of so many important musical skills that you need to have. Like we think about learning specific skills from certain periods or subgenres, and I think that that's so important.

But in jazz, it's always kind of under the guise of some kind of improvisation. So like when we look about and talk about bebop, it's not so much that like, okay, I want to learn how to master bebop playing so that I can play bebop. You know, no more so than you would say, I want to learn everything about ragtime so that I can play ragtime. It's almost like that's sort of a byproduct of that. Whereas most people would think of that's the main. thing and then getting these other associated skills as the byproduct. It's like, no, you're learning how to craft, you know, specific melodic lines with a syncopation and a bounce to them that can be used in hip-hop, they can be used in R&B, that can be used in funk and everything. Bluegrass. Yeah, bluegrass. I mean, like, you could literally take a bebop line and float it over all those different styles and other ones. And it sounds classical. Absolutely. We hear like the Ron Carter, you know, Brandenberg concerto when he's like putting some bebop bass line. You're John Adams and City Noir.

I mean, it's got that in it. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not even necessarily talking about then specific harmonic things that can be taken, you know. But it's like jazz is such a great place to learn about these things. Like the complexity of it is certainly off-putting to a lot of people because it's like overwhelming. But to me, it's very much the same way you might look at like, how are you going to really learn about basic and beyond, but basic harmony? Like you can go a lot of places, but if you go to the Bach corrals, it's like,

not about like, oh, why do you have to go back 250 years to Germany? It's like, well, no, you don't have to, but that's a great example. It's a great place for you to learn about voice leading. That's a great place, not to learn how to write corrals. You're probably never going to do that. You can as an exercise. But to be able to develop those musical skills. Yeah, with jazz, I mean, the real, and again, I'll just say, not even with jazz, but again, black American music in general, what you have there is this diversity, this complexity of music over several generations where you get to learn how to improvise melodically, harmonically,

over different kinds of rhythms as the rhythm has evolved. The melodies and the harmony didn't evolve as rapidly, as all of the rhythmic vocabulary has. Which is kind of cool because you get to play tunes now with the same fundamental harmonic and melodic principles as they were playing in the 50s. Yeah. But the feel, the rhythmic feel has changed dramatically. Now, obviously, of course, like there's modal music and things in the 70s and simplification or ornamentations that change all that stuff, of course.

But in general, once you learn the sort of fundamentals of black American music of melody, harmony, rhythm, how to learn that, how to improvise, which is basically composition on the spot, and you take that principle to other genres that maybe have a different form. Yeah. Right. So, like, you wouldn't take the improvisational spirit of Eric Dolfi to your R&B. gig necessarily, right? Now, you could take some of his melodic improvisational compositional principles and the way that he developed rhythm and harmony and melody in his solos, and you can apply that to your songwriting and composition 100%. Yeah. And even textures and sounds. And I think you can take the skills

that you would acquire from studying Eric Dolfi's compositions and his improvisations and his rhythmic approach. Those skills that you've get those less, those more indirect skills we can definitely take, you know, to something that that, so I mean, I think that that's, that's kind of the thing. The other part of the question that I didn't quite understand that we didn't hit on, but that's okay. It's about playing different instruments. Did you catch what that was about? Yeah, just, because we like to be thorough. How playing different instruments can help your main instrument, which we talked about in a few different episodes, but you know what? I think this might be a little bit of a, not a mystery

to jazz musicians, but a little bit of something we don't have as much experience, although you're kind of an outlier as a jazz musician, and that you can play several instruments really well. But most jazz musicians can play some, you know. Yeah, I would say every good jazz musician I know can play. If they don't play the piano, they can play a little piano. If they don't play the drums, they can play a little drums. If they don't play the bass, they can play a little bass.

If they don't play a horn, they can play a little horn. Right. But piano is probably the biggest for non. Totally. You know, and we've talked about that. a lot about how important that is on the pod. But I think this idea that jazz is, it's a lot to become a jazz musician. This is not like, I mean, not to say that other genres aren't either,

but like the kind of the barrier to entry to even get to the point of like just a serviceable jazz musician as opposed to getting to the point of being a serviceable R&B player. I don't want to get myself in trouble by comparing. It's just like, you know what I'm saying? Like just that point where you can make a game. Yeah, it's a lot more. So I think that in jazz, we end up, like, concentrating on one instrument just because it takes so much just to get to that place of being just okay.

I will say, though, if you are not a drummer, that should be your second instrument. Absolutely. You know what I mean? Because for me... Unless you're not a pianist. Yeah, piano. If you don't play piano or drums, both are great. But, I mean, for me, I played percussion in the marching band when I was in high school.

I played in concert band in middle school, and I worked on. you know, snare drum rudiments for years. I still use that stuff every gig. You know what I mean? Like, I still think about that. I think it's really what has helped me to develop my own sense of rhythmic vocabulary was playing drums. I think it's super important for everybody. I agree. Even if you play alto saxophone, learn how to play drums.

Even alto? Even alto. Let's not push it that far. I know. Soprano, maybe. Well, this was cool. Enjoy talking about this. Thanks for the question. As always, even though we're in the lounge, you can still reach us via speak pipe, right? Where would they go? Yeah, then go to you'll hear it.com. Go to you'll hear it.com. Leave his voicemail.

And, yeah. We're going to ask for a couple things. If you want to leave us a question, that's not required. But we'd love to hear those. But what is required is to leave us a rating review. Can we require that? Could we cut people off from listening to the pot if they don't do it? We can bag.

I mean, it's impossible, but we can say we can. We can say we can. We're not going to cut you off, but we really appreciate it because, especially for the audio podcast, this is the most important thing you can do to help us spread. Yeah. The pot is spreading, but it's spreading slowly. I'm just saying.

We've been around for... I feel like our quality is getting better, but our membership isn't getting in a commensurate way as... It's not developing as quickly. Folks, we're hitting Peter Martin right in the ego here. So do us a favor.

Leave us a rating and review. It means so much to... For only a rating and review a day. It means something to you. It means something to Caleb. It's all of us. Amazing jazz musicians, day will be made with your rating and review.

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I got it. That's called Podcast Marketing 101. No, no. No, I got it. Do they got it? I hope so. Until next time. You'll hear it.

I don't know what to do in the lounge. I guess that's what I'm doing then.