You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - History of Open Studio

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

It's a blast-from-the-past on this episode as Peter and Adam recount the history of Open Studio.Today's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. The Oxford American is a magazine dedicated to documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Its award-winning annual music issue comes with a CD sampler and digital download - a must-have for any serious music fan. Recent issues have featured Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, and John Cage. Visit https://www.oxfordamerican.org/yhi today for a special subscription discount!Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. What's up? Do you like history? Yes. Are you skeptical? Yes. Yeah. I always think of it as more his story.

Oh, boy. I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you on a Friday. On a Friday. On a Friday. Hump Day is behind us.

Thank you. I'm so glad you figured out what Hump Day is. There was a couple weeks there where it was really touch and go. Fridays are considered Bridge Day. Did you know that? It's the bridge between the week and the weekend. Oh, cool. I mean, you know, not cool, but it's fine.

I just made that up. Yeah. I like it. Today's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. Make sure you take a minute to visit oxfordamerican.org slash yHI. You'll find a curated collection of musical content, including an interview with Les McCann, a video feature about a lifelong collector of 78 RPMs and an in-depth story on John Coltrane. Again, that's Oxfordamerican.org slash YHI.

There's some great deals there. Pete, I know you love the Oxford American. I love their font. I love their font, too. Is that the Oxford font? I don't know. But this is the thing is we were talking about this a couple weeks ago about the quality that you can get on a quarterly because they take the time for these little details makes it so rewarding to read.

They actually, before they print up each of their quarterly magazines, they lay it out on an old school. No, maybe they're not. It seems like it, though. I mean, the quality in your hand seems like that. That it's like, it's beautiful. It looks beautiful. It reads beautiful. And it's to be savored.

So that's oxfordamerican.org slash YHI for some great deals. What do we get going on today? Well, today we're going to tackle a small subject of Open Studio and the history of Open Studio. And I feel like we've done this, but we have on another shall not be named podcast. The process with Peter Martin. Well, I guess it shall be named. I just named it. Seek and you shall find.

Open the door. That's a good podcast. It was a good post. It was an hour long, though, which is a little long to produce. And we have a lot of unedited episodes. I say it was a little long to produce. like we're not doing a friggin daily podcast now for over the year. Yeah, we decided to get rid of that one,

go to a daily format. Something easier, like a podcast every day for the rest of our lives. No, so we had talk about this a little bit. I don't know if we talked about it, and you'll hear it very much. Just about, you know, people see this Open Studio logo behind us on YouTube or they see the logo on the podcast app. What is Open Studio?

So, I don't know, why don't you give us a brief history of how Open Studio came to be as you know you're one of open studios co-founders yes and um stay tuned for right afterwards we're going to be doing a history of crannock and bach right below the sign i know nothing of kranick and bach and back except for it's janky um okay so open studio yeah well the uh the genesis of open studio first of all open studio is jazz lessons from jazz legends bam i said it that's what's up uh no we have you know lessons tutorials courses from really some of the greats but not just the great players really we pride ourselves on having great instructors they're great artists but they

know how to share and some innovative ways to share their knowledge to let you behind the uh the curtain a little bit to see how they do their craft in an entertaining and uh dare i say edutainment can i throw that out there yeah you should an engaging way i mean i think it's pretty cool because some of the stuff is like on the instruments maybe even that i'm not interested in that much or other folks are but it's still really interesting. I mean, I love Greg Hutchinson's fundamentals of jazz drumming. That's one of my favorite choruses we've ever produced because I am interested in drums, as are you. Yeah, yeah. So that's part of it. But even though I can't play a lot of the stuff that he does in there, I love the insight I get. He's just so entertaining and passionate about explaining what he does.

And he's so giving. He doesn't hold back at all, you know. Yeah, we have an amazing stable of artists that have an incredible collection of courses for us, as you said. And it's amazing just to think about like the amount of like knowledge and from all different places and sources that's kind of collected through these people because we all learned from so many you know different masters and mentors that we all individually had so it's kind of like fun to kind of bring that all into one place for folks to learn from so but going back to the very very beginning so you know I remember first really meeting you for the first time it couldn't have been too long after Hurricane Katrina because you were living in New Orleans at the time right at 2005 Hurricane

Katrina hit you lost your house yes and you had young children yeah and uh and and you and you and your family eventually it wasn't even immediate but eventually like you relocated right here to st louis yeah and it was going to be temporary at first yeah yeah yeah um so what was that like um well it was you know we knew we had a lot of family here and we both my wife and i grew up in st louis so it was somewhat of a homecoming but it was like a real um you know abrupt one like gather your stuff and go. And so we were going to stay temporarily. And then when we ended up staying permanently,

which was, you know, kind of over really a year or so, two years before that was totally decided. But, you know, the kids were young and in school and stuff. It's hard to move the kids when they're in the school. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, kind of, you know, jumping all around. But, you know, a little bit after that,

I mean, I've always taught, and I come from like a really strong educational foundation, both with my parents who are both, you know, musicians and teachers. And also I had great. teachers growing up. I was very, you know, lucky to have that, blessed to have wonderful teachers. So it's always been something, although I wasn't formally trained as an educator, I feel like I was just being around great educators and great artists. So, you know, I was doing a little bit. I've always done some teaching, mostly sort of playing, but interested in teaching. But I started doing some lessons online that really came out of this Too Minute Jazz concept because too many jazz started the whole thing. Wait, that was before OpenStu. And that was, even before YouTube was officially out, we used to have put up two-minute jazz on something called Vidler.

What is that? You don't know nothing about it. I don't. Andrew, do you know about Vidler? You're probably 11 years old when Vidler was, that was like before YouTube. That was going to be the big YouTube. It was a video platform. And it was jankety, a, the other one, you know.

And it was. Well, that's good because I've seen some of the two-minute jazz videos. And they're not. Well, I mean, dude, that was pre-Iphone. That wasn't even, that was like, you know, Flipcam. Yeah. Square. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SD, not HD. That's right. But really, I just started making these little videos for some of my students up in Chicago, actually, that had questions. I would go up there and teach at Northwestern a couple times a month, work with the jazz piano majors, and they'd always have questions, and I thought it would be easier to show them in video. So what that led me to do was to make these little videos, but I started to learn how to teach via video, which was an interesting thing. I mean, it's been done. Of course, you've had, you know, VHS and DVD tutorial courses, and there's a great rich history of this. but these were little short things that could be disseminated

you know like quickly as opposed to telling someone what to do show them what to do you know give them an example and tell them and so you know we were doing the two-minute jazz and then YouTube kind of came along at that time and my partner in starting open studio Dan Martin had an idea about putting them on YouTube or I think we'd seen it I can't even remember exactly how it was

we're like I'll put it anywhere just to see what happens and then we also put it on the first round of podcasts on Apple which was like when the iPod came out And we got a little traction there, just a little luck of the draw that they were looking for original content. So they featured us early on. Apple featured you. Apple, as like on the podcast iTunes podcast store, which was like super slow loading for everybody because this was. Oh, it was a behemoth.

Yeah, yeah. But they kind of figured out a way. That was like the first time when it was sort of usable. Right. And people had these iPods. And so we just got lucky because there wasn't a lot of instructional. So if somebody searched sort of jazz piano or whatever, too many jazz would. come up. So I started getting a following from that and then people started writing in sort of like,

when's the next one coming out? I was like, next one. It's not like a lives thing. It's like a weekly thing. So then I just started making more and they were always unscripted. Like I mean, totally. They still are today. Just like this. It sounds scripted, but it's not. But it would just be things that I was interested and passionate about little ideas that I had and some of them resonated with folks. And then I, you know, I had the idea of just to kind of scale it up to doing longer lessons. and then I realized, you know, I put out so much free content, but I gotten sort of feedback from people, and people were asking for longer lessons.

I'll pay you to have longer lessons. So I did some Skype lessons, but that was less than satisfying because you couldn't really hear, and then is your mic on? Is there you know, there's always some technological problems? So I said, let me just try to do some videos and see if people are interested in so we built a basic site Peter Martin video lessons. We had a very innovative name for it,

and Peter Martin's jazz lessons, I guess. See what you see. See what was going to happen. But because of the following on, on the iTunes podcast and the YouTube really at that point, the Two Minute Jazz was kind of rolling. A bunch of folks were interested. So I kept making it.

And the idea was, let me do, it was just like this podcast. I was like, let me do a new lesson every week. And I've been doing it ever since. You still do that new lesson every week. Yeah. And that was the thing.

And my thinking on that was like, I just wanted it to be simple and regular and for people to have chance to practice on it. And I was used to having a lesson every week when I was a kid. Yeah. You go into your piano lesson and you work on this. And you can learn at a certain point on your own teach yourself, but it's great to have that sort of check-in.

So what I tried to give people was that with the original site, and still to this day with Jazz Piano Method, is a new concept to sort of sink your teeth into that would take you through that week. And sometimes it even continues on, like it'll be part one and part two, something to look forward to for folks that can really either don't have access to a teacher in their area, don't have time, you know, want to do something on a Sunday night or late at night and they don't have, you know, resource of a live teacher, which is always best. that's great man so and i'm always amazed you know around here in the studio when you go to record

a new lesson or new round of lessons for the jazz piano method that you still kind of effortlessly come up with stuff i mean even though you've done over 400 but honestly it's it's impressive that you can still think of stuff to do now just like the podcast too we we do get a lot of uh recommendations like you know suggestions record this or whatever so that that's helped a lot i mean i've had you know i've said we have a great membership worldwide you know folks over 100 countries now and it's been so wonderful to meet them, but to also try to serve their needs in terms of things they're interested in. So sometimes it's a matter of, you know, I want better two-handed voicing.

And sometimes it's like I want to play round midnight, but I never really knew how to do it. So we'll do a couple lessons on that. But I mean, there's always jazz piano, it's like an endless well. You know, there's always another tune to cover. Tell me about it. And then, I mean, I can go back to rhythm chains. I've done a number of different lessons on there. There's always a different way to look at it.

So I thought I would have run out of topics by now going over 400 lessons, but I haven't. So when did it start, when did you decide to start to take it from, excuse me, to take it from the jazz piano method, the weekly piano lesson, to bringing in your friends, to bringing in Lodge, to bringing in Hamera Lubombo. Yeah, and those two guys were really, you know, our first outside artist. And that was kind of the inception of open studio. Right. And they were, you know, the original idea was just for them to do something similar to what I did with jazz.

jazz piano method and so we set it up but then I started to realize I was like this could be something bigger in terms of like you know if we're together we can do things together we can still have individual lessons for the instruments but we can do some group stuff and we can do some things all you know together and and so and it's always funner to do things with with with your friends sure and so some of those a bunch of artists saw what I was doing are like I want to do that can you help me do that and so that's when I started thinking okay maybe this could be a network and that was the original name was open studio We kind of dropped the network at a certain point.

Yeah, yeah. Just to open studio just because we liked that better. But it was really the idea was a network of like-minded musicians that were also really good teachers. So Greg Hutchinson and Romero Lubamba were two of the first that were like, I want to do this. And so I knew they were both the great players, and I figured they were good teachers. But they were kind of like me. They weren't necessarily trained in how to do a video course. So I showed them some things that I kind of knew, but basically they were naturals at it.

Yeah. And so that was super easy. and you know like Greg Hutchinson stuff is just so he's so good at explaining and showing it was more of a matter of like how do we adjust the cameras now because we had gotten really good at doing piano with the overhead and different things we added over the years from requests but now it was like okay what are drummers are going to want so we looked at a bunch of drum things and that was around the time you came in that was close yeah yeah and then we started doing transcriptions which is really where you came in and that's a big part of the history of open studio it was like we you know I was very anti transcription because I'm like I'm preaching learn by ear, learn by ear. But then I realized I was like, people don't always have time for that. And ideally you do that when you're coming up younger. But so I kind of acquiesced on that. And you came in doing a lot of transcriptions of things we were playing.

And obviously grew into a much bigger role here. And just like the whole team has grown, like the artist roster has grown. It's like we're trying to serve a lot more people and to do it as good as we can. The platform side, the music side, the production side, the content side. and then, you know, the podcast and the blog and everything that goes along with it. That's right. Yeah. And if you haven't heard how the, you'll hear it podcast, which you're listening to right now.

Meta meta. That was an extremely focused, planned event where Peter came in one morning and said, we're doing a daily podcast and we just have done that. Yeah, we started that day. Remember that? Yeah, no. January 30th last year. It was so off the cuff.

And I don't know why, but I was just like, oh, good. And here we are like, you know, over a year later. It's kind of incredible of it. Well, that's been part of, yeah. I mean, actually, that's the other side of like, obviously the great artists and the great team we have here is what really makes the open studio what it is. But we have some cultural things that have developed nicely within the company. And one is like, we'll try anything. Yeah.

And we've had mostly successes. We've had some failures too. The hang. No, no, no. We've got some things that we're still retooling. But, I mean, if you don't try something, how do you? know if it's going to work. No, that's so true. And then we also were very intuitive. And so you and I had talked about and some other people on the team here about we were, everyone was

always like, man, have you heard this podcast? Have you? And I've been old school on the podcast train for, for years. And so I just kind of woke up that day. I mean, I literally woke up with the, with the idea at three of the morning. And it was a simple thing. It was like, I love podcast so much. I don't listen to any jazz podcast, but I love jazz. There isn't really, I mean, there's some other good jazz jazz podcast, but nothing that people were keeping up to date. I mean, we have too many jazz on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. But there's not enough of it coming out. And all the podcasts that I like, there's some regularity to them.

I mean, the whole do it every day. I was like, we're going to keep it short. We didn't really have the bandwidth at that time to script it. So, like, we could spend way more time than we do on this every day by doing one incredibly produced and scripted podcast. But it would be different. It would be a lot different. And we kind of tried that with the process. So we did have some experience.

I was proud of the process. The process was great. It just didn't really work within our workflow of all the other things we were trying to do. So, you know, It might make a reappearance, though. I wonder how many people here, well, I wonder how many people here have tuned out because we're not talking about two five ones and voicings,

but the people who are still on, you know, might not know your sort of, that you're a businessman, that you own, you know, open studio. It sounds so shady. It does not, no, no, no, but that you have this sort of knack for it. And I'm wondering, you know, and it's also being, working here, working with you,

and talking to you about music I've learned a lot, but I've also learned a lot about business and things like that. So what do you think draws you to that? And what are the skills, I mean, obviously you're a great jazz pianist, but why have those skills translated to a startup? Well, I think the, you know, there's some things that I learned as a jazz musician, or really skills that I got from developing as a jazz musician that lend themselves well to leading a startup.

That's what I said. Part of a startup. Yeah, that's what I just said. I like to answer questions with the, I like to throw it back at you. That's why I ask you. That's like we're playing tennis. That's what I just asked you. Okay, now I'm going to get into it.

I'm laying it out first. Improvisation. So obviously, improvisation is one of the most important things. As opposed to going in, like, what I would not be great at is going in being a businessman in a typical large-scale corporate structure where like you're coming in at middle management or even like at the top where you have to fit into a certain system. Now, I can, I think as jazz musicians, we can fit into a system. But within that. we flourish with like creativity and saying like how do we push the boundaries and pull back and stuff and really as a startup you have to do that you there is no playbook for this i mean i know that they have like entrepreneurial seminars and and programs at universities and stuff and that can help you but you but if it was as easy as just you know follow it's just like how do you play a great solo oh just copy this one that's written down well you just play john coltrane solo why is it not as good as the way he played it so it's the same thing with starting a business in terms of like you're creating something from nothing So there's certain rules that you can go by,

but you have to know when to break them, just like a jazz solo, and you can't be afraid to break them. Well, I think that's the key is, you know, when you were talking about starting the podcast and you just had this idea or whatever, I think there is a certain amount of just not being afraid to fail. Yeah. That has to happen on stage at all times,

you know, the confidence to put yourself out there and to be yourself. And in the business world, like, you know, we remember here and during the financial crisis 2008, 2007 about like these banks were too big to fail and stuff. Yeah. I always thought when you're a startup and you're small, the advantages. You're too small to fail.

Because you have no success yet. You're failing by design. You're failing. So you might as well. Now that is the time to just try stuff. And then same thing with being a musician too, actually. When you're at the jam session phase, like, you're too bad to sound good. So don't remember. Someone's freaking out, oh, I didn't sound good. No one's at your gigs. It doesn't matter.

Now is the time that it really is. Now it's the time to try everything. And then hopefully you'll be comfortable enough once you do grow to something. And so these things that I think are intuitive to a jazz musician really do lend themselves well to when you get that startup environment, being able to work with people, put together a team quickly, and then make it be very, like, one thing I love about jazz that made so much sense to me,

because I, in some ways, came equally out at the young age of the classical world as well as jazz, playing it and being part of that. You know, jazz truly is a democratic music. I mean, it's not a perfect democracy, just like our democracy is perfect. Thorpe Khorment right now. But, I mean, it's like the ideal of it, at least, in that, yeah, you might have a leader who's the trumpet player or the piano. or the vocalist or whatever,

but when you hit the highest level of jazz group improvisation, that the leader is actually based upon who's playing the best, that particular tune. Kind of is, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, if you think about the best groups, like, you know, weather report, and I know that was co-led in a lot of ways or whatever,

like when Wayne is, like, going crazy and taken over, like everyone goes into a supportive role, but you're still together. So I think with the startup environment, what we have that's exciting if you pay attention to that, is like that anyone can take the ball and run with it or become the quarterback, you know, flea flick or whatever at any time. And in jazz, like we're very attuned to that.

That's part of our thing because we get this idea of like the performance is going to be the whole, not just the base upon what one person knows. We are so, that's true. And especially I think as pianist, you're used to going from the spotlight and shifting very quickly to being as supportive as you can. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And vice versa.

And listening. I mean, that's such an important thing when, you know, when you're with a small team. And we've grown a lot. but we're still a small team is like really being able to listen and let the ideas, creativity come from anywhere and not,

not get said, I mean, there's a whole bunch of things. I think I'm very grateful, you know, to jazz and just to music in general and how it can inform creating something,

because it's a creative music by nature. Yeah. I mean, it is like, it forces, it fosters, it requires creativity, although, you know,

and it fosters, everyone, all those things. Well, man, should we, should we go ahead and do something off the cuff here? And then we were talking about

open studio a lot. Yeah. I'm just saying, like, we have this thing called the All Access Pass. Bam. Maybe we should put a old school sponsorship. Put a little... Like it's 2018 up in here. We should put a little deal for the people who made it to the end of this podcast.

Okay, deal alert. Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing. Yeah. If you, uh, if you, if you purchase the All Access Pass. Right. Uh, the yearly subscription. You will get 50% ownership. It opens...

No. Okay, sorry. No. Enter, enter the, uh, the coupon code. You'll hear it. And there's going to be a nice discount for you. Oh, we're not even going to tell them what it is. I don't know.

What do you think? Yeah, let's do it. Let's make it a surprise discount. Okay. If you're satisfied, you know, finish out your purchase. If you're not, write to Andrew at openstudionnetwork.com. Yeah, we'll do what we can, right? Yeah.

We pay our artists very well. We do pay our artists. That's probably the worst part of our business plan. But for, for, for, I have a business plan, actually. Maybe for the next week or so, if you'll hear listeners enter, you'll hear it, no apostrophe, no spaces. Right. In the promo, the offer code. Offer code.

On the checkout page. Yeah, yeah. You're going to, you're going to save a. Percentage. Percentage. It will be a positive percentage. It will make you pay more. What you got planned this weekend?

Big guy? I'm going fishing this weekend. Oh, no. Doing some trout fishing, some fly fishing. It's been a while. Sounds dope and fly fishing. Yeah, what's great about fly fishing is, even if you don't catch any fish,

yeah. Even if you just catch your fish, you're just standing in the middle of a stream, some beautiful Missouri hill somewhere. It's great. Nice. Nice. All right, well, I will eagerly look at my invitation

to that adventure, And hopefully I'll join you out there. Send me the GPS coordinates. Man, this is only. Well, till tomorrow. Until next week. You'll hear it.