You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Do I Get My Friends Into Jazz?

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

It's another live edition of You'll Hear It where Peter and Adam take your questions. On this episode, they discuss some good entry points in to the world of jazz, as well as their favorite new jazz musicians.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Thursday's Open Studio Live Events:1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)5:30 PM - Unshakeable: The Artist & The Entrepreneur (featuring Peter Martin, Christian McBride, and Rick Beato) register here!For the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Like somebody said, love the new studio, which was great because thanks Carson. Right as he said that, I think we're at our ultimate frustration level with the new studio. I mean, it looks awesome. We did spend a lot of time making it look good today. And then we were like, oh, let's make it sound. Oh, shoot. You know what? You didn't think I knew how to do this.

Watch this, Adam. Oh, nothing's happening. Whoa. Oh, I wish I could do other colors. You can just turn that dial and it'll go to other colors. Oh, really? Yeah. See, I don't even know how this works.

For real? Those are your lights, bro. Come on, man. You don't press it again. That's just take it. All right. It's blue. Let's leave it like that.

You do it. You do it. We get so excited with... Ah, green. Kermit the frog. Purple. Gerald Undone. Red.

My Sith. My Darth Vader. Bealsabub. My Darth Vader lightsaber. Look, it's the light side. Luke Skywalker and... What's the guy's name? the actor.

Darth Vader? No, not Darth Vader. The guy who's in like every movie now, the millennial dude, went to Juilliard. You know, he plays Lord Sith, not Lord Sith. But I don't know. What are you talking about? Who's the... Adam Driver?

Adam Driver, come on, man. Your name's Adam. You should know this. Look, this is Adam Driver. I'm Luke Skywalker. Mark Hamel, Adam Driver. And I'm older than you, so that's perfect. All right.

Well, yeah, that was fun. So we're going to kind of work on dolphin dance throughout the week. You're doing it some with your, are you going to do it on the YouTube or on the daily guided practice session? No, we're going to do it on our YouTube daily practice session this Friday. On Friday. I'm going to break down a specific Herbie Lick on it. And then you might play it on Friday night. Yeah, I'm going to play it.

I look so evil. Shelter in place. And it'll just be a fun thing. Look at that. That's the way we should see. You got light and dark. Oh, yeah. Look at this.

Steve's dark. protects it. I'm bad. You know what I'm saying? So, all right, let's talk about practicing. Let's talk about some practice.

We do our weekly practice check-in. And what have you been practicing on, Dear Adam, for this week? Oh, man, you know what? I had a 442s gig on Saturday morning. Yes. Like an actual gig here at the Sheldon Concert Hall. There was only a few people in there.

They were nice and spread out, but it was a real audience. It sounded that, you know what? I know it was only a few people because I know what they're doing with the setup. They never really showed the audience. Yeah, there weren't that many. But it sounded like a couple hundred people. It wasn't?

It felt like a couple hundred people. So that hall holds about 700 people. By the way, shout out to the Sheldon. They're just the best over there. Peter Palermo, the whole team. Right around the corner here, one of the great concert hall. Wint Marcellus, as mentioned several times, it's his favorite hall to play acoustically. When he comes with the big man, they play acoustic.

It's awesome. And the crowns are always spectacular. And you're, it's one of those halls. It seats 700. but you feel like you're in someone's living room when you're on stage, right? When you're playing, you just... Wow, that's a nice living room, but yeah.

But you know what I mean? Like, everybody feels very close. Yes. Because it's very old that was designed for speaking, actually. And so it's really, really a lovely place to play. And there were only a couple dozen people in there spread out through the whole thing. So even in the balcony and all the way up. So, you know, a hall that seats 700 with just a few dozen people in there.

Felt very sparse. But when they were, like you said, when there was applause, it was great. So I spent my week just, working on 442 stuff, which means like a lot of, for you know what that means for me? I'm happy to talk about this too, because I think it's like interesting to talk about as a jazz pianist, right? What we work on is different than some other gigs we have. So on that gig, I do a lot of guitar playing.

And my role as the guitar player is essentially the rhythm section. You know, I'm the drummer. So I spent a lot of the week on my metronome just practicing, grooving on that guitar, really trying to control my accents in time. the sound of them. So, I mean, much like a drummer would work on rudiments. I was working on different rhythms coming in and out of triplets, those kind of transitions rhythmically so that I could just confidently play those grooves

in support of, you know, it's a whole different vibe being the rhythmic support. I envy bass players and drummers because you feel like this responsibility to the rest of the band to like, I'm going to lay it down. It's going to be so easy for you to play over this. Like that's my thinking, right? I want to make this so easy for you. I want to make everybody sound good. So I spent the week really just working on my time on the guitar,

like doing really, really minuscule, surgical work on, like I said, how are my accents, where the triplets lay in, you know, contrast to the eighth notes, practicing with my metronome where it's like it's on for a bar, it's off for four bars, it's on for a bar, it's off for eight bars, seeing if I can hang with that, you know, just keeping my time. Good stuff. I just dropped in the chat. Hopefully folks can see that if you want to check out this concert.

I watched it. Oh, nice. It's really good. On the Sheldon YouTube site, you can jump in there and see Adam's group, which is just a fabulous group of musicians and a lot of Adam Manas compositions. You can see him in a little bit of a – I wouldn't say a different situation. It's all Adam, but it's a great – that was a fun concert. Thanks, sir.

What did you do? What'd you work on? Well, so I ended up doing a couple of the days last week. and I was going to extend it into the weekend and I kind of fell off doing this but I got a couple good days in last week of like very specific left hand practice it had been kind of on my mind for a while

I don't know there just been stuff I'd been going for down there that I didn't feel like I was you know when you get that feeling where like you it's almost like you ever have those nightmares where you're trying to like run and you can't move but you know you are kind of moving sure absolutely for me it's

I'm fighting someone underwater right and I'm trying to punch them and I can't really punch them right wow so aggressive yeah sorry that's a lot of my own stuff there I've had ones too that I'm like trying to get out of a well oh yeah yeah that's like that's kind of dark it's like you know Jeffrey Dahmer might be waiting at the top but no I felt like I was a little bit like that with my left hand in certain things and I don't know that you know our kind of understanding of our technical prowess versus our technical limitations to me it's always connect with what we're trying to play, what we're hearing at that time.

So, like, it can be deceptive. I think that by the time you get to be my age, for sure, it's like your general technique is kind of established as to what it is. There's maintenance for sure that is valuable to do that. But sometimes when we think, oh, I'm off my game with my left hand, it's not necessarily like you've been not paying attention to it or not practicing enough or practicing the wrong things. It could be.

But to me, I think it's more, I look at it. is more often a positive thing, like where you're starting to be more confident in hearing something. I mean, when we're talking about improvised music, because, you know,

if you're playing the same classical piece all the time, you've got the barometer, like I'm playing this Beethoven sonata, this really tricky movement at this tempo. And then sometimes you've got it, sometimes you don't like it.

Yeah, I can either control it or I can't. Right. It is the situation. But if you start to hear stuff in your left hand as an improviser, this is a whole new arena here. Right. Yeah.

Right. And sometimes it happens, often it happens, you know, gradually or in spurts or something. So I think the technique is always there to serve the music, you know, but they don't always naturally go along with each other. So I had been feeling for a while, but especially acutely,

earlier last week, like left-hand, left-hand. I just kind of, you know, just kind of was all my spirit, whatever. So I was just practicing stuff with the left hand. And what I did was I took things that I would normally play with the right hand. And I think this is a little bit taken from our friend Jeffrey Keeser. Totally. But it was putting them just in the left hand and just doing some voicing and stuff in the right hand. Because I think there's a certain amount of,

you know, regulation within your brain that can be helpful anyway by just shifting things up. Obviously, with, you know, I'm right-handed. So with the non-dominant hand, there's always like that training of the left hand to be able to do some more things. Exactly. That would be the exact kind of thing. Yeah. This is great work. So, you know, I have that flash card system that I like to use when I'm doing serious piano work.

And one of the, I have three, right? I have a set over here, which is just all 12 keys. And I'll actually subtract or add keys, like have four G flats in the stack, depending on how much time I want to spend on particular keys so that it's kind of stacked in the way that I, like, it's stacked towards the harder keys, essentially. I would never stack the key of F, for example, but I might take F out of my stack because it's like, okay, I can play an F. I really want to work on the harder keys. So I have my stack of keys. Then in the middle, I might have tunes, right, or forms, right? So it might be dolphin dance, maiden voyage, one finger snap.

And then over here, my third pile would be things to practice that tune with. So that could be like all block courts. So now I'm doing dolphin dance in the key of B, all block chords. That's my practice for that section, right? Or that part of the session. Or one that I always have in that stack is left hand. so that when I'm there to play dolphin dance in the key of B, I'm working it through my left hand.

It's got to play the melody. It's got a solo and I work on it. And then, you know, I only have like four or five over here. So it cycles around quite often. It's a great way to get left hand work in. It's like you don't have to remember to do it. It's just part of your practice routine. That card comes up left hand.

Okay, here we go. Yeah. Great, great, great, great, great. Great stuff. Let's see Why don't we do a little bit of Q&A Because we In previous weeks

I've done a huge amount of Q&A It's going to be a little bit abbreviated Because of the time today And we went on this deep dive Of dolphin dance But I'm going to jump back up to the beginning And see Or is there any questions that you saw in particular

Sir Adam as we I'm scrolling up here Refer to you when we're in There's a lot of controversy about our start Really? I think we were well over 20 likes before we got started. Uh-oh. Well, then we're going to have to make it 200.

We're not going to start. We'll hang over a little bit today. How about that? Yeah, yeah. So somebody was saying about beginner and, you know, are we not looking out for the beginners and intermediates? Yes, we are. We may not be today, it appears. But I think, you know, a lot of times when you're like playing jazz music and learning to get better,

as a jazz musician, and this really, I think, transcends all instruments, and applies to all instruments, transcends the piano. The kind of graduation from beginner to intermediate to advanced happens in a different way than classical music than, say, learning a language where it's a little bit easier to define. So we can think about tunes, for sure, as being more advanced. And I think dolphin dance can definitely seem that way. but I would encourage everybody I'm a big believer in learning stuff

that's at your level but learning it in a very deep way so if we took something like C jam blues which everyone thinks of as a really simple tune like it is it's very simple but it can be very advanced to play it I would refer you to the classic

Oscar Peterson Trio version from Denmark in which there's nothing easy or not advanced about the way they play it very sophisticated kind of thing But the same principles that would apply in terms of learning that sounds weird on the road, doesn't it? It's not right. It's not right. Okay, so I'm doing a little bit more with the left hand, but even if you...

There you go. Hey, come on it. But I can play suscores beautifully. That's right. They'll make me to take this to the Summerfest. Summerfest. I don't even know what that is. But you know exactly what I'm talking about.

But the same principles with which we learn a tune like this, root melody. but really paying attention to the time. Like what is the part that we can really go next level on? Even if we're like, oh, everybody knows CJA blues. That's simple, that's beginner. But can you play it? One, two, three, four. No, I can't.

But can you play with like a really good feel while changing the melody? I'm not even trying to. I don't know what's going on. But just half notes. So restricted, simple. simple but difficult advanced I should say especially if you're talking while you do it so it's gonna be half notes just the melody swinging syncopated staying on the half notes independence of the hands because sometimes it's easier to be your roads doesn't go down

that low man no roads does actually there are 88 keys it just sounds terrible down there So while you're playing something simple, can you get that same feel? So that when you go to even before you're playing all this, just the melody, then you can start to add the other things in. That's so great, man. Yeah, I understand what Steven's talking about here about beginner, intermediate stuff, with this tune breakdown. So we'll keep that in mind for the next time to maybe hit something.

Because Dolphin Dance inherently is more advanced of a tune. Yeah, for sure. So maybe the next tune would do next week. I don't know what should we do. We should do something. You know what? We're doing kind of blue in the listening session

tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. So maybe we could do like Freddie Freeloader or something like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know how much you like that. Okay.

MJ2 says, Hey, guys, I'm a fan from Iraq and I'm into jazz piano since I was young, but jazz isn't very popular between my friends. And I'd like to hear what you, what do you suggest to people

who never listen to jazz before? That's very cool. Come to the sesh tomorrow. Invite them to the session tomorrow. Kind of blue. Could definitely be a way in for sure. Gateway drug. It's a gateway drug. I also think, you know, my friends in high school who weren't into jazz while I was listening to tons of like Dexter Gordon and Grant Green,

I got them in with headhunters. It's so funny. I was about to mention that record. It's same thing for me in high school. They love that stuff, man. They couldn't get enough. They thought it was, yeah. I mean, it helped it like boogie nights had just come out. Right, right, right. So they were like, you know, into that, that whole era. So they, yeah, they love the headhunters. My band that we had, which was originally called the Jazz Dispatch. Woo! The Jazz Dispatch. Is that corny or what? Like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Exactly. We're in St. Louis in the name of the newspaper. Hey, guys, we're, it's like the Post Dispatch, but it's for jazz. Exactly, it's the Jazz Dispatch. We are going to dispatch some jazz for you. But we played, like, we started getting gigs, just random, rando gigs. And we got a gig at like, our friends started, you know, this is back when you'd have house parties. So it'd be like in the basement Somebody who convinced their parents

Let them have a party in the basement And it was like This is when we were in eighth grade You know So we were kind of You know It was boys and girls And you were just whatever

You were trying to dance with And so nobody could like afford a DJ But you might have some records That you played So it's like Let's get Peter and Jeremy Chris Thomas

Dave Berg You know these John and John Ward So we're gonna play At these parties So we didn't know A lot of tunes We might be playing

Some kind of jazz stuff And then you know The pressure's on when everyone's looking, we've got to dance or something. So we'd just be like, and I had a Rhodes then, so I play it like, just like this. And then people'd be like, what? And then we knew like, we knew all the stuff off, you know.

Some Michael Jackson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Stevie Wonder, MJ, M2J, Stevie Wonder could be a bit of a bridge. Yeah, we used to play all that stuff because people would dance. And then we'd be like, oh, and it was really bad because the jazz tunes we knew were really corny. They weren't like sat and all. We had these combo and we play that. That's not a good party song when you're in eighth grade.

Yeah, exactly. That's not a corny tune, but played by eighth graders is always cor. Oh, yeah. For sure. And then we played this tune. Our first song that we learned was called Whole Lot of Blues by Marty Page, because we had the music from our middle school band director or something. I still remember.

It was, and then check that. Think about a pre-pubescent Jeremy Davenport playing that melody on the trumpet. But we have a. had a great, we didn't know what we were doing. You make that sound pretty good though, man. I'm sure, like, what I want to hear is... That's my job, man, that's my job. I want to hear eighth grade Peter play in that.

It was not good. But when we got to high school, we went next level because we had Todd Williams. He was a senior. Yeah. We were a freshman. Todd Williams was like a master already. I mean, it was just like playing all this stuff, Grover Washington stuff, but also John Coltrane.

Yeah, I remember when I was a freshman, I wrote a tune that was like, I later realized, like, oh, I was trying to write a rhythm changes. I just didn't know what it was, right? So it was like this weird. This weird, like 26 bar rhythm changes. It's just like free form rhythm changes. Hey, look at you. You're purple now.

Lord Sith has gone Gerald Undone. No, I'm Mace Windew. Mace Windew had the purple light. Yeah, but I think Headhundred's is great thrusticles. And this is ironic because the track is like 20 minutes long, isn't it? Yeah. Secrets, buddy. Secrets. My buddy, my buddy Chad was well into secretals.

Uh-huh. Riding around Jeffcoe in an S-10 listening to the secrets. Are you kidding me? The Funky Unit says, this is too funky. Table Salt. I didn't know if we were playing on the way going out or what's up. Well, I just wanted, I thought we were still taking some questions here. Let's do it.

We're a finely tuned machine here. We got the funky unit. I'm just, we're just viving today, man. The Funky Unit! It's like when things, I feel like this might be our best episode ever. And let me convince you why. Because with things kind of go haywire at the beginning, right? you got you got two dudes trying to figure some stuff out they don't really know anything about as far as lights cameras and action and uh we gives us a little bit of an energy i think this has been a productive well it was funny about is before we started we thought we had everything set up we had like some power issues oh we're cocky as hell yeah we were in other room watching some YouTubers talk about lighting and cameras like oh yeah that's the F stop all right let's go in to do this then we come in and it's like everything is just haywire which is you know that's where the jazz mentality uh

you know, jazz mentality kind of is great, I think, to apply to life. You know, how are you going to get... For sure. Get yourself into a quandary. How you're going to pull yourself out? Just have a good time with it. You know, what are you going to do? I'm orange now.

Man, well, kind of, but not really. Orange. So, defunkey unit says... Orange is not the new black, by the way. You know what I mean. DeFunky unit says, hi, Peter and... Oh, that's political. Hi, Peter and Adam.

Do you guys have any favorite artists who do you feel are pushing jazz into... new and exciting directions. Well, you know, yeah, there's a bunch of people. I love Robert Glass, where we were just talking about him the other day, so he's kind of on my mind. And, you know, it's easy for me to be like, yeah, it's a young up-and-coming pianist named Robert Glassberg.

Because I remember when he was a young-up, and every time I see him, I'm like, dang, you're kind of old. It's like 41 years old now. But I think Rob is like just, it's great, one of many. I think Aaron Park, these are going to all be pianists, not that they need to be. Ambrose. He's not a pianist.

Ambers, I think, is definitely pushing music into a very interesting space. Who else we got? Who you got? Man, you know, I'm really so always impressed with Glenn Zaleski. He's guest blogged for us here at Open Studio. He's such an amazing pianist. If you haven't heard Glenn's playing and Sullivan Fortner, I think those two, those are the kind of early.

Sullivan, yeah. Late 20s, early 30s generation. Glenn seems so much older. I mean, he's so wise about his approach. to, and he's great at, but so same with Sullivan. And I'm always, Christian Sands. Christian Sands is so good.

I'm also continually impressed with my friend Peter Schlam over in Kansas City. He's around Sullivan and Glenn's age too. Yeah. And just always is making. Who's the guitarist here that you just play with? I like him, the young guy from Sam. Matt Soule.

Yeah, Matt Soule's playing is beep off. Yeah. For sure. And then I always think, like, I really think innovation, the sweet spot for innovation, we always trend towards younger players, which is important.

for sure but to me herbie hancock is still innovating like i don't know if anyone i think about last i heard him live was at the newport jazz festival last summer last august well so it'd be over a little over a year ago now and it's very easy to be like okay herbie hancock at the newport jazz festival in rhode island down the street from the vanderbilt you know mansion how innovative could that be but i think that we you know that's the beauty of this music it's it's timeless and it jumps generations in a way that it doesn't need to just be like your best years are behind you. Chickaria, I mean, I've been checking in on a lot of these live streams. Yeah, I mean.

Charles Lloyd still making great music. Absolutely. A lot of times they go into these kind of rebirth periods. You know, I'm very interested to hear the project that Herbie's been working on with Robert Glasper and what's his name? Teres Martin. Yeah. And I love the stuff that Herbie laid down with flying lotus, frying, frying lotus, which is not

vegetarian, by the way, if you fry your lotuses. If you fly. And shout out to Cecile, McCorrent, Solvant. Just crushing it right now to, I think, in my opinion. And I mean, there's a ton of young folks that are making some great music. Yep. For sure. Yep.

Adam Manus in the 442s. Dang right. Dang right. So you need to get Glasper as guests. He is damn funny. I know. And I've been talking to him and every time he gets back to me, he's like, yeah, come on. Let's do it. Oh, man. I'm sorry. just seeing this. So I'm going to get back on that because he says he wants to, we were talking about doing

some playing or something. So that would be fun. Because he is very funny. He's hilarious. We should do, we need to do like an all, we should start doing it all. We should add this to our rotation, although we didn't get on some of our stuff this week. That's okay. We got some people saying they liked that we didn't get on some of our stuff.

Really? Like what? They don't like our fitness checking problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're like, you guys are out of shape. Why are you talking about your fitness check? Yeah, but less so than before. Really?

No, I want to see that. I love the hating. The hating is great, man. Man, Glasper's so funny. We overlapped for, I mean, he was never at the new school when I was there, but I knew he was there when he was off the road, because he was always on tour. He was playing with Petty Carter when he was at school there. And we overlap for a year.

And I remember you just know he was in the building because the commons would just be uproariously loud with laughter, right? Just people just scream. because he was, you know, I'll do some good was, okay, so I got this on there. This is great, guys. I know you're right into the self-help stuff,

but I much prefer getting to the weeds of the music. Just me, not to be a jerk about it. I got it. It's all good, man. Stick to your knitting, we call that. It's all good. Stick to your knitting. Now, this is funny.

Frying Lotus is my new band name. And if anyone is entitled to fry a lotus, it's Herbie. We've got some comedians in here, too. Jazz Health Diet. Cool. Well, this was fun. Always, man. Thank you, Adam. Thank you for being here. Thank you listeners, watchers, for tuning in. We look forward to next week to having the sound kind of out of both sides of the headphones. You know, just little things, detailed things like this. It's fun playing these really interesting harmonies, thick chords, hard to hear changes with one ear.

I know. It's the best. It really makes you lean into it. So what do we say? We might do. That would be good. That'll be more beginner intermediate, but with some next week. Yeah, we can talk more beginners. stuff about it too. Little balance. Ah, maybe we do that.