You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Does That Work? Playing Out

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

How Does That Work? continues today with an episode on one of the most useful skills in jazz improvisation: playing outside of the key of the tune.For more lessons at the piano with Adam (and Peter!), check out our brand new course: Jazz Piano Technique. In Volume 1 of this series, you'll get a 4-week bootcamp entirely focused on improving your ability to play pentatonic scales. For more info, go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/jazz-piano-techniqueLike those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet 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.

I'm Adam Mness and you're listening to the You'll Hearer podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Back at the piano today, going through this week, we have our sort of basic jazz theory theme going on this week. How does that work is what I'm calling it? I got no reaction on to Ryan for that. Thanks, Ryan. And yeah, Peter's in Europe, so I'm here, I'm a lonely, but having fun with this. So far we've done, if you haven't caught it yet this week, we've done altered dominance, diminished, chords and scales and chord substitutions all on how does that work. Really just kind of a primer on how these things work and how jazz musicians use them.

If you're on YouTube, check it out. We have the piano. We have the overhead cam. And so you can see some of these concepts a little bit clearer. Today, we're talking about playing out. How does that work? So playing out is a term that you're probably familiar with if you play at all. And it's definitely something that if you're listened to most modern jazz, you are

into playing out if you're into modern jazz because it's a big part of the modern jazz language. So let's just define what playing out means. Playing out means playing outside of the changes. So we learn all of these chord changes, all of these standard tunes, all these progressions, and then we completely ignore it when we feel like going somewhere else. And it's not rude. It's actually just part of what we do as jazz musicians. And it's been developed over the years in numerous different ways. There's, I mean, a lot of different ways to go about this. There's no one way to just playing out. But in general, what we mean when we talk about playing out is not playing exactly the chord that we're supposed to be playing. So if we're supposed to be playing a C minor

chord, typically you might do the Dorian, maybe the Aeolian, maybe the Frigian, I don't know, there's a bunch of scales that would be in, right, that would be playing in. but playing out would be playing like, I don't know, a D major. Right? So that's just one example of some dissonance that you can create. Now notice that that didn't sound great just staying there. So what you hear a lot of modern players do and great players in the past too is establish the harmony inside the changes using, you know, all of the language that we talk about all the time.

So in this case, Adorian, some pentatonic sounds. And then taking it out by going to that other key very briefly, and then back. Okay, so that got intense. But that's what it's kind of the point of taking it out is. It's about creating drama. So we're setting up this very pretty sound. And then when we take it outside just for a second,

now be warned, this is a sound that a lot of people who aren't into jazz are like, you're just playing the wrong notes. And that's somewhat true, but we're doing it on purpose with intention behind it to create this dissonance, to create this tension, to create this drama so that we can come back and land on a very comfortable place. But that's just one way of doing it, of just picking a key that, so I pick D major over the C minor because there's very few common tones between them. You know what I mean? There's a few, but there's a lot that really aren't. Some strong ones. So that's an easy way to kind of go out.

And really, I kind of pick D major too because it's relative minor as B minor. It's a half step down from C minor. So I know that I'm going to be safely out of that changes. I'm a half step away. That's fairly dissonant territory. You know what I mean? So that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to play completely free of changes.

And this is something I've talked about a little bit a couple weeks ago with George Garzone's triadic chromatic concept. and that's linking triads, seemingly random triads, actually random triads, via a half step. These are major triads, minor triads, diminished, and augmented triads. The only rule is you can't use the same inversion in a row. So if I have one in root position inversion, I can't use here a C, E, F, F, because that's another root position. inversion. I can't use here a C-E-G.

I can't use A-flat, C-E-flat, because that's another root position. So I could use G-sharp B-E, right? And so the idea is you start stringing these triads together. This is a common way that a lot of jazz musicians used to play out as well. It's completely outside of any functional harmony. You're not thinking about going outside for any specific. or not or coming back in.

And it's a little more tricky to get into your fingers. You have to practice this quite a bit to be able to play it without thinking about the changes. We've trained ourselves so much to think about the changes. Another key to playing out that you hear a lot of people talk about when they describe how to do this is creating themes, creating motifs, either rhythmically or by a shape. Because when we take the harmony completely out of context that has nothing related to what's happening in the song, Creating these nice patterns when we're taking it out helps to lock our listeners in. They still feel they're somewhere familiar. They feel like we're in control.

If that makes sense, instead of like, oh, this person's just playing the wrong notes, they feel like, oh, they're intentionally playing these notes that don't quite fit, and I know that because they're doing it in this pattern. So it's something to consider as you're playing out. You can't be weak with this stuff, and you can't just kind of, you know, go in and out. running scales or any of that stuff. You really want to, this is why you hear a lot of people use pentatonic, because it's such a, pentatonic is such a universal sound and scale

that we all have ingrained in us from our birth that people play out. They'll often use some pentatonic devices and shapes to make it lock into their listener. So that's really it. That's the basics of playing out. That's when you hear someone say, oh, they're really out, they're playing out. That's what that means. They're going outside of the chord changes. So yeah, this has been fun.

We have one more day left of how does that work. Stay tuned. It's drop two. It's piano specific. But if you're into arranging or anything like that, it could be very helpful. And so, yeah, until next time, happy practicing.