You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Approach 2 Piano Duos

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

What's better than one jazz piano? TWO jazz pianos! Today, Peter and Adam talk about how to perform as a two piano duo.Like 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.

Hey, Adam. Yeah. What are you doing tomorrow night? Tomorrow night is Wednesday. Yeah. And I'm playing a piano duo concert with you. Oh, awesome.

Good. I'll be there. And I'm Peter Martin. You're listening to the Gil here at podcast. Daily jazz advice coming at you. I forgot about our, we're in the future, back to the future.

Man, those duo concerts were great. Man, you killed it, bro. Man, seriously, man. I really sorry about the second night when I, like, you know, passed out and missed the gig. You're just so high.

No, but... Too high! Too high! We're recording this on October 1st, and October 2nd and 3rd, we're playing duo concerts. Don't pull the curtain all the way back, man. Come on. Yeah, they know. No, a lot of people come up to me, they're like, how do you guys do that every day? I was like, commitment.

We have to batch them, or else we would just drive ourselves crazy trying to get in the same room every day. But we're about to play two nights of duo concerts and one weird afternoon matinee. Yeah. No, it's not even... It's 11 a.m. 11 a.m. Who booked an 11 a.m. Who booked an 11 a.m. gig? Come on, Rachel.

No, we're playing over jazz St. Louis. Just across the alley here. They're putting two beautiful Yamaha pianos on stage. Are there one Steinway, one, Yamaha? I don't know. And we don't know how beautiful they're going to be. We don't know how beautiful they're going to be. But since this is in the future, we're going to assume that they were beautiful and that we had a beautiful time. I know that's going to be great. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to have a good crowd, and it's going to be a fun deal.

So we thought we would celebrate that. Yes. So this is going to be, so this is how to approach two piano duo. So even though we're in the future, we're still doing some planning for this and talking about how we're going to approach this. So maybe we'll do a post-mortem next week as well. Oh, it's a great idea. But yeah, we're just going to sort of talk about ideas.

It could be really hairy. It's just like so cold between each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, I think two piano duos, and we'll talk a little bit just about duos in general, I think is, you know, piano and something else. I just did some piano and guitar gigs, which has some similarities to two pianos.

But two pianos is really a special thing. Yeah. And I mean, there's the four hands. Now, we're not talking about that. We're actually talking about two pianos with two pianists. I guess you could have four pianists on two pianos, right? Wait, are we cool there, Andrew? Andrew's looking at the cameras, like...

Oh, we got six minutes. Oh, we got six minutes. Okay, it's going to be a short half. Yeah, we got it. Okay, good. So two pianos, this can be such a really special thing, but I always think about this as like less is more because it's so exciting.

And normally when you get two good pianists together, it's like, wow, we're finally getting a chance to play together where it's very difficult to do that. You know, sometimes you have a keyboard and, you know, a piano or whatever. Sure, yeah, yeah. But to actually have two pianos in a situation with a gig and an audience. That's a cool thing. I've done some stuff recently with Darren Pops Jackson

where he was playing like Rhodes in Oregon and I was playing piano. But, you know, even just us here, we just now before we started recording this, went through a couple tunes. But it's interesting, man, because with pianists, like, you know, I mean, we hang all the time or whatever, but I was like, I got to get to know Peter is like the musician I play with. Like, that's a different vibe, right? I mean, even though I've like sat in with your band or whatever on guitar, even still, like getting to feel each other out as pianist is a whole other thing. Yeah, and I think pianist, it's like all the rhythm section players.

We don't have nearly the experience that a trumpet player would have, a violinist, almost any, a singer. Like every great singer is saying in a choir or in a background. of working with other people on your same instrument. Blending. Blending. That's something that we got to work on, man. We got to hit this rehearsal here in five minutes and 20 seconds. Yeah.

So I think that the biggest thing, the number one, of course, is listen. But number two, right after that, for successful two piano duos, is realizing that you've got four hands to play really what two good hands could do before. Sure. So it's kind of like a less is more. It's like, how do you listen to the whole thing and put in and not play, like, what usually doesn't work is two solo pianos going on at the same time. Right.

And I've heard a lot of that. I mean, it can be. If they're good enough, it can work and be cool. Well, that's one color, right? It's one color. But I think the fun is really is when you look at, like, how do you add up all the two pianos and become kind of one solo pianist? Yeah, yeah. And then you have times where you can kind of go next level and, like, really push it and do things that one pianist could never do.

But it doesn't have to be that all the time. Yeah. So pay attention to, like, you know, your partner's density, how much they're playing, the range. you know, you would kind of told me, you're like, hey, you know, like, if one of us is comping, then the other one can kind of like hang back and play the bass or, you know, if you're comping on your own solo, that's cool. And I think that's all stuff that's crucial.

Yeah. To, like you said, like, actually making good music as opposed to just, like, two dudes up there or, like, playing solo piano at the same time. Now, and having said that, some of the funest parts can be, like, once you get that part going, then you can go into each playing solo piano

and not playing anything. Like a lot of times I've been in these situations. And I remember when I first started doing it, I felt like I was like, we have to both be playing all the time. No. The beauty is like some back and forth, some sit back and listen and,

you know, tossing the tossing the ball back, you know, the baton back and forth. That's a lot of fun too. I'm going to be doing a lot of this. You got it. Yeah.

It's all good. And then also, I think the thing you were talking about what I mentioned too is that, for those of you out here thinking about doing this, a good place to start is to think about, we've talked about the three zone concept

for solo piano playing, which is basically, you know, I mean, not to be too restrictive, but you have sort of the baseline, the base area, the root area, and then you've got the sort of comping tenor area, and then you've got some melodic, either playing the melody or soloing or whatever. So when you have two pianists playing on two pianos, you can play with the three zones sometimes,

but that means that pretty much one has to be playing one zone and the other's playing two. Because if you both play two, you're going to have four zones playing three. So if you want to do that, it's a great time also to realize that the piano really has way more than three zones. You've got the uppers and the very bottom. So it's a great time as like when we play with guitarists, which we usually have a lot more experience doing. It's thinking about, wow, we can kind of go on the outside.

Yeah, of some stuff out here. Well, I was just thinking about now, like, being inspired by this conversation of like, okay, so like if I let Pete go with like a solo piano thing, I can do like little textual things way up high or down low or inside the piano, you know, like little stuff like that I think could be huge. That's when the fun comes in. And it's also just fun to also both kind of play. I think there will be times when that's a lot of fun. It's just I'm amazed when I do see people doing this, how much where they just sort of play within just those three zones,

the same way they play like with a bass player. And they're walking the baseline, but then comping on top. Like, that's okay. And look, all this stuff is like kind of how it sounds. But I think that if you do think outside of the box and look at it as possibilities as far as in terms of just being limited by you normally would be by the drums and the bass, then it can be nice.

All right. I'm ready. Let's go. Let's hit it. Let's hit it. How many one minutes we got on here, Andrew? Oh, we got two. Oh, oh. Well, this episode is brought to you by hashtag ketosis.

No, that was yesterday. By Open Studio. Go to openstidiojazz.com. Open Studio jazz.com. You know, Jeffrey Kieser approached me about maybe doing a two piano mini course. Wouldn't that be fun? We should think about that. I'm going to tease that out there and see if we get any bites.

So he was suggesting that you and I do a two piano? No, I think that he wanted to play either with you. you or with me for a two piano. I will have to take a three-month sabbatical of shedding, practicing if we're going to even think about. Oh, I'm sorry, he approached you. He's got, see how I stole that? He's a five-zone piano player.

He's a five-zone piano player. I know. He's already five-zoned. Like, what zone am I going to play? Totally. All right, man, well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.