You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How To Listen To Jazz - #111

Episode Date: May 20, 2018

Today, Adam and Peter discuss how they like to listen to jazz. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to tell you how to listen to jazz. All right. Now this seems like we should have talked about this way, way before this episode. Well, it's possible we did. We're well over 100 episodes now. And we have this on our list like we haven't done it. But this is so important that even if we talked about it before, we're going to talk about it again. We do talk about listen pretty much every single day.

Number one, listen. So this can be a whole little mini episode about how, well, all of or mini episodes. Thankfully. Okay. So, but this really, you know, in this day and age, you do have to talk about how you listen to anything, I think. Yeah. I think we were both fortunate.

You kind of caught the tail end maybe of a little bit of distraction-free, forced listening. And I was definitely coming up in that era. But now young people are coming up at a time. And we're all living in a world where there's many more available distractions in terms of media at one time. So things that, like if you listen to the radio or you listen to an album or even if you watch a videotape or these things, you couldn't really do more than one thing and there was no like play next or a way to jump to something else too quickly. I mean, I guess you could pick up an LP and jump to another track, but it's not like today. No, I mean, I've heard recently, you know, television networks talk about how they're having to fight the second screen.

Everybody's watching everything on their, on TV with a second screen in their lap. on their hand. And it's a problem for them and their commercials. Well, it's a problem for our safety, too. I actually drove, I stopped at a start a light by someone who was actually using two screens while driving. Come on. Come on, bro. Some of his ride bikes.

Exactly. That was not cool. Oh, man. But yeah, so that's kind of, you know, my first whole thing, I think, is just distraction-free. That's how you listen to jazz. And it's not that jazz is up on this pedestal. I mean, it is, of course. Come on. But, I mean, it's just anything that you want to really

critically listen to. And I would say even from an enjoyment standpoint you're, I mean, for me, it's kind of both. And I used to think about it differently. Like, oh, I'm listening for enjoyment or I'm listening for knowledge. And now it's always wrapped up. Like, I don't listen to anything that I don't want to listen to. Yeah. And you know,

this kind of, for me, goes beyond listening. And this has been a practice that I've been trying to get better at in the last few years. And that's really just, no matter what I'm doing, being distraction-free and keeping my attention on that. it's a really important part of growing as a person.

Yeah. And especially as a musician, you know, we are pulled in so many different directions. So I've actually gotten to the point where I have no notifications on anything on my phone besides, you know, the phone itself. Yeah, I texted you like eight times last night. See if you wanted to hang out. I could now understand why. No, but, you know, I'm always on my phone anyway.

So it's like, I'll see it eventually. But if I'm doing something else, say, listening to music, I don't want to get into this battle with emails and text messages and Facebook or whatever, you know. And I mean, we've always, now I'm thinking about it, like the phone, like the phone never rings anymore. That's one advantage because nobody calls anybody. But I remember that being, I mean, I remember like practicing or something like the phone would ring. Unplugging the phone. Remember doing that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a notification. So we've always had it. It's just more and it's faster. So, you know, not just when you're listening, but when you're practicing, really practice focusing your attention on what you're doing. You're going to get more out of it. Yeah, for sure. And when you're driving, too.

Yeah, ideally. Okay. So next, I've got to listen to specific instrument, an instrument. And I would say not just your instrument either. I mean, the tendency is to focus in on your instrument and what to play. But sometimes, like, this works really good for things that you've listened to recordings many, many times. But you want to maybe listen to it in a different way. It's just to go through and listen to what the bass player is doing the whole time.

And the bass is something that we always hear and enjoy it is the foundation. But sometimes we don't really listen to what they're doing. doing. So as much as you can get into some kind of ear training to think about, okay, how much is he playing the roots? How much is he moving around? There's some fun things in there. But just to kind of concentrate, you'll hear these little things that you missed or that you felt as part of the bigger picture, but you never really, you know, kind of listen on an isolated level. It's like going to the symphony and kind of like looking at the clarinetist, you know, and seeing exactly what they do. You know, visually, that can kind of, you know, clue your ears into it. But you can do

the same thing when listening to recordings. Yeah, I think, especially for beginners, is a very important step to becoming a good listener. And to really understanding, you know, the music in its totality, you know, you're not going to be able to count your way through a complicated drum solo unless you've listened to a bunch of drum solos and really paid attention to where they're laying it on the beat and learning the language of drum solos, learning the language of walking bass lines, learning how trios work together, learning how big bands work together. You know what I mean? All this stuff is super important. And it's just so fun, like when you have, you know, know, great, either great live jazz or great recording or video, whatever,

it's so fun because there's so many interesting things happening than just what you think is the primary focus at that time. I mean, it's like going to a great restaurant and you've been a few times. I mean, the waiter brings something over and you're looking, but if you look around and you see the chef, like how they're looking, you know, in the background or a busboy or something, you know, there's all these interests, it's almost like theater, you know, or you go to a basketball game. I love going to see basketball live because you miss so much on television.

because they're only showing the ball. Right. But like some of the coolest things are like the back cuts and the defensive things like away from the ball. And the court is small and you can see all that live, but you miss all that. And it's really cool stuff. That's so cool.

Yeah. Well, so we're going to go for number three here. This is kind of the flip side of that coin. And that's to pull back and feel the vibe of the entire recording. And this is, again, you're not listening to just your instrument. Or you're not focusing on any specific instrument like what we just talked about. But you're really trying to, hear the totality of the recording from from above like taking a big picture of you you know

listening to the depth of the instruments in the field listening to the balance of the instruments as if you were mixing it listening to just how the music flows over you I think it's a super important part like a jazzy waterfall just just encompassing you and it's vibe sorry I got a little too ethereal no no that's good I like it I like it um well okay well that that the next point I'll bring up will will even be the opposite of that. And that is listen in the background. Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, normally we would sort of preach against this,

but I think that this is a way to listen to jazz. I mean, I know we started out distraction-free and stuff, but the right kind of jazz, and I don't want to pigeonhole any one particular player style, but I think it can be successfully listened to in the background. Now, I don't do it that much because it's hard for me to focus, like if I'm having a really interesting conversation with someone, and then something really interesting happens in the recording,

I get distracted by that. But I think that there is music that's kind of, I mean, it's stereotypical to be mellow enough to just kind of ride in the background. And it's just like kind of a nice little background waterfall, if it were. Absolutely. I think it's a good way to like really kind of expose your subconscious to it as you're going about your business doing other things.

Have some jazz on the background. And yeah, you'll hear it. Then our last point. Oh, we done? Oh, no. No, no, no. Oh, sorry. That is not the end of the episode.

But we're almost there. Okay. Our last point is to read the liner notes. This gets harder and harder to do, it seems like. Because of a lack of liner notes. Which is ridiculous now that we're in an age where, you know, this digital media is so small that it doesn't really cost anything to add it to it. Yeah.

So, you know, when I don't know about you, but one of my favorite parts about exploring new records when I was a kid was at first having the actual LP liner notes that were huge in like a book and it was amazing. But then even with CDs, you know, oftentimes they came with booklets. Right. And you could see who the players were,

or you could see where it was recorded, when it was recorded, all the instruments that were on it, you know, even some reviews. And then they started getting chintzy and it wasn't even like the booklet. It was just like a page in the jewel case.

Oh, I love the ones that were sometimes just on the CD itself. So you couldn't read it as you were listening to it. You had to like get it out. Although this would be a good hypocrite check for us. Your last couple of albums with your group. Did you have liner notes? I did.

Oh, good. Yeah, yeah. Why, what are you saying? I didn't read them. Sorry. Well, I don't remember them now. Well, no, so one of them was on like a business card in it. We got a little too artsy for, to be honest.

Then another one we actually had like a map. I'll explain it later. Okay, I get it. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's, yeah, exactly. I mean, I still, when you were describing with the LP and as you're listening, I think that's kind of the one thing that you can do without getting distracted. And, you know, and at first it's just like, who's,

playing on. I mean, that's how we discovered these great players and stuff is, oh, they're playing on this record, they're playing on this one. But really thoughtfully written liner notes can be a really great narrative addition to the story that's being told on the album. That's awesome. So those are some ways to listen to jazz. We'd love to hear from you guys how you listen to jazz. And, well, we haven't talked about this in a few episodes. They can contact us. They can be in touch. We have a little community at openstudio network.com slash podcast where folks, can check in, make a comment, even leave a question for a future episode. That's awesome, yeah. And as always, you'll hear it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello. Wait, you can do that. Absolutely. All right, and if you like what you heard, please leave a review and a rating below. Thanks.