You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Nurture Joyful Musicians

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

In this episode, Adam and Peter talk about how to nurture young musicians to be their best self.↓ Links from the pod ↓Unlock your FREE Open Studio trial to become a better player today.Nurtured by LoveHave a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Mr. Caleb was like, no theme music. I know. What was up with that? I think it's because we took so long. We got two into a child is born, which is the tune we just played up front.

Yes. That I think we're, Caleb was like, you know, Caleb sometimes has to be like, the vibe was just right. He was, so he's trying to like. Well, except for the big 251 to the,

I was trying to set it up in a tasteful way. But producer Caleb's like, no, no, just leave it. Just leave it. It's good feedback. Caleb says put it the comments. if you think we made the right choice. It doesn't matter, Caleb, because at the end of that all, we just went, is this thing on?

We're about to find out. We're about to find out. What's it up, man? Hey, how's it going? This is the, you'll, sorry. Hey. Hey. This is the You'll hear a podcast, and I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And thanks for listening, everybody. Let's do an episode today, Peter, on something that we haven't really talked about, but this is your, this is your very beginnings of your musical journey. And I think we can see. segue this into maybe other people's experience with musical beginnings and maybe how you might nurture a young musician that you know could be your child could be your niece or nephew or your grandchild even your pet you are maybe not okay that's weird but uh no it could be uh someone you know

who is just starting to learn music and uh i thought we could talk about this we had a great voicemail from simon and maybe we can hear simon's thoughts on this hi peter hi adam this is simon from London approaching four years as an open studio member. For a few years, I've wanted to hear Peter's thoughts on a specific teaching method, but surprisingly, no detail has really ever been spilled. And what I'm talking about is the Suzuki method. I know, Peter, that you were taught this method from an early age on violin. And in fact, two of my favorite modern-day jazz players were taught in this way. You and, of course, Emmett Cohen. And, um, You did once mention nurtured by love, which I read and found really fascinating.

And I wondered if you could spend some time discussing your experiences and how it helped you, you know, become the player you are. And also, you know, how we can all use this teaching to help us and our kids to grow musically and become better piano players. And, you know, I feel that you already apply some of this technique in your jazz piano method. But as I said, it rarely gets mentioned and almost gives it this mythical quality. And by asking this, please tell me if I'm completely missing the point. But really looking forward to hearing you do a deep dive on this subject. Many thanks.

And please come to London soon for You'll Hear It Live. We'll even pay for a ticket. Thanks a lot. Oh, okay. We do have our You'll Here at Live. Will they pay for a plane tickets? That's going to be our biggest. We do have, you'll hear at Live Peter coming up on April 12th, which is sold out, by the way.

Sold out. Yeah, there's no more seats left. There are no seats left. It's interesting, though, because that's like the third person from the UK that I've heard from this week. We got to go. Yeah, so that may be the next location. I think we should go over to London. And if you guys aren't on YouTube, that's fine.

But go over there for the vibrant discussion that happens in the comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We love the audio listeners. We were just talking about that this morning, but you want to talk about it over there. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is, thank you, Simon. First of all, I have a cousin Simon who lives. in London.

Wait, was that your cousin? Is this a setup? He had a similar accent, but different voice. So shout out to my cousin, Simon. But thank you for the question. And, you know, the Suzuki, I'm happy to talk about this. I thought I had talked, but maybe it's been a while. I think it's such a part of me that there's almost no part.

Like, it would be hard for me to detach not only me as a musician, but just me as a parent, even as a spouse, as a family member, like the Suzuki method is so thoroughly ingrained in me that I may not even be the most, well, from my own experience, the most authoritative to speak about it. I wouldn't be because when you're kind of inside of something, it's very hard to describe it. Yeah, you're not, I wouldn't say hesitant to talk about this, but it's like almost one of these things where whenever this subject gets brought up, you're like, well, I just don't even know what to really say about it because I think it is. So it's like saying, talking about like, well, tell me about your hearing, you know? It's like, my hearing is just my hearing.

Right. It's like such a part of your being that it's kind of, I think, difficult, seems difficult. As someone who knows you really well, it seems difficult for you to describe it. Maybe, Peter, if you could just give a brief personal history with your relationship to Suzuki and how, you know, that journey for you. I know your mother is, was an early adopter of the method here in the United States. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of my, um, what I realize a lot of my knowledge about this that is probably more helpful to others is from my own kids doing it.

Oh yeah, yeah. You know, all my kids at one point went through the Suzuki method. So from that standpoint as a parent, I actually am a little more conscious of kind of how this works. But, I mean, it's just to say that I came up learning music very much within this method on violin and piano

also, although I wasn't as strict within the method on piano. When I started piano a little bit later, I was, my teacher, who was a friend of my moms who lived around the corner from us in Florida taught me with like some of these other methods and I did learn to read a little bit earlier possibly on that. But yeah, in terms of like what the Suzuki method is, and I'm not an expert on this, but I've been around a lot, I would tell you that the kind of cornerstone of it that I think is very important and certainly potentially the most applicable to jazz or different styles of music beyond classical because it's very much based on the Western European classical repertoire in terms of the, the, the, the, the pieces that are learned. But it's, I think what really marks it,

it makes it distinctive is that you're learning by ear from a very young age. Yeah. Like there's no assumption that it's too early. That's the big difference between that and other like Western style music instruction where you learn to read like right off the bat. Right.

So, kindergarten. Right, exactly. And so what the assumption of that is that you can't learn to play an instrument until you're able to sort of intellectualize and read notation on the page or you have to do that at the same time.

So the Suzuki method decouples those two things and says, what is our most natural and instinctual connection with music? And that is, and as Sinichi Suzuki, who is the originator of the method who it's named after, who was a Japanese violinist that my mother actually studied with back in the 70s. There's kind of a pilgrimage that a lot of American

and from all over the world, teachers went to learn from him when he was still a lot. I believe he died sometime in the late 80s or something. I mean, he was very old when my mom went to study with him, but super vibrant. But he created this, and certainly he had a lot of influences and nurtured by love, which is kind of his thesis on this, his book, which I highly recommend. I kind of read it as later on as a parent, so it was very instructional, not just for teaching music to your kids, but just teaching art, teaching life, teaching humanity.

and the concepts of nature versus nurture versus nature, which are probably above the pay grade of this podcast for us to get too deep into that. But in terms of music, like, that's what was really ingrained to me. And so that seeped into many parts of my life as a parent, as a coach, as an uncle, and all these different types of things. And that's just the concept that Suzuki promoted, which is it's not about the talent that you're born with. It's about the talent that is, the artistic talent that is nurtured in you from a very young

age by your parents as a language. In other words, everybody can learn to speak their mother tongue, as he calls it. And that is the language you hear normally from your parents, your mother, your father, your grandmother, your caretaker, whoever it is that you're around, how you learn to speak your number one language, in my case, English. As you can tell, I am quite eloquent at the English language. Obviously. I've been speaking in my whole life to tell you the truth.

You don't have to caveat that. Everybody knows. But the idea is that we're taking the same concepts of how you learn, like, at its most core, like, first principles level. Like, how did you learn how to speak English? Do you remember? I have no idea. Right. But maybe you've heard. Like, maybe you learn from your mother, perhaps, your father. Who were you hanging around with you? I was hanging around with you. I was hanging with mom and dad. Mom and Dad. Probably more mom than dad.

Probably at first. More mom and dad. Yeah, just learning to speak. And Grandma was around, too. My whole family lived on the same street when I grew up. So my aunts, my grandma, grandpa lived on the same street. So perchance, do you speak with a similar accent to some of them? I do occasionally say Washington Avenue. Yeah. Right.

Which is a very thick St. Louis accent. Yeah, but I do. Yeah. And so just listening to people around you, of course. But I think that the concept of nurtured by love is that you learn the language from the ones that you love. So when you're like a baby, you know, not even a toddler yet, you're an infant. Yeah.

And there's, obviously, you have a bond. with your mother and maybe beyond that. And so they're the ones that teach you this language. They're the ones we teach you. So you trust them implicitly for everything because that's all that you know. Like you don't even know it. It's not to be trust or a lack of love.

You learn that later in life, you know? So you're imitating, though. So like that's the base level. So the Suzuki method is about imitating music as a sound. But how do you get it any closer to the origins than imitating your parent? So the strict Suzuki method,

I shouldn't say strict, the OG you know manifestation of is is that the parent learns first so this was really exciting for me and like because my mother was a violinist and it is a violinist and a teacher

of course that was easy but like I went through this with my kids my wife learned because I already knew how to do it and she really wanted to do it and I was traveling a lot anyway so Kelly learned some violin she learned before they did

and then they're watching her learn that's great it's such a great way like to make that connection And then, of course, when the kids are a little, two, three, four years old, they see their parent doing something they want to do it. Yeah. You know, and so, and it also gets the parents that maybe don't consider themselves musical, right?

Yeah. To be like, wow, I can be a musician. It's not something you can only start when you're two or three. We all have music in us. And that's that nature versus nurture. It's like, put love and beauty into the world and connect people with it as opposed to pulling them away from it. And we all have this intrinsic connection.

with music. I think that's, there's a, probably that's a strong reason why, too, not just like for Suzuki, but outside of that context, but why you see a lot of, a lot of all-time great musicians come from musical families, right? Lepo babies. Little nepo babies, but it's, it's not a nepo baby if you have the skills. That's the thing. And of course the nepo babies have the skills, because they're around it their whole lives. Like, Witten and Brantford and the whole Marcellus brothers, they're amazing because their dad is Ellis Marcellus. Like, there's music happening all around. They've got a literal expert on the, on the music that they're learning in the house with them, who's, I'm assuming, seemed like from all accounts, a very loving, supportive

father who was there to help nurture with love the music. And then they're just around it. You're just enveloped in it. And it happens time and time again. You know, Jacob Collier's mother and grandfather, both professional musicians, violinists and composers and conductors. And like, he's got that around. Like, it makes sense that that's where these great musicians would come from. Yeah, and I mean, I'll leave it to everybody to kind of have their own opinion on where it falls on the nature versus nurture. But I think what you're describing there would be more on the side of nurturing in that like your Jacob Collier is not this amazing musician because of his genetic or at least not primarily because of his genetic makeup of his parents. But it's because he was around great music from a very young age.

And that's something that the Suzuki method is big on. They never say like it's, you know, you're too late after this age. whatever but it's also like humans do have the ability to connect with music as a language and actually learn it and excel it at a very young age yeah yeah yeah and that was kind of a revolutionary thing when they started doing that and i remember um Suzuki brought these tour groups over i think in the like early 70s maybe late 60s these groups of really young japanese kids i mean really young playing like bach concertos and this stuff and everybody was like oh my god they're geniuses or their genetic makeup is they're smart and it was like no no like whenever he explained it and

he lays out in the book this is like no we just expose them to this. There's no, you know, genetic connection between German and Japanese in, in this case, if that's the music that they're playing or whatever. But it's like, this is beautiful music that if kids are exposed to, they're connected with and they're connected through their parents because they're so young through that love and that appreciation of it that they can develop at a very young age and do things that they thought weren't possible up to them. Because up to then it would be like, oh yeah, Mozart was a genius. He's two years old. He's writing all this stuff. But that's an outlier. What this method proves is that,

that music is for everybody there's a democratization I hate using that word because it's bullshit usually but it really is in terms of like Suzuki changed the game with that in terms of like what you can learn who can do it. It's for everybody and I think that there's probably a component

of you know Japanese culture especially I mean everything's become more homogenous around the world is much more connected than it was there than it was at that time when he was coming up so the fact that you can take something that's not a part of their culture necessarily Western European classical music, whatever you call it, and then connect that with another

culture with little kids that are like, they don't know any kind of culture. They just, you know, know what they're given. But when you give it to them at a high level in a peaceful, joyful, loving environment, that great things can happen. Yeah. You know, in regards to nurture versus nature, I think a lot of the consensus, if there is a consensus right now, is that that's probably not even a real thing and it's almost impossible to parse out the difference between that. If you think about, you know, there's been studies recently that are very interesting where it's like even when children are, you know, before they're born, when they're in their mother's womb or whatever, like if she is, if the mother is stressed out, she's releasing cortisol, raising

their cortisol levels and they have like a higher fighter flight response as they're born. Like when they're, they're born with like basically their mother's experiences like onto them. And they're likely to, like, you know, do, like, not have as good of grades. And like, but, but that idea of like, you know, there's like this genetic component and then there's your environmental component, it's almost impossible to separate it out because they're kind of the same. They're, they're connect. They're so interconnected.

You can't take the genetics out of the environment and you can't take the environment out of the genetics. Like, of course, you know, you have, you need both. Like, you need, you need, you need, to be Jacob Collier or Witton Marcellus, you need a certain level, of intelligence, both for like how things sound and your general intelligence of how you structure things. And then you need a mom like Susie Collier or a dad like Ellis Marcellus. Right. You can nurture that. And then you need luck and the stars. Yeah. And then you need all kinds of stuff to happen. Yeah, it's not even just nature and nurture. There's other other parts. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think the only way would be like if you took two genetically identical twins and separated them at birth. But like you say, even before they're born, they're making the connection, you know, and so even that wouldn't, but remove them and put them a totally different situation, but then keep everything else exactly the same. There's a ton of twins experiments, and genetics do matter.

Genetics do matter in that sense, but also environment has a huge part of it. So I love that idea. And you know what I think is important to? It's like with this, like in terms of genetics. So one thing that I think is great, and I can't remember where Suzuki,

you know, lands on this and nurtured by love, he may not even speak to it. But one thing is that environment, nature, nurture, or in the environment is something that, especially as parents, we can control a lot, especially the more conscious we are, the more intentional we are with that. Whereas genetics, once the kid's born, is what it is, you know what I mean? But, buddy, think about this. You creating an environment as a parent, now we're getting into your nurture versus nature. And what tools do you have, genetically and environmentally? Where you've been raised. Like, you were

raised by Bill and Rosie who set you up to be the kind of parent who would do the, you know what I mean? Like that is even like, oh, I love blaming them when I, when I, you're wrong. This is a, this is a 3,000 year old concept that your condition, it's called karma. Your conditions dictate your, your, your, your behavior, right? Like, there's nothing that happens without a precondition happened to that. So even that is like, yes, you made this decision, this, you, you've chosen the right, but did you actually, did you choose? or is this you were kind of like set up for this with your environment and your and you're, it's a great.

I mean, listen, this is a, like you said. It's like voice leading though. Remember we're talking about a couple weeks ago, like the better you start doing it voice leading. Yeah. You're like, oh, this opens up so many options or does it actually not? It leads you right to the right one. What is your, you know, what is your jelly bean test? What is your pain tolerance for like, you know, understanding like the risk award and understanding, you know, delayed gratification?

Like all of that stuff, there's some genetic aspect. There's some nature, nurture aspect to it. there's an environmental aspect to it. So like you said, above our pay grade, but I find all of this stuff fascinating. Because, you know, I'm sure you have these thoughts too about like, you know, the environment I was born into got me to wherever I am today, whatever that is.

Like, however music I make, it all happened because of like my parents' genetics and the people and experiences I was around. And it's just fascinating. And some luck and some intersection of just random people that come into your life. You know what I mean? That's the cool part, the serendipity of it. But I think when you're naturing young musicians,

like I think about my kids who both play music. For me, the name of the game is to like, you know, I say this with my students and with my kids. Like, I want them to follow their passions.

Like, follow what is they're actually interested in. And so, like, that doesn't mean you have to be a professional musician, but like my daughter is the perfect example. She's 14. She started off on violin and piano when she was like six, you know,

she didn't really like either of them. Enough to, like, she showed any interest. You know, we would make her practice if, like, she had a recital coming up and she just had like it was homework. You know, you have to do this. You actually committed to do this. You have to work on it, right? Just to teach her the value of

committing to something and then following through. But I could tell like she's not spending any time doing this classical music of the piano on her own. She's not that interested in it. And now, and we didn't, we didn't push her. Like, we were just like, whatever, if you don't want to do it. If you're not interested after this point, after commitment's over, you don't have to do it. Now she's found, luckily though, I've filled our house with as many instruments as I can get my hands on. And so we have an electric bass and a little bass amp. And she's found like a real love of like rock music and the bass. And she sits in a room for hours with headphones in just like practicing baseline learning baselines from the record. Like all the things we tell our students to do,

she's naturally doing it because she's so into it. You know, it's amazing. That's so great. It's amazing. Couldn't she have chosen an instrument that she'd have some chance of getting a gig on though? Well, so she mentioned the other day. She doesn't listen to the show, obviously. She's my 14-year-old. But she mentioned the other day, she might think about joining the jazz band in high school. And I was like, buddy, I can get you so many gigs. If you learn how to play a B-flat blues, are you kidding me? Do you have to know that as a baseballer, actually? You can get gigs?

Well, I think that's great. And I just want to give a shout out. Thanks again, Simon, for the question. You mentioned Emma Cohen, which I didn't, I did not know he was a Suzuki kid. I feel like I've heard him talk about it, but yeah, I didn't put two together, yeah. Jason Marsalis, who's the youngest of the Marcellus brothers, fantastic drummer and vibraphones. He's a Suzuki kid.

He played violin coming up. actually came up with the same teacher that my kids, when they first started before we moved back to St. Louis, and they were studying with their grandmother's study with there. And I'm sure there's a bunch more. I can't actually think of it. I know I've talked to other people. So it's definitely like, it's not like some secret society we have. It's, there's a lot of Suzuki kids in the jazz world. Yeah. It makes sense. The year training is so important to what we're doing. And I mean, and when it's, and it's, look, I mean, it's been proven many times, but I just want to throw out one thing. Like, with any successful, I think, music, like, kind of

what you mentioned about, like, instilling with your kids, and I really wanted to do this, too. My thing was like, and what the Suzuki method works great at, is connecting them with a love of music. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? It's not about, are you going to become the greatest player? Are you going to become Jason Marcellus or Emma Cohen? Maybe, but they're going to become that anyway. You know what I mean? Most of that is seeing you be passionate about music. Right, right. But it's like the same things that, like, when we play, like, if you play baseball coming up or like play jacks or whatever play was that was fun, And then maybe you end up doing that the rest of you play cards. And so you play cards the rest of your life, whatever. Like that's what the Suzuki method does with music. It's play.

It's fun. It's not just the numbers and the graphs and right. You get to that later. But it connects you with music. It makes, the most important thing is done is it's, it's developed hundreds of thousands of astute people that are probably not playing anymore,

but they're music lovers. They go to concerts. They're connected with music. They're positive members of society. And like, they're confident as music. Like when people are like, oh,

I don't know how to dance. I'm a bad dancer. Everybody in my family's, I was like, ah, because you guys didn't dance when you were young. You know, if I don't have a beat or whatever, everybody can have a beat. You know what I mean? You're not going to be Jacob Collier, but don't worry about that. You're not going to be the polar opposite. Can we get somewhere in the middle?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it, man. Well, as Suzuki would say, natured by, oh, no, you'll hear it. Yeah.