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

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Adam's become a practitioner of a "mindful" lifestyle, and today he and Peter talk about how you can apply that to the practice room.For more on this topic, read the excellent Kenny Werner book Effortless Mastery, which you can pick up here. If you want to be even more 21st century by getting an app to help you with your mindfulness, you're in luck! Take a peek at Waking Up with Sam Harris.There's a new course from Open Studio: Elements of Solo Piano! Learn from modern jazz master Geoffrey Keezer as he shows you the strategies and techniques to become a better solo pianist. You'll also get Guided Practice Sessions featuring Adam Maness, where he walks you through how to practice each lesson in the course. And for even more piano courses, sign up for the Piano Access Pass.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.Let 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.

Hey, Peter. Hey, so I know how to mindlessly practice, but do you know how to mindfully practice? I know a little bit about this, but I'm excited to be exploring more today. Let's do it. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily music advice, coming at you.

Coming at you today's episode is sponsored by OpenStiojazz.com. I love that little affect I just put on, made you smile and giggle a little bit. It did. It's got me back in the game, as they say. Yeah, I was just trying to wake you up, bud. Yeah. What are we talking about today? Well, we're talking about mindful practice, and I think this might even segue into just sort of mindful living.

Perhaps I'm trying to set you up here a little bit because there's something else that you've been getting interest in doing mindfully lately. I've noticed. Well, honestly, I've been in mindfulness, into mindfulness in general, but mindfully eating. Yes. That's this book that your wife Kelly and I were talking about the other day about eating mindfully. It's changed the game for me. Yeah. mindfully eating.

But I really kind of like opened up this entirely new path of thinking about mindfulness in a way that I hadn't been as much before. And it's starting to kind of like bleed into my practice, obviously, because it's a big part of my life so far. And practice is a big part of my life, I mean. And it's been pretty awesome to think about not thinking as much while I practice. And I thought we could talk a little bit about maybe some techniques that people can apply mindfulness to their practice.

Yeah. And I think that this is, the practice area is something that, that doesn't necessarily come naturally for us, but it's like one of those areas that if you've been doing it long enough, it starts to come easier, you know. And I think what ends up happening is if you play, you know, if you do a lot of practice over a number of years, you either develop some good mindful habits automatically and then maybe you acquire some, you know, techniques from other areas like meditation that we've both been doing.

And then just sort of advice from others, but mainly just kind of learning by trial and error, you know, and it's the kind of thing that, like, if you don't develop a good practice of mindfully practicing, a good technique of that, you're going to either just sort of lock up or lose interest or just not be so ineffective in your practice and stagnant that you're probably going to drift away from, you know, the very art of practicing or getting better. So it's something that I think if you've been around long enough, you've got some techniques, even if you don't realize it. And then when we read these different books or go through these different practices of other areas, it's cool to kind of be like, and this is what we talk about

a lot is like, wow, okay, I actually was already doing that in my piano practice. I just never thought about it with food or with exercise or with life or with relationships. or whatever. And so then we can kind of draw on our experience in music. It's so true, man. And the more I read about, like, eating mindfully or just sort of the nature of consciousness, the more I realize, like, I already kind of have some talent at this in the practice room because I've had to acquire it to be a professional musician.

Exactly. You know what I'm saying. But it's interesting because I know some things like you also believe in. Like, I've been listening to a lot of this author, Sam Harris, who talks, he's got this whole mindfulness app or whatever. And he's great. He's very smart. and he describes that, you know, often humanity describes our greatest currencies as time,

but he says that's not actually the case, because we've all guarded some time, an hour, and then completely wasted it by letting our attention get away from us. So really, the greatest cash value we have is how we can direct our attention and our ability to do that, because you could easily squander any time that you try to guard by just being longed, lost in thought or not having your attention placed in where you ideally want it placed. That's all happened to us in the practice room. We've got in the practice room and like, okay, here we go. Today, hitting giant steps in all 24 and a half keys.

Wait, let me get my bench right first. Yeah, exactly. And then, I just got a notification from Instagram. Hold on, hold on. Wait, this might be about a better way to practice. So let me check it first. Yeah, I think I got an email about some voicings from Open Studio. Oh, my mom just emailed me.

Oh, it's been 45 minutes. It's okay, well, I guess I better hurry up. You know what I mean? That's how it all happens. Or we just... Would you call that mindless practice? It is mindless practice. So one of the things we're going to talk about avoiding is recognizing when we're practicing

mindlessly and to just take a beat and to start again. Like this is a big concept. A little reset time. Yeah. There's so many opportunities in all of our practice sessions where we can just recognize that maybe we're lost in thought or maybe we're rambling. Yeah. You know, sometimes maybe you're thinking like, oh, here I am.

I'm at the village vanguard. I'm playing with Christian McBride and I'm rambling on a blues for 40 minutes and I didn't get anything good accomplished. I just played all the stuff I already know how to play. Didn't actually practice. You need to be able to recognize and catch yourself doing that

and stay disciplined and really start thinking about where your attention lies. There's all these opportunities to start again. Don't judge yourself for doing that. Don't beat yourself up for it. It's like the natural human condition of consciousness is to do that.

But just recognize that those thoughts are part of the greater consciousness and then direct your attention back to where it should be. Yeah, and I love this idea of the example you're making about being on a gig because I think that's actually what we can draw upon as well. Sometimes people would think, well, I'm not at the level of mindfulness of my practice to be able to do that. But if you think about when you're in a challenging situation

or when you're put on the spot or when you're kind of, required to do something. A lot of times we rise to the occasion. Sometimes we fall flat on our face. But either way, when you've got that sort of time, either a time constraint, because what you described at the Village Vanguard playing with Christian McBride, if you ramble on for 40 minutes, that might be the last gig you ever do there. Right.

But you're going to know that too. Now, you might not play the greatest you ever want to play, but you also know that, like, when it's time for you to soul, it's like you got to speak your thing. You can't really ramble around and take your time before you get started. Whatever's going to happen, it's going to happen. And I think that's, I mean, ultimately, I think mindfulness is not always about quality. Of course, we're trying to concentrate as much as we can. But we're mainly just trying to be in that moment to be, you know, as productive as we can at that time.

And as you say, you know, to make that reset quicker if we need to. So like, don't wait for 40 minutes of your practice to go by before you're like, okay, now let me get going. Yeah. But don't beat yourself up if for five minutes you're kind of like, whoa, whoa, you know, start to develop the techniques that you need to do. so that from that five, that six minute on, you get to really lock in. Yeah, realize that only, you know, masters of meditation who have reached enlightenment are the only people that don't have thoughts coming in. We all have thoughts coming in, and we all need to just gently remind ourselves,

oh, I'm lost in thought, and it's time to get back. Now, a great way to practice this is to actually practice meditation. Meditation is the practice of being aware in the moment. Yeah. And so if you can practice that outside of the practice room, It can be very beneficial in the practice room. It doesn't have to be a religious or spiritual experience. I mean, it's a spiritual experience, but not religious experience per se.

It could just be literally you practicing attention. Yes. And there's tons of ways you can look that up on your own. There's tons of different ways to do it. And they all can really help you achieve this goal of awareness. Some just practical things you can do in the practice room if you don't practice meditation that I like to do to kind of get me back in the moment is the thought always comes up when I catch myself thinking too much is, okay, reconnect with my senses.

We have five of them. I don't know if you know that. Touch, smell, sight, taste, and hearing. Yeah. Forget about listen. Listen was number five just then. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know.

No, but just take a beep and think about, okay, what am I seeing right now? What am I smelling right now? What taste is in my mouth? Okay, it's still breakfast. Yeah. What am I hearing, air conditioning? And what am I feeling? Like, think about the point.

points of contact to the piano bench or chair you're in or maybe your feet on the floor or the air on your skin, any of that can help you to like come straight back to the moment. And then once you're there, start again. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I think that, you know, a lot of times because of the potential for sensory overload in modern culture now with devices, with the speed with which people are exchanging

information that we start to think it's impossible to do anything fully mindful like you used to be able to. And I would just say that, you know, these digital tools that we have can be wonderful devices, but they can be very divisive. They can be very, um, they can obstruct not only mindfulness, but just attention in general. Oh, yeah. But we can also, we don't have to give in to them. You know what I mean? We're still very early in terms of like, you know, technology is always accelerating up to a point. And we're in a period most likely. I mean, it's always always hard to tell until you look back historically, you know,

to assess the periods we're in in terms of, you know, technological advancement. But it feels like we're in a time where things, technology has sort of out, you know, outraced our ability to control it. But not everybody. Like if you talk to certain people, it's, again, it's a mindset thing. If you believe that everything is out of control, then you're never going to be. able to do anything fully mindful because you don't even believe it's possible anymore. All that, you can't do that because there are notifications.

You turn your notifications off. Yeah. What's wrong with that? I mean, I know some people, but even back in the day, it used to be like that. You know, you'd be at a concert and you'd hear a beeper go off. That was a doctor. Yeah, of course. That was literally a doctor.

They're the only ones that would have that. But then we got this thing that everybody has to, you know, be able to be notified and in touch all the time. And so you have to remove yourself from that or else you're never going to be fully present and even have a chance to be able to practice mindfully. And we talked the other day, I think about the 15 minute concept. And I think some people might have misunderstood us thinking that, oh, they're talking about practicing for 15 minutes because the digital world is so intrusive that that's all you can

concentrate on. And it's really not that at all. It's that if you can take 15 minutes and be very mindful and productive and put on a mindset where you can really get something accomplished in what is, it seems like it's a short amount of time, but actually time, it's like when you start to really concentrate on something and you're really in the moment, time stands still. So 15 minutes becomes long, right? Yeah. If you're able to hold your attention on your objective for 15 minutes, that's a big win.

That's a big, big win. So consider that as you're considering all these things. I mean, we've done some unsuccessful podcast where we rambled on for 25 minutes. Even today, they're never going to hear the light of day. But then we've done some real little gems at like nine or 11 minutes. minutes because we were in this and we might I mean I don't like to judge it pre-judge it or post-judge it but I mean it's just you know yeah time should not be I think the more mindful you get the less time the more elastic time is and the less we have to concentrate on that so consider working on mindfulness in your practice I'm going to give a shout out here to a book that I got when I was a teenager and that is still relevant for this and that's a book by Kenny Warner awesome jazz pianist effortless mastery effortless mastery he literally wrote a book about how to practice mindfully, go check it out. It's really awesome and can help you make strides in this.

If you're having problems like focusing or staying aware in the moment while you're practicing, or even when you're performing, there's a whole thing on that about performing with fear and all that stuff. And it's great for getting out of your head. Very much. And then there's the Sam Harris app, which you sent me, which I haven't even checked out yet.

I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, waking up. It's a great app. Yeah. And we're not sponsored by them or anything. This is just stuff we're throwing out there. Yeah, a lot of good, like guided meditations on that one that can help you come. Calm is great.

I mean, that's like one that a lot of people use. Calm is good. Headspace. My wife uses headspace is good. Yeah, they're all good. But there's just... My wife just says, get out of my headspace. I don't think that's related to them.

That's right. Yeah. So, you know, we'll come back to this. This is something that I think it should be an ongoing thing because it's so important. Maybe we could talk someday about performing mindfully and not mindlessly. And I would just say, too, to people, like we're all at different places with this. But I think because there's such a movement, especially with younger folks, but really with everybody.

You know, because, like that's why I say we're actually at a very exciting moment because there's so much like chatter around the world. There's actually a movement in a number of different areas towards mindfulness. So you can take these things like a lot of people have gotten into different kinds of mindful eating, you know, and we both have in our own ways and we exchange ideas about that. And you can take that if that's an area that you excel at more and you feel like, well, I'm having trouble with that in my practice. because you're taking those same concepts

and applying them to your practice routines. It's not actually that different. If you're a really good reader, use those techniques. Like, I'm actually in the middle right now of trying to up my reading game. I've got a little 30-day challenge coming up. I don't want to jinx it yet.

Oh, really? I'm just putting it out there. Yeah, a little thing about reading 30 minutes a day. But that's very much, like, people that read on a regular basis and are in that habit are in a perfect kind of mindset to be able to apply that to those same principles to practicing on an instrument, I think.

Man, you do too many 30 days. You did two this month. Are you doing two next month, or you doing one? I think I might even do three. I didn't feel like these two were that much, man. I don't know. We'll see. I got two days, so check back with me, if you know what I'm saying.

All right. Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.