You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Survive a Gig With Awful Players - #50!

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

Peter and Adam tackle the drag-iest of drags. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Ennis and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at Podcast. Today we're going to talk about how to survive a gig with awful players. Subtitle the first 10 years of Adam's career. Oh, what year are we in now? Don't worry about it. Okay, we're past 10 though. All right, good.

Okay, so these are going to, look, we've all been there. Okay, so we just want to help you survive. If it's a group of awful players, you are not going to thrive most likely. I mean, you have to be strong, strong. mentally and physically. So we're going to just try to help you give you some tips on how to survive the gig without killing anybody. Or that might be number seven.

I don't think so, though. Okay, so the first tip is leave the gig. Come on. Oh, I should have saved that for the head. Just leave the gate with leave the gig. I mean, if you can identify that they're horrible at the beginning, just leave, you know? I mean, abandoned ship, as long as you're not the captain, you know what I mean? No, if you got on a cruise ship and you see that there's an incompetency with the crew and the captain,

are you going to stay on there? No. Exactly. So you abandon ship. Now, if you're the captain, you've got to go down with the ship. Yeah, yeah, you've got to go down with the ship. So, I mean, if you're the leader of the gig and you've assembled some horrible players, shame on you, but then you've got to stay there and survive it.

But otherwise, leave the gig. Why not? All right. It's not a brain surgery. That seems drastic, but hilarious. So my first, this is one I use quite often or have in the past. And that's to tell the crappy players to play soft. This one works every time.

Listen, this is a vibing technique. It's old school. But you basically whisper in the drummers here at the first set break, hey, can you just maybe play a lot soft? Maybe brushes all night? I like my better. I just leave. I don't even have to say it.

You'd be nice about it. You're like, you know, I'm kind of feeling brushes for this room. It just fits the vibe of the room better. Yeah. I like it. Okay, well, along those lines, you could tell the crappy players to just listen to you all night. Okay?

And then you play soft, so they have to play even softer. Say, really check, you know, just check out what I'm doing. I want you to listen really close for a lot of cues. Then they can't be as aggressive with their crappiness.

Is this one of those things, though, this whole list? Is this one of those things that's like, if you keep playing with gigs where it's with crappy players, you have to look in the mirror a little bit. Exactly.

Wait a minute. Am I one of the crappy players? The crap will get on you. Believe me. That's why you've got to be aggressive with these techniques. Come on now. All right.

Number four is to think of a happy play. I like to think of my great uncle Bob's farm up near Hannibal, Missouri, where he used to have this beautiful German shepherd that would roam the fields, and we would go fishing, and then, oh, we're playing Stella by Starlight. Yeah, so you're kind of transporting yourself to another place. It's an out-of-body experience. You're pretending that you're not in the big pile of steaming crap that you actually are. I like it.

I love when we do our snarky list, man. That's right. my favorite episodes by far. Okay, so here's another one. Wear a disguise. Thus minimizing the chances that you'll be associated with these horrible plays.

No, this is a serious thing here. You don't want to, you know, guilt by association, right? I mean, if you're part of a jazz crime, you want to put a ski mask on or something, don't let anyone see you be part of that group. If you ever see like a killing piano player with a long black wig.

Yeah. That's probably Peter Martin. That's right. Well, I mean, think about it. I mean, Oscar Peterson, you can see videos of him. I had a chance to see him live several times, even get a chance to meet him. I never saw him with crappy players. Now, maybe it happened.

But if it did, you never recognize him. I didn't recognize it. Smart guy, see. All right, our last one, thank goodness, is to. And this is probably. We might not even survive this list, much less surviving a game with awful players. I'm going to be paying. attention to this next gig we play together.

This is to make better decisions about who you're going to take with a gig. Veth the other players in advance. You know, play with the best people you can. That way you don't have to do things like abandoned ship and wear a disguise. Right. Okay, well, I liked your last one,

but that's not really how to survive. That's just how to avoid it in the first place. Which is probably the best way to survive. It's the best way to survive it. So, good luck with this. And if you're constantly having to do this, you might have to practice a little more. That's right. So hopefully you won't hear it. Oh, nice. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hearit.com to get more information,

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