You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Take Care of Yourself as a Jazz Musician

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

With Adam still gone, Peter has to answer a listener question all by himself. This time, it's about how to prevent any injuries from the physical demands of playing an instrument.Check out Sean Jones' courses from Open Studio that Peter mentions in this episode. Not one but TWO courses on the fundamentals of jazz trumpet - you can get 'em both right here: https://www.openstudiojazz.com/trumpetLike 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.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, Peter. Hey, man, what's up? Yeah, how do you take care of yourself? Well, the first thing I like to do is talk to myself as if I'm a separate person. Oh, really? How do you do that? Well, you'll hearing it. I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Coming at you from the pod cave today, solo edition. Adam is still out on the road. We miss him dearly, but we are charging ahead on a very interesting, time. topic today, which is how to take care of yourself as a jazz musician. I'm actually going to add that because we just had how to take care of yourself. But I'm not qualified to talk about how to take care of yourself. But I am qualified to talk to you about, give you a few ideas at least, how to take care of yourself as a jazz musician. And this comes from a listener question. Evan from Ann Arbor from the great city, the great college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Big shout out to Wolverine Nation and Michigan in general. Let's read his question and then we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of how to take care of yourself. Hey guys. Love the podcast. You make me want to burn my guitars and learn to play the piano. I know you guys are pretty health conscious. Hashtag plant based hashtag Keto. But I was curious if there were any self-care tools you guys rely on specifically to keep you in playing shape.

Any struggles with tendinitis or carpal tunnel, etc. Quick plug. I'm an acupuncturist, and I think it can be a pretty great support tool. I see a fair amount of professional musicians and music students for these types of issues, as well as back pain, stress, et cetera. And there's a network of nonprofit sliding scale clinics so acupuncture can even be affordable for musicians. It's called the People's Organization of Community Acupuncture. Now, that's tough to say.

People's Organization of Community Acupuncture. P-O-C-A. and their website is P-O-C-A-C-A-C-O-O-P-O-P-O-P.com. They have a map of all the clinics. Looks like there is one called Community Acupuncture of St. Louis. You should check it out. Thanks, guys, Evan from Ann Arbor. All right, Evan, appreciate the question.

Appreciate the information. I was reading the People's Organization of Community Acupuncture. I thought it was like the People's Republic of China Community Acupuncture. I thought it had like a socialist bench. to it, but it's not. It just sounds like that. It sounds like a great organization and thank you for the info on that. Yeah, so acupuncture is something that I've never done and I don't know a lot about, but I do know several musicians that swear by it. And these are super smart, thoughtful, great players. I won't put their names out there so that I don't violate HIPAA rules. Now,

I probably wouldn't. But no, I mean, these, I think that there's really something there. specifically for the physical challenges that playing different instruments can put on your body. Every instrument has its own set of just physical difficulties, physical challenges for us both to overcome and to cope with. So, you know, as a pianist, we think about for sure the wrist, the arm, the forearm, the back, the shoulders. I mean, really the whole body. I really like to think about playing the piano in a holistic way and not to just think about it as the fingers.

So, you know, things that we can do for our entire body to stay in a general sense of good health and balance and strength and all that, I think, are extremely beneficial for piano, but not just for piano, for every instrument. If you think about the saxophone, I don't play the saxophone, but I've talked to saxophonists and look at them. I mean, that's a whole body experience.

The drums, I mean, feed and, you know, So I don't think you could find an instrument that only uses an isolated part of the body. So when we think about different forms of exercise, I think the things that are a little bit less violent, you know, violent to your body are going to be better things. So like going out to play tackle football in full pads and stuff may not be the best form of exercise to build up your body because it's potentially destructive to you in so many different ways and so many different injuries. But if you look at things that are lower impact, yoga, you know, I've very influenced by my wife, Kelly, she's a yoga instructor. So I have some great in-house instruction. And I'm far from a yoga master or a yogi. I'm more yogi bear than yogi.

But I think the idea being that what I've learned already in my yoga journey and what it's done from my body in terms of like balance and strength, core strength, strength, not to mention all the things that's done on the mental side has been very important for me, I think, in terms of preventing injury for sure, but also being able to maximize the usage of my body to be able to produce the sounds that I want out of the piano. And that's really, I think, at the most simple level of like, why do we want to keep our bodies in a certain type of shape and how do we take care of ourselves as a jazz musician to be able to do the best that we can in terms of our job to make music. And I think it's about having our body in a place where we can produce the sound from our instrument because that's the sort

of physical manifestation of our connection with the instrument. We're trying to pull a sound out of the piano. So if we're in an advantageous physical situation that can best be able to do that, that's what we want to go for. Like working out, run. doing yoga, you know, getting stronger and things like that, that's not going to make us a great jazz player because we got to do the skills to develop our ear and have good ideas, all the mental and stuff that's actually connected to music. This is just about sort of us being in a position once we have those ideas to be able to best pull those out.

Now, in terms of things that we can do that are destructive and can lead to, you know, tendinitis and carpal tunnel. And look, I'm not only am I obviously not a medical doctor. I'm very unqualified to speak beyond hopefully what I'll speak on this. So specific to piano and maybe that can be extended to other instruments, I think it's important and it's certainly not going to hurt at a minimum to think about repeating the same kind of action that can cause injury. So anything that you're feeling tension-wise and on piano a lot of times we're talking about

the wrists, we're talking about the elbow up into the shoulders like, anything that starts to feel tense or that you're tensing up either because it's difficult what you're playing or you're in an awkward position, you want to be very careful about repeating that over and over again. So, you know, in playing jazz, that can be at a time when you're like learning a solo or trying to learn a specific phrase that's difficult.

In classical, it can happen even more often because we're repeating the same phrases, the same specific hand positions over and over again. So you've got to make sure that you're keeping tension out of your body anywhere as much as possible. But the reality is there's going to be tension. So you've got to be careful about repeating that over and over again. Because that's, from what I understand is where some of these tendinitis carpal tunnel

and these kind of things can happen is tension plus repetition. So, you know, you can build in, first of all, just I like to have a general rule of no more than 50 minutes or an hour, really, or 55 minutes, I guess. But basically once an hour, you're taking a break where you're getting up from the piano. You're getting up. you're putting the saxophone down. Like you have a time limit of a maximum of hour that you're playing. Now that's not going to solve everything,

but that, you know, sometimes when we get very focused in on our practice, two hours can go by and it's like, wow. And it's great because you can develop so much in that focus practice. But unfortunately, physically you can also develop some bad habits

and really do some damage to yourself. So one hour is not going to solve everything, but that'll cut out some of the more, you know, longer repetition. But then, you know, even as you're practicing those phrases,

you don't even want to go 10, minutes of tension. You don't want to go two minutes of tension, actually, but the tension's going to come. So you just have to learn how to recognize it. Pick up your arms, pick up your hands off the keyboard, take the saxophone, take the trumpet out of your mouth, put the drumsticks down for at least a couple seconds, come back, shake it out kind of thing. Awareness of tension is, I believe, 90% of it. It has been for me. And, you know, knock on wood, knock on several kinds of wood here. I've never had carpal tunnel tendinized.

I haven't struggled with that. And I've practiced a lot and stuff. So I don't know. I might just be lucky, but I've always been very aware. And I had some great teachers and great instruction on this from a young age. So it kind of became second nature to me, you know, to really be aware of your body and the tension that it can hold in different areas and to move away from that as you're practicing as quickly as you can.

So I would also say that yoga is very beneficial in that area, in that it clues you into just tension in your body in general and relaxation and strength, like and being able to tell the difference between strength and tension. Those are not the same things. You can be strong but not tense. And in fact, it's very important to be able to master, for instance, piano technique to know the difference between that.

So, you know, you can, you know, Pilates, I know, I've never done it. I know a lot of people swear by that. I think, you know, for me, I'm doing a lot of running. I think it's important to find some kind of, some way to take care of your body. You know, yoga, Pilates, running, working out with weights, basketball. I mean, there's so many different things. Some type of use of your body separate and different from physically playing your instrument that you do to connect with your body, walking.

You know, I mean, there's all different ways to connect with your body. but because we are using our body to physically play the instruments, we want to connect in a different way. We want to strengthen our body. We want to be able to bring that strength without that tension away from the instrument so that when we come back to the instrument, we have something to be able to contribute, you know? So I think those are all kind of just general things without my,

without getting into too much trouble of trying to give you medical advice that have worked for me and hopefully can work for you. Now, as far as like the food and stuff, to me, this is more like, I don't know how much it directly, you know, contributes to your playing, probably less so than the exercise. But I will say that if you're traveling a lot, like I've been doing the last few weeks, your diet and exercise, but really primarily your diet, can have such an effect on, you know, your immune system and if you're going to get sick or not and how you feel when you get up to

play. Like a lot of times I'm in a situation where I have to eat right before a performance. I'd rather do it later, but sometimes like we're either traveling after the gig on the bus or our restaurants aren't open or that, you know, a lot of times the promoter will take us to eat before the gig. So you're fueling up your body. And even if, you know, physically you have a strong, you know, you can fend things off a funny meal or some weird food or whatever, it affects, you know, kind of how you're feeling

and your mind and all that. And you've got to be really strong to have that not affect how you're going to play. So you've got to be careful about what you put in your body. And I think it's very important to try to keep as many toxins out of your body. especially right before you play. I mean, you want to have the best mindset possible for the best possible performance. So, I mean, does what you eat, make or break

a great jazz performance? No, not at all. It's more like kind of a detail thing. But it can also, eating right on the road can really help you from getting sick. It can't totally eliminate it, but it's just another one of those pieces of the puzzle. Eating good, clean foods, organic,

no toxins, all that kind of thing. You know, if you want to go next level and go, I mean, the plant-based thing, I think, is just something for me. I've had success with it just not even as so much of a dogmatic vegan type of thing, but just trying to eat as many fresh fruits and vegetables as possible that are clean and just, you know, really being a little bit more mindful and thoughtful about the food. I feel like it's enhanced by playing a little bit. It's not the primary thing, but that and exercise can help. Certainly keep you healthy on the road, keep you ready and in the best

shape possible to be able to hopefully play something good. So anyway, hopefully that helps. It's important for us to take care of ourselves as jazz musicians. This is not an easy thing we're attempting to do to be able to be creative at the drop of a hat, the drop of a tune. So we've got to be physically and mentally prepared. All right. There you go. We are sponsored here at the You'll Hear a podcast by Open Studio. Open Studio jazz.com is our little home on the web.

We've got jazz lessons from jazz legends. We have tutorials, classes, courses on a number of different interesting subject. guitar, piano, drums, bass, saxophone, trumpet. Sean Jones, I haven't mentioned his name lately, but his jazz trumpet fundamentals course, volume one and volume two, are one of our most beloved courses. I mean, trumpet players that I meet around the world are just like, man, I love that course.

Sean is so engaging and so much information, so entertaining. He plays a bunch in the course. I even got to play with them on a couple tunes on there, just giving him a little bit of an... assist, but I mean, he really breaks down jazz trumpet playing and a lot of kind of jazz trumpet. I mean, not even jazz trumpet, just trumpet playing. You know, it goes through the arbins and all this kind of, you know, exercises and how to get in shape as a jazz trumpet player. There you go. All right. Well, till tomorrow, you'll hear it.