You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Teach Jazz - #77

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam discuss techniques for teaching this music. From listener, Derren. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Today we're going to talk about how to teach jazz. Now, I've always heard that this isn't possible that you just have to hear it. In fact, I've heard there's a whole podcast based around the You'll Hear It philosophy. Is that not right?

That's right. And I mean, obviously this is going to be difficult question for us to tackle because it's taking us about 12 takes just to get started for some reason. These always become the best episodes when it takes us this last. long to get started. Hey, hey, don't put that pressure on me. Okay, I'm just saying I'm looking forward to where this goes. So this is from one of our listeners, Darren, and he just flat out ask, how do you teach jazz? So this is, it's an interesting concept because I think that both of us may have grown up in

that era when it was, you know, it was prevalent thinking that you can't teach jazz, that it was this esoteric thing, that there was some secret scrolls hidden under, you know, Charlie Parker's woodshed in Kansas City, maybe. If you didn't have access to those, you were out of luck. You have to look inside Lester Young's hat to find the scene. Yeah. But having said that, I had some wonderful teachers of myself, and not just in jazz, just in music in general. So I've always felt like it was something that you can be taught.

And I was taught jazz. So my career in terms of teaching has always been more based upon sort of passing along the information, maybe a few things that I picked up as well. Yeah, you know, I think what it is is you can't teach people how to be, great musicians, great communicators of emotion through music. That's something that's really hard to teach. It's kind of one of those things either you hear it and you get it or you don't. But as far as like the structure of jazz, the rhythms, the language of it itself, I mean, it's like any other language, very teachable.

Yeah. And what I like to do is really concentrate on the specific skill set that will put you in a position to be a successful improviser and jazz. musician in general. So more of the concrete skills that you would need and some techniques to develop those, you know, to find them, to practice on them, to hone them. Because, you know, for me, some of my best teachers were always concentrating on those very things, no matter what it was that I was learning. Yeah. I mean, if you're learning how to speak Spanish, there's certain things like vocabulary, grammar, you know, that are just, you need to know and that are going to help you. Now, whether or not you get a good feel for the language and have an ear for it,

that's a little bit harder to teach, and you have to kind of do some self-discovery with that. But, I mean, in terms of jazz, I think how to teach it, the beginning is like how to train your ears. Well, I mean, we always start with this one, right? You know what? I was like, finally, we're not going to start with it. But we did. No, I mean, you want to approach that. You know, we were joking because we always start with listen.

But it's the same thing when you teach jazz. The first thing I usually start out with is getting my students to be able to hear intervals. You know, I think that's kind of the most important building block to build chords off of, to build melodies, to understand how those relationships between tones work. So I always get people listening to intervals and being able to call out the interval. That's where I start with jazz or music in general. Yeah, and that's a very concrete thing. You can, you know, up until recently, I guess you really needed somebody to kind of quiz you as you learned your intervals and could identify them now. I think there's some apps, which, ashamedly, I don't actually know the names of any of them.

You learn your intervals a long time before there were apps. I did, but that would be kind of cool. I'm always like, you know, if somebody came up with one that was really geared specifically towards jazz, that would be even better. But, I mean, really the same kind of things for classical ear training are what you need for jazz. It's just for jazz, you need to learn a bunch more beyond that. So, for instance, in classical, I remember learning ear training. Well, I mean, you know, like some harmonies, some counterpoint, but just in terms of, as you say, identifying the intervals and then how stack up to be chords, how

those are broken up to become melodies and stuff, and it's really just about getting so that you can identify and hear those and then start to build upon it to be on an intuitive level where you just automatically know what's being played. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's like any language you have to understand what the letters are

before you can read the words and then the sentences and the paragraphs, and then, you know, eventually you're a poet. And I think almost anything that you're learning from the very basic intervals to more complex chords to learning solos, all the different things that we preach in terms of teaching this music, the more that you can sing those things. And so I was encouraged that in my teaching.

It's like sing that interval. Sing that chord. Break it up. You know, sing that melody. Sing it in different keys. Because singing is a great way for you to start to train your own ears and to kind to kind of get some, you know, exponential as opposed to just linear growth in your development for your ear training.

So we know that ear training is super important to be a great jazz improviser, mainly because most, if not all, of the great jazz improvisers had great ears. So that's just kind of like working reverse engineering from what's a great jazz player. What are the skills that you need? How do you quickly get there? Yeah. And being able to sing that sort of speeds up the process. That's right. Another thing you can do to get started teaching jazz and what we try to do around here is to show people instead of,

telling people. You know, people learn a lot faster by actually experiencing something than they do being explained about it. So, you know, if you're talking about a particular scale, you know, it helps if you play it for the student, but also, you know, it may take a little work on your part to get some examples of some classic recordings that utilize that scale or utilize that concept that you're trying to teach and then imparting that on your student. Not only do they hear the concept that you're trying to explain and hear it how it's, it's, it's, it's relating in real time to the music. But then hopefully you're also introducing them to jazz musicians and albums that maybe they

don't know about and they're getting inspired. I mean, part of our, I think, duty as teachers of this music is to hit people to things that people hipped us to when we were coming up and to spread that love of the music. Yeah, and I love that too because that's the kind, you know, as a teacher, the more you're doing to expose your student to something that they may be discovering and then kind of going into self-discovery mode and that they become passionate about, you know, then they, I mean, because it's just like anything. Generally, you know, the most progress the student can make is on the time they're practicing

and working on their own. So like if you look at taking piano lessons or something once a week or going to a great, you know, university course just twice a week, you're spending a lot more hours on your own. So I think it's important for the teacher to not only teach specific things. Like I might sit with the pianist and say, you need to fix this with your hand position or whatever, and you can show that to them. But you've also got to give them,

you should be giving them things that will inspire them and then lead for them kind of discovering more inspiring things on their own so they can constantly be growing. So they don't need you there with them at every minute. And the greatest thing we have with this music are the recordings and now great videos on YouTube or whatever. You give them a little bit of that. I mean, I remember years ago, one of my most successful students and teaching moments is with a great young pianist named Sullivan Fortner.

Yeah, man. He's not even that young anymore. He's amazing. But I started teaching when he was like 13 years old. He came to me, and he didn't know anything about jazz. But he was already a pretty good pianist. So it was very simple for me. I said, okay, I'm going to get you a recommended classical teacher.

And I talked to his parents. I said he needs to study with this great classical teacher in New Orleans. And then I just started giving him recordings. I'm like, go home and listen to this. And he came back. And, like, you know, I gave him things that weren't even necessarily in order. I just tried to see what he was interested in and what might respond to. Huge.

So that he would get excited about it. Start learning it on its own. Make me look like a genius teacher. And then years later, I can brag that was my student. Yeah. No, I think this is the key. And this is actually how the music has been handed down generation after generation is you kind of teach people how to learn on their own.

And then you inspire them to find what they're passionate about. and then if they know how to learn from those recordings, you know, I mean, it's almost a trope right now, the transcribe, oh, transcribe, transcribe, but it is how this music has passed down. Didn't a great man many years ago say you can give someone a fish or you can give them a fishing pole and teach them how to fish? Isn't this? Are we going into that area?

Yeah. Don't teach them how to fish. They're a grown man. Fishing's not that hard. Oh, that's true. Go to Aldi's and get some salmon. But you know what? Like what I just said actually kind of applies.

we talked about one podcast about it's really not that hard. Yeah. Like, you know, if you kind of understand the basics of intervals and ear training and music and you can pick these things out, it's all there. Yeah. It's all in the records. And you just have to be inspired and go get it. And this thing, what you just said of, it's not that hard.

I would just say, for anybody that's teaching, keep that in mind all the time. Like, if you're teaching, this is hard, this is complicated, this is, that's the wrong approach. I mean, yes, there's plenty of things we can find in this music that are super difficult, take a long time and they're complicated but in reality the foundation of the music is not that hard it should not be that hard if you're constantly saying how hard it is and not how joyous it is and look listen how great this is and developing every day and you know staying on that continuum i think you're doing your students a disservice yeah and so hope this helps uh was it darren who asked this yeah yeah darren uh really hope this helps uh you know teaching is kind of like

playing. It's like it's everybody has a different way of doing and everybody has a different path. So so I'm sure what you're doing is helpful to your students but keep in mind that you know first and foremost listen, uh, try to inspire, try to get them, you know, interested in seeking out their own way of learning this music and you'll be fine. And if not, you'll hear it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. If you liked what you heard, please leave a rating or review. Yeah, I liked what I heard. I'm going to leave five stars, but you guys can do whatever you want. Today's episode was brought you by Open Studio.

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