You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Introducing the Pod Suite (feat. JEN Recap)

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Peter and Adam make their long-awaited return today in the new-and-improved Podcave, and they fill us in on their trip to the JEN Conference.Let 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, Adam. Yo. Yo, where are we? We're in the pod suite, baby. How did you know that, man? I got airlifted in here. I don't know what's going on here. Andrew told me.

Okay. I'm Adam Manus, and he's Peter Martin, and you're listening to You'll Hear It, a podcast about listening and playing music better. Peter is performing the theme today on our new Hammer 88. That's right. No more key station. Double Hammer 88s.

Flying the Hammer 88s is what I've called them. I'm so excited about this. Yeah, it's awesome. Unfortunately, I was unable to. to even do my little intro part while I played. I'm going to work on that. Well, you're playing in like 13-8 or whatever that. I wrote it.

I should be able to do that. But I'm super excited about this. We finally have our two keyboard set up. We've been talking about this for a while. Yep. Excited for the new year. Two keyboard and a desk setup. Because usually when we get,

we had the key station on there, it was like we had to keep our hands at our sides. We got the coffee, got the old granddad. We got too much stuff happening. We can break out. If it wasn't 1130 on a Monday, that old granddad could be broken out,

no problem. Yeah. I'm almost nervous we have such a good setup here. But it's also just, it's just sort of new for us, you know. Like, you're going to be able to sit down and play that stuff at any point. I know, I'm just like accompanying whatever you say. This could be a whole new, I won't do that. You know, you'll hear our listeners.

We try to construct the most quality jazz education podcast that you could possibly conceive of. And one of those things is some funky-ass background music. Yeah, we're going to have to, like, match each other. Yeah, it's hard, man. It's hard to concentrate. I got a key keyboard in front of me. See what I'm saying? He's distracted like a dog that saw a squirrel.

Hey, look at that dog out there with the squirrel. Where? But, no, we're super stoked. Thank you to Dan and Andrew. We were gone in New Orleans, and they kind of put all this together. They did. And it's beautiful. And maybe we'll do in a coming episode.

So we got YouTube over here, what's up, YouTube. But we'll do a little bit of a studio tour at some point. Yeah, absolutely. Once we get everything settled where everything's going to be. Right now, I mean, I feel like, do we get too big for our britches? You ever heard that there's a white stripe song that starts like, well, you're in your little room and you're working on something good? But if it's really good, you're going to need a bigger room. And then once you get to the bigger room, you might not know what to do.

The five false starts we've had today might indicate a possible problem. So I'm saying, do we get too big for our britches? Yeah, yeah. But we'll find out. And we're a little further away because usually we're within slapping distance of each other, which we've never done. But it keeps us in check. It keeps us in check, yeah. Like if there's some bad information going

Now we can't really reach out I think it's okay I feel like we'll project our voices A little bit better Yeah And we'll see how it goes It sounds great in here It sounds awesome in here

And it really is nice to have The keyboards here And the speakers here too actually Exactly No headphones And probably tomorrow we'll get into Maybe we'll do You know some real in-depth

Kind of demo stuff on the keyboards Once we get everything finalized here That could be tomorrow's episode I think we'll be ready for that right For sure Okay So today we thought we would just kind of recap the Jen conference in New Orleans.

Talk about our new studio a little bit, but let's talk a little bit about Jen. We had a fantastic time. We had a fabulous time. Met so many great people, saw so many great things. Yeah, first of all, the city is a knockout. I mean, there's just no doubt about it. I was talking to someone earlier,

and it really is just like, it might be the most special city in all of America. As far as the culture that it has, it's kind of got all the good and bad things of America rolled up into one sweat. heap of a city. Right. I mean, we were walking down Bourbon Street.

I don't know if you remember what that lady who was trying to sell me shots said to me. She was very, she was very complimentary and very rude at the same time. In one sentence, she like built me up and knocked me down.

That was good. In an attempt to sell me some kind of fluorescent shot of something. Jello shot. Yeah, so that was interesting. So first we should tell folks because not everybody knows what Jen is. Oh, okay.

Jazz Education Network. Yeah, it's a conference. It kind of took over from, and they don't like it when we say this, but it did. kind of takeover from IAJE. The International Association of Jazz Educators,

which no longer exists. No longer exists. But it's way different. I don't know if you remember IJU, but it's way, way different than IAJE. IJE was almost like a showcase convention where artists would try to get signed by labels. Well, I think it became that.

And some folks were talking about that over the years. Actually, the first time I went, which you would have been young, Adam Manus, without a beard, probably much shorter, and probably not even double digits, I would think, in terms of age, because I was a young lad myself. Okay.

But it was really, this is like kind of mid-80s when I was in, I think 85 was when I went. It was very much like on, kind of more like it is now. I think it's come a little bit full circle. But yeah, it became more jazz industry thing, which is fine, but they were trying to kind of serve two different things, jazz education and jazz industry. So I think now they've kind of nailed it nicely. It was really great. So we headed down to Norlands on Monday. We got in.

You had secured us what ended up being. just an amazing hotel, although it wasn't even like a traditional hotel. It wasn't, but that's Nalance. Peter said that about one billion times on the trip from that S&L sketch. Yeah. But so this hotel was awesome. We had this like great suite and it was like you, me and Sean in this place. We had awesome time, like a real hang of a place.

And we weren't right on the conference, which I don't know if that was actually. We were close, but we weren't. Yeah. But we got to like, we were in a killing neighborhood. What was the name of the neighborhood? The warehouse district. The warehouse district. Man, that was so happening.

Lots of great food. And in the conference itself, we had a great time. You gave a great keynote speech on Tuesday that was called. How being a jazz musician taught me to be a startup founder. That's right. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about, I really want to do it again. I'm going to maybe change the title and not make it so fuzzy.

But that's kind of what it was about. And just sort of the concept. I don't know, we may, we have some video. Maybe we'll put that up. Yeah, we do. We'll leave below to that if we do. but the idea was really just, you know, the tools that we learn, I realized the tools that you're kind of forced to learn,

you know, gleefully forced to learn to become a jazz musician over the years, you know, improvisation, collaboration, these sort of basic skills are very applicable we found to organizations as well. And so I start, I've just, it's kind of been unfolding to me over the years and I'd had this idea a while ago, but it was really crystallized recently for me. So I wasn't sure I was going to go, but it was pretty well received,

which I was excited. Like over the coming days when I would see people, you know, they kind of come up and talk about it. And I just wanted to sort of make those connections because it was a real, been a real organic thing for me. And I'm so grateful to, you know,

this music and the musicians that I played with and just, you know, the records that I've learned from and all that. And a lot of times I think we get into a little bit too much of a fixed mindset. Yeah. Or a narrow mindset in that. all we're trained to do is to play music, which is our primary.

I mean, I definitely feel like that's my primary sort of professional, you know, function on being on this planet. But when you start to look at the skills that you get from that and start to say, wait, where else could these apply to? I think that sometimes we sell ourselves short as musicians. Certainly, you know, going into education and things like that, that's sort of a natural. But I think even beyond that, it's very exciting when we look at the flexibility especially in terms of mindset

that jazz sort of gives us built in. I mean, no great jazz improviser ever has gone into a performance situation, especially an extended kind of thing, and had any success when they're like, I'm going to be dogmatic, I'm not going to listen to others, I'm going to plan out what I'm going to do,

and I'm not going to adjust to the moment. So all these different kind of things, I tried to kind of pick those things out and make a few parallels. And just talk about how I use some of those for Open Studio. Yeah, it was great. That whole day, Tuesday,

those were the kind of music business keynotes that were happening. We saw a bunch of good stuff, including YouTuber Rick Beato. Who? Yeah, we saw Rick's, and we got to hang with Rick a little bit and talk about, you know,

kind of what we're doing here at Open Studio and everything. Hang with him for a little bit. We had about a three and a half hour dinner with that gentleman, as I recall. We did, and it was really... We trapped him at that table. We physically did not let him get up.

It was so interesting. It was great to talk to him about his whole philosophy behind YouTube and music education on the internet, which he's obviously so prolific. at. Yes. Cool.

And that dinner, Koshan, shout out to one of the best restaurants of New Orleans. Absolutely. That place was. Koshan was killing. And they prepare me a beautiful plant-based off-the-menu meal that I kind of hid from

you guys because I wanted you guys not to realize. I didn't want to talk it up too much because I wanted every bite for myself, which I was able to pull all. It looked amazing. And if you don't know, Koshan is like a very meat, seemingly meat central. I mean, it is.

Meat, focus. Well, you guys all ordered Koshan. Yeah. And it was unbelievable. But I. But I was not surprised that what you had was killing because if you can cook like that and someone says just make me some plant-based stuff, it's going to be great. It is.

Yeah, yeah. No, it was cool. And Rick's talk was really good. I thought he was sort of talking about, I forget what the title was, but it was really about social media usage for jazz musicians. Yeah. That kind of thing. And he made some great points. I would just say one of them to highlight was that, you know, for, you know, musicians that think about, oh, I need a publicist.

If only I could afford a publicist, how do I get my stuff out there? And he said, the publicist now is social media, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, whatever the channel is. But we have these that are disposed. And I think the concept kind of being that, you know, it's still about the music. And, you know, we've all seen these musicians that spend, you know, 23 hours a day on social media and one hour a day per. I guess you got to sleep too. But, you know, the ratio of how much they spend on social media versus how much they're practicing is a little bit out of balance. but I think if you think about waiting for a publicist to kind of help you or a record label, whatever,

you do kind of miss the point of these tools being available. So if you can get that balance right and leverage these tools in a way just to find, not even to find fans, to put your music out there so that fans will find you, I think, was kind of his thing. And he did some great Q&A too. Yeah, his point about that, that social media can be your publicist, it hit me really hard. And then the point of like, you know, don't just put, hey, I'm playing. here tonight. Right. That's the only thing you post. I know. People want to see your creativity. As he was saying that I was

deleting all my hey I'm playing here tonight post. I feel like that's all I post sometimes. But you know what? I mean I do get a lot of people who even even though that's all I post they're like I don't know where you're playing. Right. So people don't see as much as you think they do. But I thought it was a really good point that show your creativity off a little bit. Yeah. You know, I thought he was mostly talking about Instagram at that point. I think it was a good point because it's such a short thing that you can do there. That was a great part of the beginning part of the conference. And then Wednesday we opened our booth at the exhibition. Yes.

We had so many, you'll hear our listeners come by and say hi. That was cool. I mean, throughout the whole conference. Right. That one guy slapped you. I don't know what that was about. Well, you know, I said some things that he didn't agree with about. Nice.

out to all of you who stopped by. Is that up yet? Oh, that's what's coming, right? Yeah, that's what's coming. So, man, that was so cool to do in front of a live audience. We've never done that before. Right. The first time.

We were a little nervous. We were very nervous. Yeah, we were like, oh, this can be easy. They had like a roundtable, like, oh, this is just like the pod cave. But when you have people right, and we were in kind of a small room, but it was packed. Yeah. So it was like, folks who were right there. Yeah.

And then what really made me nervous is sort of the first sort of joking we did or whatever got no response. but what I realize Yeah well yeah exactly But but you know You kind of feed off that energy of the audience Right I think we're used to that in terms of playing I mean not that you're waiting every phrase that you say or play

But it was so You know just nothing But then we sort of found out as we went People were afraid to make noise because they saw the microphones and they're like Oh you guys are doing this live recording They didn't realize how casual it could be So we stopped after the first episode And then sort of encouraged folks

Don't worry about making some noise And so then we've maybe we've Maybe we got funnier too. It's possible. It's possible. Yeah. So yeah, that was cool and that stuff will be up and available. But we really, we tried to just keep it to, I think we did.

We just kept it to regular episodes. Yeah. We didn't really change it up too much. Yeah, we did some funny things about Jen. Another highlights for me were the parkway. Oh, Parkway. Parkway, Po Boys. That was the highlight.

That was good. And hanging out. I noticed you took a very long nap after we went to Parkway. Yeah, about a two-day nap after that. That was crazy. and then seeing every single one of the 12 homes that Peter Martin lived in in New Orleans. How many places did you live in, man? I took them on a little tour.

If you knew how many you... I mean, you know, I was a struggling young jazz musician during those years, man. You got to move around, man. You got to stay ahead of the debt collectors. It felt like every block we turned, you were like, so we used to live there. Right when we first moved to New Orleans. You know what I mean? It was like, you lived in a lot of spots.

Yeah, but I'm telling you, we didn't even go to the West Bank. It was a couple places over there. No, we literally didn't cross the Mississippi, the Miss Hippie River. It's crazy. And what's crazy is here in St. Louis, you've lived in like the same place the whole time. I know. I know. Got sick of moving, yeah.

Man. Well, that's cool. Well, nice little wrap up. I think, you know, encourage folks to go down. Maybe you could just talk about that because I think a lot of people didn't understand, like, if they're not invited or part of an institution. Like, who would you recommend for folks thinking to next year to go to jam? Yeah. It's not for everybody necessarily.

It is kind of industry specific. If you just want to, if you just want to, if you just want to, network with other jazz musicians, especially if you're an educator. I know we have a lot of band directors that listen to this podcast. If you're an educator that wants to maybe get in on some of the latest jazz education innovations, there's a ton of like sheet music distributors. Right. And just meet other educators who are doing what you do and maybe get some ideas. It's one of those kind of conventions. Right. But you know what? Our friend, the great Peter Schlam just came down on a whim. He's a great musician. He's not an educator at all. Just came down to hang because Warren

Wolf is playing. and Stefan Harris was playing. Right, right. And it was, he was just kind of like hanging. You know, he knew that we would be there. And I think if you're the kind of musician who likes a good hang, there's a ton of good hangs. Yeah, and I think when we didn't go to a lot of the real sort of insider education

sessions, because we were either at the booth or doing our own things, but there was, I did talk to quite a few band directors that were really excited about getting ideas in the, and a lot of the sessions are short, like 30 minutes, some of them are an hour. But there'd be stuff like, you know, new ways to teach beginner improvisation over a blues and very specific things. And a lot of these great teachers really put a lot of thought. I mean, months of planning into presenting it.

It's kind of a formal way of sharing knowledge about how to teach improvisation and stuff and people get a lot of value out of those things. There was a ton of stuff like that. I mean, there was like a breakdown of Keith Jarrett solos. Like there was a ton of interesting things that you could have gone and seen, not to mention all the performances.

And a bunch of really good high school and college bands. Yeah, showcase. You almost have to kind of decide what track you're going to go on or you can get side. I mean, there's so many different things happening, but yeah, really good showcases. But then also like committee things and social things like, you know, the women and jazz committee. Right. Like a really interesting talk on pretty much anything that is jazz related, even on the political spectrum of things. It was really interesting.

Yeah. So, yeah, next year it is in Louisville, Kentucky. Right. Which is a great town. Great town. Not quite New Orleans. Not quite New Orleans, but hip. Yeah.

And so I might go, but I don't think if Pete go. Oh, I'm not invited? You're invited. How are we going to do the podcast live? I'd be shocked if you go. Ah, you see how that? A little reverse. Yeah, I'm trying to get to death.

Yeah, we're going to go. Well, until tomorrow, you'll hear it.