You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Jazz Musicians Play the Blues

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

It's another live edition of You'll Hear It where Peter and Adam take your questions. On this episode, Peter and Adam take a question on jazz albums where the musicians really play the blues.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.Tuesday's Open Studio Live Events (All Times EST):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Jazz Piano Method Live with Peter on YouTube8:00 PM - Listening Sesh with Peter and Adam on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet 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.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Annas. And you are listening and watching the You'll Hear a podcast. That's right. We are live on very serious. You threw you off there, didn't I? We are live on YouTube. And man, the pod suite just keeps getting nicer and nicer, Peter.

What are you doing in here? No, I mean, it's sometimes it's one step forth, it's two step back. 15 minutes before we started, we were four steps backwards. And then we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, as it were. And here we are. How's everybody doing out there? there's no I'm asking them

okay they're doing good okay cool what's up Colleen check this out see this one I'm talking about Adam look over there

so you can see that hey you can see Colleen happy holidays Colleen yep and okay there was a good

well by good I mean good joke on me I don't think it's a particularly great joke tell me what you think of that

oh oh Joe I'm gonna need some frozen peas for that burn aren't I Dang. You use frozen food too.

You know, the first, when Heather and I were first married, I used to use, like, bags of frozen corn. Yeah. And she was like, look at me like, are you crazy? What's wrong with you? For Savage Burns. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, man, come on. That's old school.

So, yeah, here we go. We got Zach's, Zach is in the house. Always good to see you, Zach. I love this, man. Happy holiday. My new favorite resident of Houston, if you know what I'm saying. No Future, No Passes. Pitch bin on a piano sound is a jazz crime.

There is something terrible about it. But you know what? I'm not going to ignore the fact that we're playing on Hammer 88s. Right. Are we, though? Yes, see, look at that. That's a couple of Hammer 88s. And look, do we see if we've got our little friend Cordy in the house?

Look at that. Oh, look at that guy. G7. You know that. Come on, man. You know that's a G7. What about this? Yeah, that's got it.

Why is it so oddly specific? Let me see if it makes this. Okay, so what does it call that? G7 shocker, that's good. What about this? So what would you call that? What would you call that? E flat over G.

Well, G and C. That means no chord. No chord that it knows of. Yeah, maybe kind of saying like an E flat major 7, sharp 5. But then as soon as you go there, yeah, flat 9, sharp 9, sharp 5, that's what we do it.

Peter, so play a little bit of that groove that we started with. It took me a long time to find where you were in here. I threw your little curveball because you're at a manous, you deserve them. Was it? So that we're just doing a step up to four. So my initial thought is, all right, we're in 12, right? Oh, were we hearing it? So I was going, one, two, two, three, it was in three.

Oh, no, well, I think I was doing it in four. Yeah, I think you were doing it in four. I was doing it in three. We matched up about 30% of the time. But do you know what? I love playing like that when it's not like, I am in four, I am scared. You know. Yeah, yeah.

I thought you were talking about this chord. This is like that F-13 sauce. I heard the harmony. I just couldn't find where it was. I know. I was like, wow, Adam's just dropping beats. That's all good.

It is a pandemic. I thought for sure you were in two, a three. One. No, it was one, two, four. That's kind of like 12-8. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a different 12-8 than you. That explains why I was having to count five beats and then come in with that walk-up.

I was like, oh, okay. Well, fun fact, for many years, I thought, well, play walking for me. Play the way you hear walking. You know, like with the bass, like, do, be, de. Oh, the, yeah. This is where I always thought it was.

Oh, sorry, go ahead. Play that again. One, two, D. With a wrong key. Oh, you thought it was, like, reversed. Still on two and four, but, isn't that start on the? Yeah.

because it's done yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah don't even like I still can't I still can't come in on Herbie Hancock's Manchild album hang up your hangups I still yeah yeah it takes it takes a full two minutes before I'm like there's one yep but those are the things like once you get to the point where you yeah you know once you get to the point where you can kind of like accept that you're going to be in a nebulous zone that you're going to be in the groove but you have no idea where one is. Because remember how it was always like, where's one?

I don't want to come in. Like, I would always be so afraid. Once I was like, who cares? Let me just play the groove. I mean, like we played all that stuff

at the beginning and we were never at the same one. Well, like it turns out. About 30% of the time. Oh, I didn't even know that. I didn't even know that. So that was good.

Oh, well, it's where we are excited today to be back in the glory of the pod suite. And look at us. Look at us all there. Sean Jones is still here. Christian McBride.

Adam Manus, Peter Martin, the Plexiglass, the sneeze guard. The case numbers keep going up. We're going to have to get this. This is going to have to just be a sneeze guard with a separate entrance. I know. You're going to have two doors. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But we're glad to be here and I hope everybody's having a great holiday season, as it were. This is the holiday season, right? Agreed. Yeah. This is, I was corrected. I called out too many holidays at the concert the other night. I said, Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah.

Happy Kwanza. Happy Festivist. That was all correct. But then I went one. step further and said, happy Ramadan. And I got a text message from my sister right after the show. She's like, great show. By the way, Ramadan's in April. I was going to say, is it Ramadan in the spring? Yeah, eternal spring. I screwed that one. It's eternal spring. It's an early. It was an early. It was an early shout out. We like to be inclusive here at Open Studio. But yeah, it's an exciting time.

We, those of you that were, I'm just so excited because you can see, you can see what's happening up there. So I'm like right there. It's right there. It's right there. Yeah. We have a new monitor in here. You can't see it. But for us, it's exciting because we can actually see what you guys are seeing. So like if I go, bam,

we know that, right? And if we come back here, it's all good. I'm going to throw one question and then we're going to get to our check-ins because we have a special request from one of our listeners and friends who I actually just met up with IRL, as they say. But I'm going to throw this question in their first.

Look at that. That's our buddy Pickingstone. What is the best album where jazz musicians really play the blues? they're not as convoluted. Oh, wait. There we go. What's been saying,

jazz really even play the blues. I've had an ear on Ray Brian, but Oscar Peterson has to be up there. That in his early at jazz is essentially blues. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, pretty much anything Louis Armstrong ever recorded, prior to 1940, you could kind of consider early blues and jazz record.

I don't know, Alex, man, I don't like to... It's hard for me not to... to listen to something like a Love Supreme and not say that that's a pure blues album. You know what I mean? Yeah. I hate to be that guy, but I don't wanna categorize it into,

I mean, what are you talking about? Like Muddy Waters style or Robert Johnson style? Yeah. You know, like this is just all like a pure blues album. Yeah, I mean. I feel like it's a little bit, we're a little bit trying to put a box around something that doesn't need it.

Yeah. I think one thing about this question that is interesting though, I was like to say, okay, we know blues is like just a primal element of jazz, like probably the most important building block, not just of jazz, but of almost all popular music, so-called pop popular music of really the 20th, like the late 19th century onto today. I mean, it's one of the most influential forms and styles and genres.

And it's beyond a style and genre. I mean, it's like a, it's a cultural phenomenon, the blues in the way that, I don't know what you can't really compare it to anything else yeah so jazz is one style or genre that has drawn heavily upon blues so it's it's maybe heavier than any others I mean you look at rhythm and blues rock and roll of course yeah very influenced by the blues but jazz as well so I think any kind of album the best we never can that's like saying what's the best saxophone album of you know who's better sonny rollins or city bichet or john coldre I can tell you a great a couple of great albums is when great jazz musicians

make a concerted effort to thematically feature interpretation of the blues. So Coltrane plays the blues comes to mind. For sure. That's a great record and they're really playing the blues,

of course. Yeah, yeah. Your reference of Lewis Armstrong, I would say on West End Blues kind of the prototypical, you know, the prototype of jazz musicians funneling and channeling the blues

into a modern, I mean, yeah, into a modern jazz format and then being the kind of rocket ship that other jazz musicians, especially trumpet players, but every soloist since then has channeled the blues form and more importantly, the blues sensibility into jazz as an authentic element, not as like, let's get bluesy, man.

Yeah, yeah, from a real cultural standpoint. Yeah, from the same vein. I think I get what Alex is saying here. Yeah, I mean, in that regard, it's hard to say, you know, all of the great records, it's hard to say they're not super-influenced by the blues or great blues. I see this is where like when you put these labels on it it's like well what's the you know what's the best blues it's hard to I don't know yeah I feel like every art Blakey album from the late 50s could qualify there's shuffles you know what I mean like the feeling is there Oliver Nelson blues in the abstract truth is a is a large ensemble album yep that captures that really well I mean we're gonna go large ensembles pretty much anything count Basie did could probably be something yeah I mean just you know

makes me feel that way. So that's hard to say. It's hard to say. I mean, I think of that. Ornette, like lonely woman. Oh, yeah. Shape of Jazz. That whole record is so blues infused, I think.

So, cool. All right. So that was just a little prelude to a question to wet your appetite for the coming segment of wet of expertly answered and digestible nuggets of information that are going to be flying at you soon. from my brother Adam and myself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But first, bam, I'm going to give you some new,

we got theme music now for the practice check-in. You want to hear it? Sure. Because we're doing practice checking. It's time for the practice checking. We're checking in right now. It's time for the practice checking, because if we don't check in, we're doomed.

Wait, wait. I just put that up. How could you have now, and then if you don't check in, we're going to check out. You got to. Oh, yeah. You teed yourself up and then you were like, we're doomed. I'll give you the changes.

You give me the voice on that one. Okay, hold up. Here we go. I'm going to feature you up here. Okay. I forgot what your lyrics were, though. You can do your own, see? Oh, man.

It's time for to practice checking. It's me checking in today. It's time for to practice checking. You do? If you do or don't. No, you had the other part of that. Come on, man. You put me on the spot.

Okay. Practice checking. This is actually answering the question about what's really the blues. This is not really the blues. That's really not. It's time for the blues check in and you ain't going to find it here. Okay. Anyway, I was just kidding.

We don't have theme music. We don't got time for that. Practice checking. You'd be great at it, though. Listen to that. How was your practice this week? Practice this week was awesome. But I want to talk about, I had a great phone call this morning.

morning with our friend Brian Fielding, who I think is on here watching right now. We talked about just kind of like what we need as practisers. And we were talking about motivation a little bit. And so I think we've got a good idea going here for maybe a feature for Open Studio members of doing, you know, kind of a practice, like kind of a support group or like a practice group where we can get together and kind of talk about our week of practice. It's kind of what we do with our practice check-in, but where then the expert practisers, i.e. me, you, people who can practice can kind of help guide our members into how they can set up their week of practice routine, like to kind of really like get down to not just like, what are you practicing and like what

scales are you working on? But like, so you only practice like twice this week. What was going on? You know, like what was happening in your life? It's like, well, I was trying to practice late at night, but my kid was sleeping. And it was like, oh, okay, well, is there any, is there any, possible way you could try to like set a new routine where you get up in the day like things like yeah trying to get you motivated or like uh i practiced twice but i just kind of you know i was just like just playing the same old stuff i always play you know uh just blowing over solar for 20 minutes and then i stopped you know and then we can kind of guide them through well okay maybe this week let's let's let's focus like you know five minutes at least at the start at something that you don't know how to do

yet yeah stuff like that yeah yeah i mean i think that practice This is always, you know, I think the more we learn the different sort of faces and facets of practice, the more we can hopefully get to that point where we can make adjustments to our routine and kind of call audibles as we going, you know, no matter what kind of plan we have. And we've all been those times when we're super inspired. A lot of times at the beginning of the year, it's like, okay, I'm going to really map out my practice for January or for the first quarter or whatever. and then get to that point where, you know, we can be very productive in our practice. And I think that's important.

But to be able to call an audible and to have some really fun and fulfilling practice, like that intersection of just passion for music and inspiration, but within a practice format, that's where the goal lies. Now, we can't do that every day, I don't think. It's kind of like if you're a composer, like, I'm going to write a masterpiece every day. Well, if you can do it every day, then it's not really a masterpiece now, is it, right? No, it's not. I need to practice on my, uh, my,

improvising theme music. That's going to go on my list this week. Being able to sing a theme to any selection we have. Okay, well, we're going to do it for each of the segments today. It's going to be trial by five. Fitness, fitness, I love fitness, up and down.

Woo-hoo! Okay, so, no, what I was going to say, that one of my most joyful things of practicing list last week was actually a little bit practicing performing, which we've talked about before. But for the Friday Shelter and Place concert,

we actually played with your group, but to a recording. So in having to kind of get it lined up where I could play it in real time, it was streaming, it was a bunch of ordeals with that. So I kept listening to the tracks, but also I wanted to be able to play something.

And I don't know if you notice, I pulled the piano out with our friends at Anytune. More from Anytune a little bit later. I didn't even notice that until, like, the second tune. And I was like, there's no, where's the piano?

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. And that's a great attribute of our our longtime sponsors, any tune where you can pull out. I mean, it depends on like how it's recorded and stuff and it seems to be easier to pull out vocals. I'm not even a master doing it. But anyway, you did it though. Yeah. I was, I did some practicing on like kind of, I was getting so excited because I felt like I was playing with you guys. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. Like even though it's a one way thing, I hadn't listened to the recording in a long time. And the sound was really good in the headphones and the piano was sounding. good and it was just fun. It's like, wow. Maybe I'm more inspired by that now because I'm doing so little playing with other musicians. So to be able to hear that, like, doong, decong, I was like, yeah, okay, I don't have to play the baseline. I can just float on top of the baseline. Is it going to feel great to play with the rhythm section again? I know. I've done it a couple times now just like separate rooms and studios. Yeah. Even that, man. Right. Feels really great. And I mean, that's probably sort of, in a lot of ways is the equivalent of this playing, because I mean, you guys could have been in separate rooms playing.

I did a session. We made a little recording for our buddy Jeremy Davenport. Yeah. Christmas recording for him and his daughter to sing over his Christmas song. I saw that. Yeah, I haven't heard it yet. Really, really fun.

But we're, you know, Sam at Shock City is getting levels and they have to like cut in because we're just playing for like 30 minutes. You know, me and Montez and Bob are just playing and playing and playing. All right, well, we're ready to go guys.

I'm like, oh, shoot, we almost out of time. That's fun. Speaking of that, I was even going to see if I could pull it up on here, but I don't know if it's going to come a little Christmas recording that's

going to be dropping later today, I think, from Diane Reeves' family. Oh, yeah. If we got that together. Nice. It's trying to get together. It's flowing around somewhere here. Okay.

I'm just throwing it out there. It's not ready yet. It's not ready yet, though. Boom. Cool. Yeah, so that was a part of my practice that was fun. It's like sometimes it's fun to practice something,

and I was practicing for a specific purpose, but just to enjoy it. Okay, can we have a little fun while we practice? Is that allowed? You know what I'm saying? Absolutely.