You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Kenny Kirkland's Sound

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

Peter and Adam take questions on a variety of topics today, including whether or not Kenny Kirkland's sound has any cliches, how to stretch before practicing, and communication during duo performances.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.Monday's Open Studio Live Events:1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)4:00 PM - You'll Hear It Live on YouTube6:00 PM - Bass Guided Practice Session with Bob DeBoo 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.

Okay, let's get to some questions. We've got some good ones here. Dan says, he kind of mentions our play like a great series, which we started a little bit with Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans. Just towards the top here, I want to get this up here. Towards the top. He says, does Kenny Kirkland have any cliche melodic devices, rhythms, chord voicings, etc. Et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that just jumps out, I mean, Kenny Kirkland for a rhythmic device is the, what are the, What do they call it? Is it five rhythm? You know, when it's like one, two, three, four,

where you're playing one, two, three, four, bomp, pong, can, it's called five rhythm, I think, because it's one,

two, three, four, five. So bompon, bon, funk, can, can, punk. It goes into a cycle of five, even though you're playing in four-four,

although actually you can do it in any meter, but you can learn it in four-four, so it's a cycle of five. So like, if you were to go 20 beats, you'd be five bars of four, or four cycles

of the five rhythm, because the, What is that called? The Helio or something? Called Elio Alves. Alves. So that's something that he liked to do. You could hear him in the comping,

especially, you know, kind of, well, I mean, his whole, all the time when he played it. He brought it to just kind of everything that he did. Then there's also the seven rhythms, which is like still bass in four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four. And these like actually work better when they're not in the actual meter like of five or seven. They're kind of corny when they're in seven. So if you're like one, two, d, four, five, six, seven. One, two, deep, five, six, seven. Then it just becomes a clave in the rhythm. Exactly. And it forces you to play on the one of every bar.

Whereas the beauty of this, the five, the seven is they keeps you out of that for at least five, five bars in four. four or seven bars if you're doing it in four over the seven rhythm. So that's one that jumps out to me for Ken. Yeah, harmonically and melodically, I mean, he has that angular fourths, certainly out of someone like Chick-Korea or Herbie Hancock in that sort of school, that modern school. Yeah. But there's nothing that's jumping off as like cliched Kenny Kirkland because he wasn't

a cliched player. I mean, there was no, like he was, you could tell him, I would say, you know what, the most signature thing he had was a sound. His touch and his sound and the power and the attack that he produced was very singular, which is, as we talk about, that's a tough thing to do. It's a tough thing to pull off. To get a sound on an instrument that's essentially buttons is rough. Yeah.

And, I mean, you know, it was a lot of, you know, he was a highly melodic player, I would say, at all different temples. So, yeah, definitely not a cliche, but a stylistic thing was like you'd be hard-pressed to find, like that was a theme of his improvisation that it was constantly melodic and thematic based, you know, and everybody thinks that they play in that way, but he was very much

always taking a melody, a simple melody, and then developing it somewhere. So it became a theme and variations kind of thing. And that combined, like, a lot of rhythmic intensity in terms of like very much within the groove, not much of a floater above the groove, but like very much right in the group.

But because of his precision kind of time and groove playing could play with that beat a little bit before and you know bump but do you do you know like pulling back a little bit pushing ahead a little bit but very much within that groove

that only players that can really feel that groove I think can do so right down below that question is a question from Rich do you have any finger or arm stretches before you practice so Rich if you're if you ever come on to the guy to practice session. We do a few different things there, and these are really just kind of

coming out of the things that I like to do before my guided practice, for my own personal practice sessions. I like to make sure that I'm connected to my seat and to the, to the ground. I like to just like start. As opposed to levitating, you mean. As opposed to like slouching and having my feet, you know, this is my default posture. So I'd like to, the older I get, especially, the more I want to connect to the earth and to my seat and the instrument. So I just start at least with my feet flat on the ground and I make sure that I can sort of lift my heart to my chest. I might do the things that I like to do are like put my shoulders to my ears and do a five count, five, four, three, two, one. And then just kind of on an exhale, let everything fall down.

I mean, things you could learn in like yoga. And then also, a little yoga for the wrists, you know what I'm saying? This little exercise here of stretching, putting your wrists back and then turn. or forward and then turning. That to me gets me mostly where I need to go. And then a big deep breath and then I'm good. Yeah, the breathing. I mean, our friend Ruben Rogers is always great reminder for us for any instrument.

I think that whatever, there's a bunch of acts. Actually, we have some yoga for pianists. We're going to be doing some more of those videos with the lovely Kelly Martin. Oh, so good. On the, if you're a piano access pass member, you can find that in your, wherever it is, the dashboard. But she does, I mean, regardless of, and she has some really great specific. specific ones for the piano.

And it's funny because I was like, how did you develop this? Because she can't really play piano very well. She can't play at all. But the weird thing from her watching me play so much, she gets it. She gets it and she knows the problems, you know. And I'm not a great example. And I'm certainly not as good as you about thinking about the position. I've been trying to think about it more.

But doing the yoga has helped me and just like more the overall concepts of yoga I've been able to apply when I do things, which is like we, everything is in balance. For sure. Like, and both sides of you. It's so big. That's so big. It's so big and so important. And so, like, as pianists, that this can be such a problem because there's so many things inherent

to the instrument that force us out of that symmetry, right? That's right. So there's like when I, you know, exactly. So some of the general concepts of yoga about the balance. And I mean like the balance of everything. Like when I said lift your heart to your chest right there. Yeah. As I do that, I think about the grounding of the back body, right?

As the front part of the body lifts, I think about my tailbone, like, going down into the seat. Your ars. Exactly. So that everything, and it makes so much sense as we have to do, you know, this is not just a down motion here that we do, right? There's a lift to that key. Yeah. And so, as you know, a big part of someone's touch is not how they press down, but how they come up. Right.

And that could be the difference between having really good technique and not. You could come down all you want. but if you can't get up. So thinking about the balance and how everything has a counter. So if you're going down, something's coming up. If there's any energy going this way, there needs to be a balance that way.

Like all of that, I think, is very good to think about. Yeah, absolutely. That's great stuff. And I think that, yeah, and the other thing is just to remember that there's symmetry of both sides of our body. So, like, I've done some things that are, I think, are really good.

If you would have combined them, actually with what you showed for before and then the breathing and then think about perhaps a stretch and you want to just be very careful and deliberate about this but if you go and like as you're seated at the instrument if you if you do your neck and you look around and then when you get to the point certainly before pain and then you come back with you're very deliberate and then you do it on the other side like that can start to get you into the kind of mode as you practice that every part of your body we don't think of our head and our neck as as connected with what we're playing as obviously our hands our arms and our shoulders but the more we get up there and then as you say

to your to your butt and down into your legs and everything the more we realize everything that'll keep us from doing things where like we might tense up here and then we're like oh like that's relax and then the tension all of a sudden is up here yeah and we're relaxed there we want to have everything connected so you want to take you know stuff with your feet obviously we're using the pedals and stuff too, every part of your body as much as you can when you do that stretch and on both sides of the instrument. And one more thing on this, Rich, as you go through this, remember that this is a practice and that this is for us even always changing and we're always tweaking and depending on where

we are with our bodies. And I know everybody is thinking about, you know, changing this kind of idea of how my body works with the instrument. So don't get frustrated if like you don't get, you know, perfectly still and balanced at first or you don't do the right warm-up you can't play, that's crap. Like, just take what you can as you can, come as you are,

and you know, you'll develop. If you have an open mind to how you feel, like one thing that really changed was me thinking about my actual experience at the piano. Like, how do I feel? Do I feel good right now at this piano in this position? When I play here, when I do this, does this feel good?

Yeah. If you ask yourself that question and you honestly answer, you're going to come to, I think, a decent place. Absolutely. Because it's just like nutrition, exercise, anything. I mean, this is a physical endeavor. So we getting into that feedback loop with ourselves and being able to assess, it's almost like ear training. It's like body training. Just like ear training, we don't want to get to the ever, we want to elevate our ear training. We want to be getting better and improving, but we don't ever, we want to make it less and less conscious as we make the right ear training decision. Same things with our body. So that as we get into the moment where we definitely can't think about it, we're able to make those those those. those micro adjustments that's right you're just training yourself you're just training yourself this is great uh so right below rich rob has a great question can you let us in on some of the high level communication between you during the duo last week like when adam that's proprietary we cannot

like when adam said he heard peter doing going for a percussive approach on the intro to emotion and motion that's right we were i got asked this yesterday in the daily got a practice session they were very curious about how much of what we did was planned out uh how much was rehearsed or written out how much was improvised and I said almost none of it was planned out. We had, you know, a short text back and forth about what we were going to do. And then we had a short rehearsal before we actually played. But when it came down to actually playing the stuff, you know, as with, I think, most of the performances that we do, we left a lot of room for us to to make it happen. And so like with the intro to emotion and motion, which is a theme song to our podcast, we left it,

You know, we said, okay, let's do a little intro. We're not going to go right into it. Let's take our time and do a little intro. But that's all we really said. And then I heard you play something. So I muted a string and you heard that and you did something and it becomes a conversation. Yeah. And that's really the goal, I think, for any improviser is that you want it to be as natural and a smooth and seamless conversation between the people playing.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, in terms of calling it high-level communication to me that if we, and this is always something we're aspiring to, but you got to kind of know, well, you have to think about the parameters of it. To me, the high level communication when you're playing with anybody besides one person is like how do you make the connection

if it's a duo or if it's a quartet or a hundred piece orchestra, but how do you connect the circle with the audience and you? So if you're playing solo piano, it's you and the audience, but that should be like an unbroken energy field, as it were. If you're playing with the duo,

two pianos as we did, that we're making a circle, but we're not just high level communicating with each other only, that we're like having the conversation go, you know, all the way around the circle. So the higher the level,

I think the less planning there is. There has to be some. It can't just be like a total, well, it could just be a free for all in terms of like you're just creating something and you don't have songs that you're playing. But the closest you can get to say, okay, this is,

the skeleton that we know we can put a good set together, but don't take it any further than that. Then you're going to be able to have the most chance for improvisation. Otherwise, you could just write out arrangements and all that, and that's fun too. Yeah. But it's a different thing. It's a different thing. So the risk reward, you got to walk right up to that line.

And I think we did a pretty good job with that. There was some things where it was like, oh, we almost like we're having too much we definitely didn't over rehearse because we didn't have access. I mean, sometimes the situation will put you in something. Like we didn't have access to two pianos until two hours before the gig. Right. Because of the setup and we had to get a tuned and put. I mean, there's a lot of logistics involved even in here.

So you got to, you got to roll with whatever you can. But I think to try to get to the high level of communication, you've got to be listening even more. You've got to choose material that will hopefully rewards. Like, for instance, we couldn't do all things that neither one of us were super secure on if we want to hide. Like, if we're having to communicate with the music and just like, where am I at in the form? Yeah. So I was very appreciative that you even, you know, wanted to do.

that tune because I know the tune. I wrote the tune, although that's never a guarantee that you know it. But it's a hard tune. So, you know, you want to jump in on that too. But, you know, we played it together before, but it's been a year. So I proved that it was hard in that show. This is tough to play, man. But no, you're right. We chose tunes that at least one of us was like super solid on and can kind of like anchor it or whatever. But even then, it's like, you know, I think when it comes down to the, the nitty gritty of actually communicating things, you know, what's so great about playing with you is I know I can ask a question and you're going to have you're going to you're listening right that's that's really the key is there's just constantly listening constantly asking questions first of all having some agency to be like

and then I know that you're going to answer in some beautiful way of like oh where's that going to go right and that that's kind of a a question that ends your your answer and I can be like and then you'll respond like that's but we when you do that like you said in the structure of like a or in the in the in the context of a structure like in a even if it's just a sketch yeah especially one that you know pretty well then it becomes it comes it comes a beautiful thing become a really beautiful thing