You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Let's Fact Check an Online Tutorial - #32

Episode Date: March 3, 2018

Peter and Adam fact check an online jazz piano tutorial. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manus and I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to fact check an online tutorial. I've been looking forward to this episode all week. That's right. Now, I'm not even sure if we're allowed to do this, but we're going to do it. Well, let's not mention the actual website or tutorial we're going to fact check. So I shouldn't say anything about Wiki How? Wait, should we be encouraging people the fact check online tutorials when we make so many of them?

You know what? We're not going to say exactly. You know what? Fact check us. That's right. That's how we're going to get away with this. Apparently there's some kind of website called WikiHow, and they've got some stuff.

I mean, I don't want to send you right to it, play-hyphen jazz hyphen piano. If you find it, you find it. But we're gonna go through, because when I stumbled upon this, I was like, eh-uh, and you know what people should not be putting out bad information. I mean, I guess they're trying, let's just take it step by step. All right, well.

Okay, how to play jazz piano? Jazz is an art form, okay, so far, correct, fact. Yeah, that has grown from its blues origins to draw influences from just about every genre of music there is. That's kind of true. For the beginner, though, it's perhaps best to focus on early swing and learning to improvise. Okay, now, already, we're getting, no, it's not, you don't focus on early swing. What is it? I don't even know what that is. Here's a pretty easy way to get going. Well, the verdict's out on it. That's factual or not. Why don't you take number one

that they've got here? Number one is listen. Now, this is actually, this is really good. If they had left it at that one word, yes. Yeah. So find as many recording. is you can get your hands on. Don't discriminate. Listen to the old greats like Art Tatum account Basie and Thelonius Monk. All good, as well as up-and-coming pianists of today. But I have a problem with don't discriminate because, of course, don't discriminate in the workplace for legal reasons, but you should be very discriminating when you're starting out in terms of like how to play jazz because you can get overwhelmed, you can listen to the wrong stuff. Yes. You can kind of get stuff out of order. And it's not to say there's one way to do it,

but early on you've got to be even more discriminating than later. I agree. And I think I think what it should say instead of don't discriminate is to find the musician that you like. That is what's going to make you progress fast. It's to find the player that speaks to you when you're starting out so that you mimic them and you want to keep going and that you want to keep practicing. Okay. Now they've got number two, step number two, assuming you already know some very basic theory, first learn all 12 major scales. Okay, now I got a big problem with this for being step number two because, you know, for most instruments, really for all instruments, learning all the major scales.

Learning all the major scales, of course that's important, but you don't have to do that to be able to start to play jazz. And it's certainly not on the assumption that you already have some basic theory. I mean, you could learn how to play jazz and get the theory later. In fact, I prefer doing it that way. And in my jazz piano for beginners, quick plug there,

course, it's all about you can play the instrument a little bit, but you jump right into the actual essence of learning to play jazz, as opposed to saying you have to have basic theory. It's this whole kind of outmoded, outboded, outdated thought process of you learn, you know, to read and write and the theory and the grammar before you learn to speak. It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense, not with an art form like jazz.

It's, if you start theorizing too early, you're going to lose, you know, your sense of direction. You're going to not be, frankly, you're not going to be very inspired to play the music when you're, well, I guess I can't start learning this until I have all 12 major, you know, scales under my fingers. It's like, or you could just, you know, play the song you like to still play. That's right. I mean. Right. Okay, so now number three, make sure you can read music and play some basic stuff even if it's not jazz. Well, okay, maybe, but that's what, we're on step three, and we're already talking about not playing jazz. Peter's starting to get worked up now. I'm getting mad now. You're going to tell me how to play jazz and say, go learn some other stuff and learn

how to read music. I mean, maybe you can already read music. That doesn't mean you can play jazz. Maybe you can't, but you can still learn to play jazz, and you can learn to play read music also, but that's really a separate skill. Yeah, there's some, I mean, there's some really famous jazz musicians who skip step three here. That's right, right. And I mean, you know, I'm a little bit biased, too, because I grew up, even before I was playing jazz, I first learned to play music in the Suzuki method on a violin and then on the piano.

And I started so young, well, it wouldn't have matter if I started so young, but you don't learn how to read first because we think about music as a language. In the same way, could you imagine teaching a little baby, you know, instead of saying, say mommy, say, say, mommy, say, look at this page, spell mommy, but don't say it. it. And then after you learn the theory of how to spell it, then you learn how to say it. It's just, it's whack. Right. The quickest way to learn French is to move to Paris.

That's right. That's right. Okay, oh, this, you might want to take this one because I'm not, I already don't like this. Number four. It's number four is this, yeah. It's by a songbook of one of the masters. Cole Porter, Gershwin, etc. Make sure that the chord symbols are guitar tabs are written above the melody.

the melody like D flat minor seven. So again, it's trying to pull you, yeah, I mean like one of the hardest chords. It's just to try to kind of, you know, it's, they're trying to diminish you and say, do you know what this means? If not, you shouldn't even be at step four. And it just isn't true.

I feel like this whole thing was written by a sheet music publisher. Well, it probably is. And this is the problem with getting information on the internet, but I mean, by a songbook of one of the masters. Yeah, of course Cole Porter and Gershwin are masters. But you're not gonna learn how to play jazz.

Like that's actually a very, advanced skill to be able to read out of a songbook of the masters and play it as jazz. I'd be able to interpret those chords and it'll just totally confuse and I mean it's kind of like you know learn how to play basketball get a basketball and then go dunk it you know yeah maybe but more likely than not you've got a few steps in between okay um how many steps we got here because I'm we're only on four oh man of course all right we're not going to make it we're let you peruse these on your own because it goes up to 14. It's 14.

Oh man, we can't do all these. Let's pick a good one now. Okay, okay, let's go here. So we got, oh, again, so obviously this is, yeah, learn a major seventh, one three, five, seven, the minor seventh, dominant seventh, that's actually not bad, but then they say in every key. Like that's hard to do, like you're gonna wanna,

you know, go baby steps. Learn a blues that's got three cores instead of trying to learn to play in every key. Oh, you're not gonna like number six then. To reward your hard work, pull out the songbook. Yeah, just to, further frustrates yourself, pull it out and hang yourself with the songbook. Even though it probably sounds horrible, practice for long enough and you'll sound more and more like what's written.

Okay, the whole written thing is a little weird. Yeah. Next, learn quarter bird. No, you can't learn quarter of birds because you still don't really know chords. I mean, because you're so stuck in the theory and then the pentatonic scale step nine. There's certain, okay, I think we can stop here. I think we've debunked this WikiHOW. I mean, look, this is just to say that,

Look, there is some good information in there. Yeah, the first one, the listen. The listen wasn't too bad. But, you know, if anything, if you get anything from this episode of the podcast, first of all, you can take away that Peter and I are very aggressively discerning about what we consider to be online jazz education. But also, you should be as well. You know, you've got to wade through a lot of this stuff to get to the good stuff. And don't listen to everything.

Everybody says, even us. Exactly. No, no, no. And go with kind of like some proven messaging. and techniques, and I would say, if anything, you know, what we really believe in is a certain simplicity in the approach of this music. Because that's where the beauty lies, you know. And it's just like if you want to learn to draw or if you want to learn to paint. It's like learn color theory and then pick up a paintbrush.

Well, maybe, or maybe you'll lose your mind by the time you do that. Yeah, this has had a tried and true way of being passed down from generation to generation for over 100 years. years now and, you know, try to learn it the right way. It's really easy to do. Just figure out how the good people learned and learned that way. Yeah, and I mean, another thing that I'm not crazy about in this air quotes tutorial is the fact that the blues is hardly mentioned in here. And that's such a foundational part of this music. And it's one of the simplest forms. And it's a form that most people already know, even if they're not jazz musicians. It's ingrained. Yeah, that's the thing that kind of pull. I mean, it's like you're going to

go out and learn how to run, well, you know how to walk already, so let's use that as your foundation for just moving a little bit faster. So, you know, I would just encourage everybody find, if you want to learn how to play jazz, don't pick up any kind of system that's going to overwhelm you or send you on a lot of rabbit holes that you don't need to go on, find a simple system with proven results. That's right. That's it for today's episode of You'll Hear It. We'll be back tomorrow, but if you need more information, you can go to you'll hear it.com.