You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Live From Instagram: Q&A (5/2/20) - Part 3

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Peter and Adam are going to be streaming live on Open Studio's Instagram every Saturday for the duration of the global health crisis. Here's the thrilling conclusion of last week's episode, and be sure to tune in this Saturday, May 16, for another livestream. To see the "All of You" solo analysis mentioned in this episode, use this link. And for the solo transcription, follow this one.On the calendar for Open Studio events today: at 1:00 PM EDT (and every day this week for members only) Adam continues his daily Guided Practice Sessions. And at 6:00 PM EDT, tune in to YouTube as bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr. host a Q&A based on their Open Studio course Art of Swing. To keep up on all the live events from Open Studio, check out this handy calendar - we're adding new events regularly so pop in to see what we've got in the pipeline.In light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.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.Let 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.

Hey, Peter. Hey, hey, where are you, man? Oh, you're inside my phone. What's up, man? Yeah, I'm always inside your phone these days. I haven't seen you in person and, well, it's been nice, actually. It's been nice. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Daily, music advice coming at you remotely, but all up in years. All up in yours. You know, I was joking about that. I would actually prefer to be doing these in our glorious pod suite that we designed, well, we didn't have anything to do with it. We were in New Orleans. right, frouncing around town, working in many quotes as Dan and Andrew set up our beautiful Potsweet. I'd much rather be there with you, but it is nice to also just be in my dining room with you. Yes. And live on Instagram today, we have some questions. And also we have, we have like a prodigal, prodigal son. Prodigal son returns. Returns. We have a sponsor. And this is actually a

awesome sponsor that is super useful for our musicians who listen to this podcast. Well, yeah. And, you know, we rarely do sponsorships because we have such high standards around here. But we only, we only really involve ourselves with products that we love and or, and it's usually and that we think that our listeners may not know about, but we'll really get some benefit from. So most of the stuff, the music advice we talk about is just like freely shared.

You don't need to get anything. You've got your instrument or whatever. But this is a tool that we found streamlines the practice process. And it's such a delightful way. It's such a great piece of software. And it really enhances a lot of the ear training, the listening, the learning souls, a lot of the really core tenets that Adam, you and I share here at the You'll Hear a podcast. I mean, that's why the podcast is called You'll Hear It for Crying Out Loud.

Wait, I just figured that out. That was awesome. Yeah. And the sponsor is AnyTune. And it's an amazing app and browser app and mobile app. And it's just designed to break down music so that you can hear exactly what you want to hear. You can slow things down without losing pitch. You can single out instruments. There's a ton of other cool stuff that you can do with it. But just those two alone are worth checking it out. And you can get a free version.

Go to what is it, anytune.com? I think it's anytune.us. Anytune. U.S. But you know what? There's such a beloved sponsor. You think we'd know that, right? Well, we are just kind of throwing this out here as our first day back with Anytune.

We do love Anytune. We do. Oh, yeah. So it is. It's Anytune. dot us and um but you can also just go in the the uh the app store and yeah it's only available i believe still on the iPhone but that's okay because that's what's up yeah but also the mac version is excellent we've had a lot of phone it's a mac app actually for your computer it's amazing i've actually

this is one of our sponsors that i had this long before they were a sponsor and i'm so happy that they're they're now a sponsor the podcast okay so we still have some questions here we're live on Instagram. Join us every Saturday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Instagram and ask us your questions. We have one. We're going to start off here with Mitchell. Mitchell asks, I've been asking what are some people's favorite target notes in solo, e.g. 11th on minor chords. Maybe you just think of pretty notes to aim for, are you just playing what you hear? Thanks. Well, I'll start on this. So Mitchell, I think you had a question a couple days ago or a couple episodes ago about common tones. And I'll kind of say a similar thing here. What you want, you don't, I don't like the term target note used like this

where it's like there are good notes over the chords, right? What you want to do is form your relationship with your ear and with your hands and with the music that's happening for every diatonic note and even non-diotonic note for every chord you're going to play, right? So what does the fifth over C minor sound like? And what can that be used for? Because is the fifth or the 11th prettier. I mean, that depends on what's happening before and after and how good you are at setting that up. I feel like a really good musician can make any diatonic note sound great and make the quote unquote pretty notes sound even more beautiful, but you can make a boring note like the root sound pretty intense and great. So I would say think of it more like I need to develop my

relationship to each note diatonically on a chord, on any given chord. Right. So are you saying that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder? Would that be a summary? That's exactly what I'm saying. I wouldn't have a career without that to be the case. Yeah. I mean, I think that you nailed it there. And I mean, the only thing I would add is that we are, you know,

we're always wanting to do things in our practice where we start to be able to learn and memorize what so-called target notes are really just what different scale tones over different chords sound like. so that, you know, because there's anything is potentially an interesting target, you know, any of the 12 notes over any cord at the given the right time or not. But the main thing is just like, how do you, you know, develop a palette of knowing when to go to something and knowing when not to based upon what you want to say in your story at that particular time? It's like you've got this catalog of, well, you know, they used to have these like basement archives. I guess they still do somewhere for like paper products or like at a police station would have all their evidence, you know. And you'd go down there and be the guy or the gal that's like in charge and you'd say,

do you have anything from 1967 blah? They're like, ah, just a second. And then they go and they're able to just, they know right where to go. It's everything's archive there. And that's the way we want to think about being able to. The archivist. The archivist, right. The alchemist.

And so, you know, developing a knowledge of how all these different things sound and being able to just go and access them in real time is really was up. That's right. young Tony asked how to practice memorizing altered scales. I've noticed many dominant chords have so many shapes in common and ways to group them together for practice. I guess that's the question. So, I mean, first of all, you want to understand

the intervolic relationship between the different altered scales, whether that's the half-hole diminished or the altered scale itself or the Lydian dominant or whatever you're going to use on an altered, quote-unquote, dominant. a C7 altered means you use the altered scale generally. I mean, there's no like solid rules, no jazz beliefs are going to get you for anything. But it's kind of good to know the sort of standard versions of these before we deviate from them. So just understanding the intervolic relationships of the different kinds of scales you can use over dominant chords, I think is a way to start.

And would especially help with memorization. Memorization is just reps. We're just, we're all humans, we're all primates. it just takes seeing it and hearing it and doing it over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one little hack in a way that you can do with this is to try to learn scales, but it really could be anything or it could be anything that's pattern-based in music.

But we'll, you know, since you're asking about scales, but learn it in several different ways, the same scale. So that would be, you know, the altered scale. You would learn what the succession of notes is. for each of them, but also what the succession of intervals is as you go up, but then also find some, like maybe one or two or even three other ways to connect it with something that you already know. It's like pattern recognition.

So for the altered scale, I would say, you know, it's the same as a diminished half hole, and this is assuming you know what that is, maybe better than the altered. But, you know, instead of the sixth, the fifth and the sixth, you're substituting out because it's one less note, remember. You're substituting out. the note in between the fifth and the six, which would be the raised fifth. So it's the exact same scale as a diminished half hole, except you're subbing the flat at six or raised fifth for the fifth and the six. So it's just another way to hear and to visualize it and for it to feel.

And then what happens is, you know, for our brains, for a lot of us, if we can learn something in several different kind of ways, we've got more than one way to get there when we're thrown into a situation, you know. The crystal palace of memorization, absolutely. Bam. All right, Thomas Meyer keys. Crystal Meth Palace. Hey, that's my home turf. Thomas Meyer Keyes asked, hey guys, I've always heard that it's important to transcribe comping in addition to soloing.

It is. Is there any specific solos you'd recommend transcribing the comping underneath? I love, there's one track on, it's a Ben Webster album called See You at the Fair. It's from 1964. And there's like, you know, the Queens Globe is there or whatever. And he's smiling. But Hank Jones is playing piano. The second track in a mellow tone.

the way Hank Jones comps under Ben Webster on both the melody and a solo is just chess kiss. I think there's so much information in that, again, see you at the fair by Ben Webster, Hank Jones on piano, in a mellow tone. The whole record is great for comping, I think. You're going to get a lot of ideas. But that's kind of an easy one to hear, just the way the piano is sort of placed in the mix and the way Hank Jones comps, I think you could really get easily identifiable shapes for those chords. Yeah, that's great.

You know, one that just came to mind for me and I was looking because I think we did an episode. We'll link below to this. It's old school. We're not even in the pod cave yet. I'm looking at this on YouTube. We're in the pod room. We're all exposed at them.

We're all just out there, man, with the bad mics and everything. Oh, man. But we did a solo analysis of Herbie Hancock's solo on all of you from Miles Davis, live in Philharmonic My Funny Valentine record. That's a great solo. And I just happened to see this recently, and so they both came up. We're going to link to both these YouTube's below.

Somebody did, I believe this guy is from South Korea. He did an incredible transcription, and it's on the YouTube as it's playing on Herbie So on that very solo. And I remember, I mean, I wish I'd had this when I was a little teenage PD trying to, you know, pick that stuff off because you can really, actually, I'm glad I didn't because I had to learn it. But this is for you guys a good supplement. And it's a really well done. transcription as I remember I saw this a couple weeks ago and as is typical for something great on YouTube and it's only gotten 312 views so we're going to link to that

and you can see some of his concepts there which are great and then you can always go on a deep dive yourself to many other great similar Herbie Solos for comping absolutely can I say a question I know that you've got you got a question no no no no you're mystery I'm just going to do what we've been in the flow where I go first and you answer and then I'm looking at the next question but you should take the next one that's right don't give me our secrets don't give away our secrets

Okay, Rafi asks, I love this one because I'm going to just give a very simple answer. Rafi asks, I got into a jazz piano performance MM program. Should I go? Yes. No. Okay. So you say no, I say yes? I'm just being contrarian.

Yeah, yeah. Do what you want to do, Robbie. Yeah. You know what? Obviously, we can't give you definitive. That's the nature of Instagram. It didn't give you enough room to really explain things. So is MM is a master's program, I take it?

I believe it's Masters of Music, maybe. Yeah, Masters of Music. I would just tell you the criteria I would use to evaluate. You've got to decide this one for yourself, of course. Do not. I'll tell you a couple things not to decide it on. Don't just go because you got in, you know. Congrats for getting in, first of all.

But you have to make the kind of, there's always sort of a value proposition and not just the money. I mean, that's just part of it, obviously. It's important part. I mean, I got kids in college and stuff. It's crazy expensive. But the value proposition on your time, on your development. You know, like you don't want to just go because while I'm rich, I don't care about the money. That's fine.

But what about like is that situation like what's going to be required of you and is that going to be beneficial to you in the long term as a musician? And if so, then you look at some other things. It's going to be a cool social situation. Are you going to be able to network with people? So if you start seeing some affirmatives in those areas, then I would say go. Something that you know, those are good criteria to decide it on. deciding on like well I'm going to have a master's degree when I get done and I'll have this piece of paper that's great but it's not necessarily it depends on what you're going to do if you want to be a performing

musician it's maybe not going to be that valuable because usually when you show up at the bandstand or even show up to audition for an orchestra or something they're not going to really care if you have a master's or anything but if you want to go and get a cool teaching gig or whatever it can become very important so you're going to but you still want to balance it with like is it going to help you develop am I going to get the paper And is it a pleasant situation to be in? That's a great, great answer. And I agree with all that.

Okay. We probably have time for one more question here for our episode. Let's go to That Boy, Tom. Have you guys ever composed a tune out of a transcription or a single lick? So I'll go deep on this because I would actually say that a majority of the songs that I've written and the compositions that I've written have been directly inspired by something that I was listening to at that time. I can think just offhand, I once wrote a song for Aaron Bodie, the singer and friend of ours, just on hearing one line of a Willie Nelson song.

Like the melody did this thing where it went up an octave and I was like, oh, I can do, I can hear something on that. I wrote a 442's piece just this past year where I was listening to some Philip Glass and just one second happened and I was like, a Philip Glass. I was like, I want to write a whole thing just around, I have an idea on that whole, just that one second. I wrote a song, a pop song once based off of a show. Schubert chord change. You know what I mean? That it just was inspiring to me. Anytime that I'm

feeling inspired by something I'm listening to, it usually wants to come out right away in my own voice somehow. Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty much, I think, the same. Although I always get into the situation where I'm getting inspired. I think I'm coming up with this great idea for a tune, which a lot of times for me will be, you know, a melody that can be built upon. But sometimes it's already kind of a combination of a melody and some harmonic movement. I'm like, man, I love this. I've never, you know, and it's something that I feel like I've never played before. And so I'm always excited because I'm like, man, I have so many ideas.

I got these notebooks everywhere with ideas that I still have in development. Like, this is cool. And I'll start working on it. And then kind of slowly as I'm working on, I was like, wow, I've never heard this. Wait, I think I have heard this. And then I think about what have I been listening to? I'm like, well, it's probably sounds sort of like something. This is Billy Jean.

Yeah, exactly. And then it'll be so obvious. I was like, woo. I mean, to the point of it being possible lawsuit, I'm like, okay,

can't work on that too. I mean, it just, you know, it gets in your ear. So I think, you know, for some,

you know, sometimes I've, I've had done a few of these, like, kind of larger commissions over the years where you really have to write a lot at a certain time. You can't just wait to be inspired.

And I found it those times, it's, for me, it's easier to not listen very much at all during those times. Because I just get too much sucked into hearing stuff I like and then regurgitating it when I think I'm being created. And so to kind of get a void, kind of a white space area that you can just kind of be forced to just create, but to really pull something out of you. I don't think there's anything wrong with what we're talking about.

And it's a natural part of, I mean, you look at the greatest composers ever. You can see where they directly stole, not even talk about borrow influence, you know. So that's just a part of the creative process. And I mean, nature and music and all this stuff, it's all out there for us to take and use and mold and share anyway. But I do think it's important for people that want to compose. just to think about the different situations in terms of how much they're influenced by what they're hearing

versus pulling something out of you. Absolutely. Thank you, everybody, for the questions today. Join us next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. Open Studio Instagram live at 2 p.m. Eastern. We are sponsored by AnyTune. Check out AnyTune in your app store

either on your iOS device or your browser. It's an amazing resource for any musician. We should all have it because it just makes listening to music better and transcribing music way easier. Yeah, so check that out. And one thing we like to talk about any tune

because Adam and I use it had a lot of fun with it. It's got a huge amount of features, but you can kind of slowly discover them as you go. You know, it's like having a relationship with somebody long term. At first you're like, oh, I like her so much because she makes me laugh. And then, oh, she's actually really smart.

And, you know, you don't have to learn it all the first day. And you shouldn't be intimidated, but it'll be fun for us in these little sessions just to highlight some things. And one thing I was thinking about since we're talking about transcription, it has on the desktop, the Mac app version of it, the ability to basically get rid of everything except the one instrument you want to hear when you're transcribing. Yeah, it's awesome. And it's some next level stuff. And so we're talking about the Herbie Hancock solo, whatever.

This is a way when, yeah, we want to hear the music altogether. But then when you want to isolate out just the piano and hear just that left hand or whatever, it's going to really open up some doors for your jazz, your personal progression in this. music is you're going to be able to hear with the kind of clarity that hitherto was not available to us. Hither, dither to. Come on, hither to the dither. Schnizzle. Thanks. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

And check us out tomorrow. Until then, you'll hear it.