You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Motivation Station

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Peter and Adam answer a Speakpipe question about finding the self motivation you need to make music and stay engaged with your interests!Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Adam. Yes. Take five just for the record. You always do this where you count the takes off. Because I take it as a challenge. Like, you know, the more that we do, the harder it is to really nail things. So I'm just like, you ready to up your game? Because I screwed up the last take.

We're going to find out. Yeah, we're going to find out. Let's get free. Let's get free. I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you listen to the You'll Hear podcast. Jazz.

Explained. Explained today. Take five of our attempt. We love the song. and we love the number of takes. That's your song, man. No, take five. Oh, take five.

Scooby-doo-d-hoebe-heap. Scoop, scoop, scroop, scroop. Yes, this is take five. You know what? We keep doing them because each take just gets better and better. It's like a fine wine. It's like a fine wine gets better and then it goes downhill. It's like whenever I'm in the studio and we get like five burning takes of like a nine-minute

song. I'm like, let's keep going, guys. We could do better. We could do better. Everyone loves that. Have you noticed it? It's always when it's your sense. session, you want to keep doing more takes.

You keep thinking, oh, no, it can get better. When you, you have such a non-objective view of things. You're an infinite well of energy. But when you're on somebody else's session after like the first or second take, well, that sounds great, man. As soon as you feel like you've played a good solo. Exactly. You're ready to move on.

Nothing's worse, too, than when you feel like you really nailed it. And the leader is like, let's do another one. You're like, oh, that was the one. Exactly. That's when you sidle up to the engineer and you're like, save that solo. Are we on the grid on this one? If we're even close to the tempo, put that piano solo.

That's right. Here's a honey. He's a honey on the side. Absolutely. But today we're talking about something that none of this matters. Yeah. Actually.

Yeah, that's not true. But we're going to talk about that. And that is free jazz. Yeah, we have a question here from Erica, speak pipe, a voicemail. By the way, if you want to leave us a voicemail, go to you'll hear it.com and ask us your question. That's you'll hear it.com to ask us your question.

Just leave us a voicemail like Eric did. And this is kind of a good time. Don't be shy. Come out of the shadows. Stop creeping around. Stop being a lurker. We love the lurkers, but this could be your big chance to engage because we've been on kind of a role. Give me some butter.

I'm a roll. I'm from the Borch belt. No, but we've been on a little bit of a role with answering the speak pipes recently. We don't always do that. We're not going to. We're not going to. We're not going to. Here is Eric's question about free jazz.

Hi. This is Eric from Oakland, California. long time listener to the podcast and to Open Studio, a long-time member. I've been playing free jazz since I was a kid, and now I've been doing it for years. You know, I've been at it for a while. I love doing it. The musicians I play with seem to have a good time doing it, though a lot of times nowadays I'm doing it solo. But it's very hard to connect with anybody about it, any audiences.

And that's fine. I get it. People don't love that. I'm the only person to have encountered that. You know, a lot of people have found that their audiences don't follow them where they want to go. But how do you keep yourself motivated when you're doing something that's just really outside the marketplace or even outside audience receptivity? I find that I just love doing it, but it'd be great to have some external motivation.

Talk to you later. Well, great question, Eric. Peter, I wonder if we're going to be using this button here a lot today. Just play the right note. Well, I think so. But perhaps, first of all, yeah, thank you, Eric. This is great. And the, okay, how to stay motivated.

I think, Eric, you might already have what is needed inside of you to stay motivated. You've been doing this since you're a kid. I can tell from the passion of your voicemail that you believe in this. Like, because that's what it takes, I think. That's how you stay motivated. It's like, you have to believe. You have to believe that, you know what, I will connect with an audience. You don't have to believe you're going to connect with a billion people in this world over it.

It might be with three people. It might be with 300. The number actually doesn't matter. You just want to connect. And you probably have already done this, I'm sure. It's very hard. Like when we do start looking for external motivation, as you say, we all need that to a certain degree. But like, let's temper our expectations with that.

It doesn't hurt anything. It doesn't hurt anything. A little pat on the shoulder. A little pat on the back. Good boy. Adaboy, out of boy. But it sounds like you may have a pretty good pathway to being self-motivated by your love for playing free jazz. And first of all, let's just say free jazz, like we're not experts on free jazz any more than we're experts on any kind of jazz here. We're interested parties. We spent a lot of time Adam and I listening and playing and teaching and performing and we love this music.

But I mean, there's a place for all of us within this music for every player at every level, really, that wants to like take. the artistry side of it seriously. It's not about like, oh, I'm going to follow this tradition or I'm going to play free jazz in this way. No, it's like kind of what you say you already have, Eric, is like a belief and a love for playing within this style or subgenre, whatever you want to call it.

This way of playing. Yeah. I'm like expressing yourself. So you've just got to continue to believe. And actually, I think even build upon that belief, the more you feel like you're connecting with your own spirit and soul with the music, where it means something to you,

where it speaks to you, that's the same where you're going to connect with the audience. And I mean, sometimes for something that's a little bit more challenging and maybe requires, dare I say even a little more, I don't want to say intelligence to listen to, but a little more thoughtfulness in the listening skills.

You have to be more nuanced than how you go out and acquire and reach that audience. It's there. It's just not going to be as close by it. Now, you live in Oakland, so you're Bay Area. You're kind of at the epicenter. So that's a great thing.

So physically you're located a place in the world. It's kind of like, oh, I want to start a tech company. And I happen to live in Silicon Valley. Well, perfect. You can do it from anywhere, but you're really at the right place when you're there. Yeah, we don't talk a lot about free jazz here on the podcast, but we do talk a lot about motivation. I actually love, man, one of my favorite musicians is Ornette Coleman.

Yeah. We don't bring them up a lot here because, A, it's pretty advanced, like you said. It's like a wine that uses like Barnyard. Yeah. It's like, you got to, you have to kind of. to come in with some knowledge, but also there's not a lot of piano going on. That's right. Ornette loves the lack of piano in the group, but. Which I don't mind, but.

But is Ornett kind of the father of free jazz? I mean, I know that's overly simplistic. It's like saying that Lewis Armstrong is the father of jazz. Yeah, there's a compit playing. But definitely I would say that Ornett Coleman is sort of on the Mount Rushmore of free jazz, you know, Eric Dolfie and Cecil Taylor. Dewey Redmond. Dewey Redman, of course.

But the like-Jar it to a certain extent, right? I mean, Keith has done pretty much every form, but certainly his free records are some of the best. Yeah. You know? But for motivations sake, it doesn't actually matter the genre because we're all, to some degree, if you're playing any kind of instrumental music A. Yeah. Right. Or and then any kind of improvised music, B.

Right. It's not going to be, you know, at the top of the pop charts. You're not going to have a... It's not even going to be at the bottom of the pop charts. No, it's not going to be anywhere near or the popular. charts for the most part. But there, I think to Peter's point, like, Eric, you're nailing the biggest part of it, which is to follow your heart and to play the music that speaks to you. And, you know, I think the artist job and obligation in this world in this short time that we're

here is to keep digging further and further down in there to find more and more of what it is we love in these sounds that we can hang in the air so, you know, hopefully skillfully. Yeah. And like, that's a tough job. Like you go into some depths. And free jazz is, I think, one of the more brutal, expressive forms of music because you can really find hard things when everything is an option. You know, it's like a completely free, unstructured premise for the most part. you can really go to some interesting and raw places.

You know what I mean? So I would say, you know, you already seem to have that, to Peter's point, Eric, this love of it and this passion for it. But you could, if you wanted more motivation, realize that there's always a little bit deeper to dig with whatever, whether you're a singer-songwriter making pop music or free jazz, there's a little bit, always a little bit further to the truth of you. to where you want to go to explore or even to be able to let go

of expectations of what you'll find or anything like that. There's always work to be done there. And for the external validation side, in my experience anyway, the more truthful I've gotten towards that part of the music inside me out, the more reaction I've gotten externally.

Yeah. And that doesn't mean more people but just connecting deeper. It sometimes does and sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes you can't count on it. It's a little bit random. But it's either way, it's a deeper connection. Yes.

To what's happening. Because it's truth. It's, people can recognize authenticity. It's like, and they can sniff out in authenticity in half second. That's right. And I mean,

I think that we'll find like if we're really trying to reach people and have a communal experience through art, uh, which really is performing live music or putting out recorded music or streaming or whatever it is, but presenting our music, not just for ourselves, not just we're going to sit

and hold on to this precious little thing that we've created, but wanting to have other people, there's nothing wrong with wanting to have some external, you know, gratification and satisfaction and satisfaction and just validation,

you know, from others. But the thing is, like, do you want to have that from eight people in a very deep way or do you want to have it from 80 people in a more surface level way?

Like our last episode, we talked about, generated computer generated jazz, which is like kind of the opposite of free jazz in a way. It's like constricted

but free at the same time in the worst ways as we discovered. What if you heard a computer that was algorithmically playing like Ornette Coleman? I don't know what I would do. Did you see my face on the coffee shop playlist?

I don't know what I would look like for that. But I mean, the thing is like we have to really embrace what, you know, embrace people that really want to can, you know, hear our music and connect with us over that, even if that's a smaller number, because that's actually often a good thing.

When you get to a bigger number, it's very hard to do anything and connect with people on a very deep level. I mean, you're talking about, like, you know, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, some of these stars that, like, hit a certain level of artistry and actually can connect with a whole bunch of people. But I think that, you know, there are some things that we can do, and I think that jazz musicians in general, and this is not peculiar to free jazz musicians, just jazz musicians and in general, we do a terrible job on aggregate of marketing our music, I think.

Because it's so, like, we've just, it's just kind of a cultural thing for us. It's like marketing is bad. And like the music should speak for itself. And like, you've got to like, you'll hear it, you know, things like that. Oh, we're kind of guilty of that here. Right. It's the name of the show. It's the name of the show.

But you know what I'm saying is like there's a lot of really attractive things and people that would be interested. I'm not talking about billions of people, maybe not even millions, but thousands of of people are would be into something kind of offbeat like free jazz if they understood and knew what it was and marketing is just putting the message out yes it's playing the music and letting people hear it yeah but you got to prepare them a little bit you know you've got to like frame it I mean think about like the pop the punk rock movement of like the 80s it becomes a thing it's a thing like they did a great marketing job with that because a lot of that music was I'm not

going to say trash it was like purposefully defiant and like you know you know, very contrarian. Yep. But they did a great job of like hooking in the fashion and the messaging and basically giving a middle finger to society. Like, so they connected with their people. They didn't connect in the same way that Michael Jackson's

Thriller did at those numbers, but it became a thing, you know. And free jazz did for a while too. So it's not out of the question. But then a lot of musicians don't have any stomach for any kind of market. I don't want to do that all. That's beneath me. So you kind of get what you reap what you sow too. That's true.

And listen, you're always going to have people like this. You're not stupid. Jazz is stupid. That's right. Jazz is stupid. That's right. And they're not saying... They just play the right notes.

Right. Maybe they're talking about free jazz. But that's... You could turn that on its head and be like, no, that's the whole point. You play whatever you want. Well, and look at the characters that are saying that. Exactly.

It's Dwight and Angela. Yeah. So don't try to present your music there to that kind of middle America office crowd, right? Beat Farmers and Cat, Cat-loving, conservative, you know, judgmental. There's probably plenty of cat-loving conservative free jazz fans. That's right. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a Venn diagram. That's right.

Yeah. But back to the first thing I think, Eric, is just like, keep believing. You know what I'm saying? Like, your belief, like, that's what can be marketing. So like, don't stop believing? Don't stop. I knew it. I knew I get him singing.

Yeah. But I mean, you know, it's like that can become the most effective marketing. Like, that's infectious. It's like an infectious disease. Don't stop. Don't stop. Believe. Don't stop.

Don't. Do do do do do do that was a classic sing. I got it back. That was crazy. Well, thanks, y'all. Thanks, Eric, for the question. Yeah. Good stuff.

Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. Until next time, you'll hear it.