You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Our FAV YouTubers (Jazz?)

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

In this episode, we decided to highlight our favorite YouTubers and some specific videos of theirs. Check out who WE check out and see what's been giving us inspo lately. Here's the links to the videos that were referenced:Patrick Bartley Nahre SolScott's Bass Lesson'sPerformance videos:Shawn Martin | Keyscape SessionsEmmet's Place ft: Samara JoyJazz Piano Deep Dive (High Level)Chris Parks - Things I Learned from BarryJeremy SiskindHave a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

Hey, Peter. Hey, what has gotten in you today? You are super sassy. I'm a little saucy. I'm a little saucy. Super sassy, buddy. You got sass coming out. But I want to know something from you, sir.

Okay. What is up with that horrible carcinogen sitting right there? The Diet Coke? Yes. It's your decision and it's a bad decision. Unbelievable. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Music Advice coming at you. Is Diet Coke bad for you? That's what I've heard. But now that I'm remembering, doesn't Warren Buffett, like, drink four of those a day or something? Seems we do it, okay? Well, if you think that I could, send me all the studies. I want to, if there are studies.

He's a scientist, not just a court. Send them to, I want to know. Oh, man. Those studies are going to change my mind about that. Drop those in the comments, please, below, and that's for real. We are brought you by Open Studio. Go to Open Studio Jazz, as always. You know, we have a lot of cool things happening over there.

But I think my most exciting thing every week is Friday at 2 p.m. Eastern, where we all gather together for our. mentor sessions. That's right. Just recently we had our own Royce Martin teaching some ragtime and stride piano that was last Friday. It was so cool. It was amazing. And then this Friday, we've got Aaron Parks of all people coming in to talk about comping and chords. It's amazing. And it's, I mean, it's so cool. It's like live on Zoom. We've got members from around the world, usually several hundred gathering and just learning, having fun, kind of ending off the week on a really cool musical note educational. It's one of my favorite parts of the Open Studio community.

Yeah, go to Open Studio. And you usually introduce the folks with your eloquence. I try to. Do you drink Diet Coke before you intro those things? Yeah, buddy, every day. You're amped up. Yeah, go to OpenSudiojazz.com and sign up. And that's available for all members, not just pro members.

Yeah, become a member. Become a member. We're having a great time. That's right. The water's fine. Okay, so what are we talking about today? Okay, today we are talking about our favorite YouTube question mark. Okay.

I mean, no, sorry, our favorite jazz question mark YouTubers. These are definitely YouTubers, and most of them are straight jazz YouTubers. Some of them are kind of jazz adjacent. But these are folks that, and look, we've talked about, you know, some of our OG favorites. We're not going to hit on because we've highlighted them before, but Rick Beato, Amy Noltee, Adam Neely, some of the really leaders in our space in terms of music commentary, talking about jazz, talking about other things, just really setting the bar for everything. But we're going to talk about some other folks that we're kind of been listening to and geeking out on, as we would say. Yeah. Because we're kind of YouTubers, right?

We're on YouTube right now. I mean, more than kind of. We're actually on YouTube here as we're talking about it. But, yeah, we love this list of fresh young YouTubers who are doing some really interesting things. Creators. Very, very competent and creative creators. Yes, yeah, yeah. So should we jump right in here?

Let's jump right in. Okay, first up is Patrick Bartley. Oh, so this is Patrick's one of my favorites, not only because he's a great YouTuber, but that's a legit great player right there. Great player, younger or youngish player. So it brings a great perspective on kind of the current generation of New York. New York. I don't think Patrick's from New York, but he's, you know, he's in, he's a first call,

New York. He's on the scene. He's on the scene. Saxophone is great saxophone. It's been featured on Emmett's place. I think got on a lot of people's radar. It's been on a bunch of great sessions. But he's also just like a very astute creator in terms of talking about the music.

And I'm just going to play a little bit of this. It was one of my favorite videos that I think kind of first put him on my radar. I mean, I'd seen him and heard him play. But it's what it actually takes to be a jazz. musician in 2022. What's up y'all? It's Patrick here. And what is actually, I think, the first real talk, the actual

actual full-length real talk video that we're going to be doing on this channel. And if my voice sounds a little weird right now, I just got, as of the recording in this video, I just got back from Jacksonville Jazz Festival. And for the past week, I was fighting a cold and coughing a lot and all kinds of stuff. But luckily I'm good. Don't worry. Thank you.

You know, but my voice is a little messed up right now. So I got a little bottle of water here with me. Stay hydrated. I just wanted to kind of record the video because this is a topic. It's been on my mind for a long time now, especially since I started doing more teaching and interacting with a lot of people since the pandemic who are really eager to play this music because it really makes me happy. You know, a lot of y'all might be, you know, seeing some of the stuff that I post on the Internet sometimes

and how things can seem kind of dark. But one of the reasons why I'm like that is because I feel like there are some fundamental things that I feel like people are missing. not because of them, not their fault or y'all fault or whatever, but it's just fundamental things that make me feel like the music doesn't feel quite like what I got into the music for. You know what I mean? Okay, so some great things that he's doing already.

First of all, this is just like there's no cuts or, I mean, not that there's anything wrong with doing cuts and all that kind of thing, but this is a real authentic kind of video. Yeah, it's kind of a rant video, but he's already laid out sort of like his street credit. Just got back from the Jacksonville Jazz Festival, but not like in a cocky way, but he's just talking about what is happening.

then he contrasts when he got into the music and kind of reasons for playing, not in a, you know, a subject that could be very dogmatic, but I think that he actually brings a very positive, current, coherent kind of strategy towards dealing with these sorts of issues. And this is just a great example. And engaging, super engaged. I mean, that's what I was going to say. He's just has a natural charisma. Yeah.

And like what you said, Peter, authentic, I think is the key word. Every, every video I've seen of Patrick's comes across as something that he's genuinely passionate about it cares about and as we know having done this for a long time the closer you can get to your most authentic self even as a YouTuber even as you know as the same as a musician as it is when you're making videos and Patrick just has that across the board yeah and I mean and I was just checking here yeah he's I think folks unless you've done this to sit there for 31 minutes and I don't you know just talking at the camera with it being that close all of them everyone who has introduced you Like that's a real talent that goes behind just playing the saxophone.

So yeah, I mean, that's shout out Patrick Bartley. We'll have a link below to his channel. That's great, man. Who do we have next? So next up we have, thank you for asking there. Oh, okay, so we've got the wonderful, how do I go to here? Nari Soul, amazing, primarily known as that classical pianist. I believe she's Juilliard trained or one of those fancy schools in New York.

I do think she went to a fancy school, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, fancy piano player, too. I mean, like, really great technique. Yeah, what's what I love about Nari's channel and especially her shorts. Yeah. As someone who makes shorts, like we do around here at a little studio. And that's what we look at first. But she's so inspiring as far as, like, getting like some really actionable,

practically good yet entertaining content in such a short amount of time. And I love that you have this fast but soft one queued up because I think, I don't think she even talks in this one, which we should watch another one where she speaks because she's also like Patrick eloquent. This... Oops. Yeah.

She's so dynamic. 19 seconds. And that's for me weeks of practice. 19 seconds. Do that again. Play that one more time. Fantastic left hand technique to across the board. What not to do.

All the things we think about here and how to present stuff. Think of character, not just about volume. That sentence, like, that's what I'm saying is like, you know, those are the sentence that I look for when I'm making videos too. Yeah. That, like, think about character, not about volume. Yeah. Those ways of communicating, she's so crystal clear with, and it's so helpful as a pianist.

Yeah. And so, yeah, if you're a piano nerd and you want to think about the how you play things and even, you know, you know, how to craft more compositionally, Naray Sol is a great resource. Yeah, and I think she really nails. like really maximizing the short format, the one minute, or in this case, 19 second, 21 second, whatever it was format, it reminds me of like if you had the pleasure of having a great teacher at any time, you know, for piano, it's like those moments when they're demonstrating something for you. They tell you about something, but then they demonstrate and you're looking over their shoulder.

Like in that little one minute, you can learn as, you know, it might be the best part of that hour-long lesson. So she's able to distill some of these concepts down, but she just doesn't tell you. In fact, in this case, it's all just a few written words and her showing you with her beautiful left-hand technique, great pedal technique. Like you say, it's so much to learn in a practice.

So don't get it twisted and think, oh, this is just a throwaway one-minute thing. That's hours of valuable instruction. So this is another one of her. So the other side of the Nari Soul that I've seen is she's a great storyteller, beyond just these little nuggets of great piano information. And she has this series, and this is going back away,

she has some really cool current stuff going on too. But I love her kind of genre as digested by a classical musician, because in this case, B-Bob as digested by a classical musician, because she's coming at it from a certain perspective. She's very clear about that, and it's very interesting to see what that is. And she weaves a story through it and also like a musical narrative at the same time. So we'll just watch a little bit.

Recently I spent a lot of time studying bebop. It's been a long, ongoing journey full of ups and downs, a lot of confusion, and some breakthroughs. But it's led to a lot of new insights about harmony, rhythm, form, and also a new approach to composition. This is one of the ones actually the Gabby on her right now. And I love... On in the video, you'll hear some new music that I wrote out of this whole process. But first, I'd like to start off with a quick rundown... And so, like, that's part of her story she tells in a lot of things, and she's really starting to get

some note as a composer. She's doing a project in Hamburg with their new beautiful philermonic venue there right by the water. I forget the name of it. Beautiful place where I think she's like kind of artist in residence and writing music and doing YouTube videos. But she weaves her discovery

and influences of different styles that I think part of the reason she's getting really some great viewership and people being pulled into her world is because she's coming from that classical place but in terms of her technique or understanding of music, but she's not coming with that typical, and I hope I don't get any trouble with my classical brothers and sisters out there with this. It can be a little bit

of a close-minded, not in that they're not interested in other styles, but not to the point of where you're going to digest bebop and then write some music and play it in kind of a classical style with a classical technique. I think that's so cool. It's a great example of what we've been talking about about how to use genre effectively and not just box yourself into what you think you should do to be part of some kind of perceived genre, but she's using all of these different sounds that she's interested in. And she talks about that quite a bit,

especially compositionally. She talks about video game music. Yeah. You know, she talks about Chopin as jazz. It's one of my favorite ones from her recently sort of comparing Chopin's melodic language to bebop. Yeah. It's great.

Oh, it's really good. Yeah. Yeah. So shout out to Nari Sol. And, I mean, she says some things out loud in a really intelligent way that I think people have been thinking or considering anyway, but she tells it in such an interesting way, so authentically, and with such great storytelling, and then with such great playing.

I mean, it's like, it's everything you want. You know, I think this is the key, right? This is what we're going to see that all the great music YouTubers have in common, or music, we'll call the music content creators at this point because it's really cross-platform. But whether you're talking about Nari Sol or Amy Nolte or Rick Biotto or Adam Neely or Patrick Bartley or anybody that we'll talk about today, is there not, is there all Good musicians. Yeah.

Like you have to be baseline, but they're also exceptional storytellers and exceptional communicators. And that's really what sets you apart, I think, of as you're trying to teach, as you're trying to just talk about what you're interested in is they have a, all of these folks have a real knack for concise, memorable storytelling. Absolutely. It's very inspiring. Absolutely. Okay. So for our third in the kind of music commentary, music creator, YouTuber category is a Scott's Bass lesson. Stevie Wonder.

Yeah. is Stevie Wonder. Shout out Scott. And in this case, Ian Allison, who's kind of, his sort of co-creator there at Scott's bass lessons. But this video, they have a... Would you call Ian the Adam to Scott's Peter? I didn't want to say it like that, but perhaps, or it could be the other way around. They're both just amazing bass players, electric players, electric bass players. It's very much a niche that I think a lot of you might miss because you might be like, I don't play electric bass, so I don't care. But just check out a little bit of this. Is this something that might interest you? It's a great looking base.

Is he having fun, you think? Are we all having fun? It's the best. It is the best. Hi, my name is Ian Allison with SBL. And today we're looking at my favorite. The communication here. Just down to like the quality.

It's a very simple setup. But the quality of the presentation is, I mean, he's using a laptop over there. But look at where it's just sitting at just the right spot for your eyeline. The backlighting behind. which defines his head, like the presentation of the lighting and the camera. For such a simple... He's obviously in sort of like an upstairs bedroom situation here, but it really works with the attention to detail.

But everything... I think his wife has relegated him to the attic space to tell you the truth. We've all been there. We've all been there. But so, you know, we were just talking about storytelling and communicating, but the visual communication... I mean, YouTube is a visual medium. It is.

And so people like Ian here, I would say that Adam Neely and Rick Beato are also in this genre of very simple setups, but it communicates very clearly the vibe of what they're trying to communicate. And to me, that makes a big difference. Yeah. And to me, the bar for something like this, like to get to that really A plus high level top shelf is, I'm not a base player, although I do dabbling on the various little, I'm going to be honest, but this makes me want to get an electric base. And learn that line. Because we all know that line and we love it, but like he makes, and it's not that he's making it seem easy and he really gets into like no he's making it seem fun yeah it makes it seem fun and it is fun and that's a good thing it's his decision his decision and it's a good

for those you don't know peter is mercilessly teasing me about one of my recent leave it under the radar folks if you know what i'm joking about put in the comments they don't know what you're joking about they do know it's their decision it's their decision to put it but um he makes it fun but it looks I mean, and look, had he been in the basement with bad lighting, frowning, but playing the same thing, it wouldn't have been the same, right? Sue me, I'm a little bit surface level sometimes with my YouTube videos. I like them to look at fun and engaging. If you're a top-tier YouTuber, the look has to be, the look and the sound have to be top shelf.

Exactly. To match the content. That's right. The content, of course. Obviously, we're saying that's a given. It would be like, I mean, you know, Stephen Spielberg can put together a great story with whatever. but the fact that his films look and sound as beautiful as they do really helps tell the story in the way that he's trying to tell it.

And it's the same thing here with SBL. Scott's, by the way, has been around forever, seemingly. It's been around for like 11 years or something. And so they've been to do it, they've been at it for a while. And I think they're just, especially in our sphere, Peter, for like an actual like music education website, they're crushing. I mean, you could learn so much, like if you can just play the bass, you know, obviously you have to be at a certain level.

These are not the easiest lines, but they're iconic lines. The one chord to the five chord back, right? But James does a completely different thing. He starts out getting to the five. I mean, look, he's telling you how to do that with that weird, what that notation called. And the four chord. Tableture.

Tableture, bass tablature. It's really played in the other instruments. So it's like really, you know, they're delivering on the connection between these iconic bass lines, how to play them, demonstrating, showing you how to play them. It sounds great. It looks great. The pacing of it is, like, great, especially knowing that you can pause and go back. It's just super engaging.

And even if you don't play bass, like, I've watched this whole video on some of their other ones. And it's just fun to watch. It's fun to hear the music. It's fun to see. Like, to me, it's not that different if you don't play the instrument as watching a great cooking show if you're not a chef. We all like to eat, though, right? We all like to listen to me. Can we have fun?

Can we have fun around here? Exactly. Speaking of fun, Peter, I think we have a couple of performance channels queued up. So this is another part of the- It's my wheelhouse of my wheelhouse. The experience is not just education, but watching people play is super fun. I think we have a couple of these. What do you got first?

So first I have Spectrevision KeyScape sessions, which I love this. SpectraVision? Why don't I was called SpectraVit? I don't know. Spectrasonic. What the hell is it called? Spectronics. KeyScape sessions.

Shout out Keyescape, which is actually this sound. Pump up the jam to the technotronics. Up the jam. What? Isn't this Spectra session keyscape? We use KeyScape. Yeah, so this is the Keyescape sessions. And this is what, for those of you interested,

this is what we use for our sounds here. The road sounds. I have that. It looks like that. I have that road sounds right. And this is the great Sean Martin. And I love this series just because it doesn't just sound great. It looks great.

And they're having fun. But listen to that. Oh. Look at that hand shot. That is killer. And Not just showing, I mean, look at that. The cinematatical. Oh, you were saying which of the keyboards?

Yeah, go back to the beginning. Okay. I think it's the LA custom stereo phaser. Oh. And check out some of the stuff he gets into. So it's like, yeah, I mean, this is a product video in a way, but this is a music video. This is a performance video. And this kind of falls into that bucket, I think, of just great playing, being able to see it, being able to hear it.

You know, yeah, it's three minutes and 31 seconds long. But there's stuff, Greg. filling gains. They've got so many great things on the channel. I highly recommend. We'll link to that below. What you got there? I got the LA Custom.

Boom. Shout out at KeyScape. That's a gorgeous sound right there. I'm keeping it. I'm keeping it for the episode. Okay. And then our other performance kind of related content that I think, channel that we love is right here.

That's a great sound, man. Shout out to Keyescape for the sounds. for the channel. Good product place. Make us want to go jump up on that thing. It does. What's the other performance channel? The other performance one is Emmett Cohen.

Ever heard of him? Look out for his forthcoming course. You know, he's recorded a course from at Open Studio. He recorded a Kalen solo piano course here at Open Studio. Yeah, that I, for some reason, ended up being involved way more on camera than I wanted to be. I love it. But that was fun. Okay.

So this is, of course, Emmett Cohen's channel, home of live at Emmett's Place. every Monday night for like a long time ever since the coronavirus invaded the America well the whole world and this one's kind of cool oh Caleb's waiting for making full screen bam there you go he doesn't like seeing that of the crap okay Samara Joy this is Samara Joy so he's featured so many great you know young kind of primarily New York artists actually I made an appearance on here at one point but it's I'm not a young New York artist but so so many great all different kinds of artists primarily his trio. This is the OG trio here, but this was a cool one that I went back and found.

This is before a lot of people knew Samara Joy, but take a gander to this, live from Emmett's Place. Man, Kyle Poole. My man don't love me. Treats me also me. She's so good, man. Yeah. Treats me also me.

This is a couple years ago, because number 40s. So she's probably, well, she's young now. She's really young. Yeah, obviously, if you're watching our channel, you likely know about Live at Emmett's Place. But if you don't, where you've been? Under a Rock, it's a great channel. There's now a huge archive of performances.

Go check it out. And clips, too. There's a ton of stuff. And again, you know, of course it sounds great. Well, that's not an, of course. The sound quality. It could be bad. And it's not.

It could be. Exactly. Yeah, we take it for granted. But it looks great. You can see everybody nice angles. they're having a good time, having been in there and played. Like, it's a teeny space. It looks three times as big. This is a New York

living room. I asked Emmett, I was like, what we see on Live at Emmett's Place, that's pretty much the whole place, right? He's like, yeah, that's the entire apartment, yeah. In fact, when I was in there, I don't even think there was drums because it was just doing like solo piano, two piano stuff. But yeah, shout out Emmett's Place, Emmett Cohen.

So yeah, that's our other, you know, oh, we have some bonuses. That's our other performance one. We have one last category, and this is what we to call, or we're going to call jazz piano nerddom. The nerddom, yeah. This is like, okay, forget about, I mean, actually these channels sound great and they look pretty good,

but it's not about that. This is like you want the highest quality, nerdiest jazz piano instruction, like just the facts, ma'am. Yeah. This is not about entertainment unless you love insider jazz piano stuff, in which case these two channels

are the most entertaining and educational thing you're ever going to see. And not just jazz piano, this is really just jazz education in general. The first channel I think we should look at is Chris Park's channel. And full disclosure, both of these channels, both of the artists that run these channels, are Open Studio Pro instructors. And they came to us both through YouTube. We discovered them through YouTube.

And the first is... What a great audition to see if it's going to work for us. Let's just see your stuff. Literally making instructional videos. And we definitely, we roped them both in to teach for us at Open Studio. And this is the channel called Things I Learned from Barry Harris. First of all, cockiest title ever, and he delivers. He does deliver.

Consider if you're saying, you're learning something from probably the greatest jazz and most dogmatic jazz teacher of all time. So you're going to take the things you learn. That's like saying things I learned from Albert Einstein. Here it goes. Yeah, but it is, I think Chris's humility coming through because he is an incredibly beautiful spirit, humble spirit. And I don't think he wanted to make this about him.

I think he wanted this channel to be about literally just the things that he learned from Barry Harris over the years. Chris studied with Barry for decades is, I think, the most, the strongest. His, um, academic academic. No, but he, he does have, I think, the clearest vision on Barry's teachings that I've seen. Having, having taken a couple of those classes with Barry myself, I'm no expert, but it seems like Chris really has a handle on what it can be a very complicated, uh, um, but it's the way he does it is not complicated as we'll see here. So this This is his most recent video.

Hello and welcome to episode 134 of things I find for Larry Harris. And today I thought we would talk about this beautiful half step below idea using berries. Well maybe like a combination of berries, six diminished or minus six diminished maybe in this case. And thinking about Thomas Eccles elevator. So here's the concept. have let's say C minor six diminished scale and a C minor six diminish scale has two things. It has C E flat G a A which is a C minor six.

Just this. D F, A flat and B. Just the way he just described the six diminishes scale as two chords is how Barry describes it. All of us other, including me, we have often talked about it as this, but that's not how Barry would talk about it. And it's a little subtle thing that he does and he jumps right into that so conceptually that's what your framework. And Chris like all of the YouTube was talking about

is a great communicator obviously with this it is a no-nonsense channel where you're going to learn barry's teachings very clearly and very directly yeah so great so great all right shout out chris parks and of course the great barry harris okay and then our other ultimate jazz piano nerddom this is none other than jeremy siskin and this is you know so jeremy has a lot of just incredible, like really tactical jazz piano information. He's super clear with, and he doesn't like get into a bunch of stuff where you're like, wait, what do you mean like this? I mean, he definitely goes advanced, but it's all like, like this is a perfect channel

to watch and to pause and to rewind. That's right. And like, as you see, he's so good at laying things out. I love the way he does that. Medium swing, eight ways. Like there's always some kind of system. There's always some kind of framework. He's got a very clear and deliberate musical mind.

He's an excellent teacher. with an incredibly organized way of teaching everything that he comes to the lessons with. We snatched him up to teach for us at Open Studio as soon as we saw his stuff because it just made so much sense. And I was hearing about him actually for like months before I actually chucked. You know, we get a lot of people like, oh, you guys should check out whatever. And then someone hit me to one of his books, actually, I saw first. And I was blown away about what organized his solo jazz piano books are.

And then I checked out his YouTube channel. The teaching is just as solid. It's just as clear. And these are like, no nonsense at all. Like really straight to the point, here's how you're going to get better by doing this. Yeah. And these are not like crazy concepts that he's come up with that may work for someone. These are like proven techniques that when he explains them, I'm like, oh, why didn't I explain him like that?

Of course. It's like stuff that I know. But he's able to really make that bridge, I think for folks that are like, I know I want to get that sound. But I have no idea how to get that. Everybody, Jeremy, Sistic here. author of this book playing solo jazz piano. I have that book. Buy it today.

Enjoy it for the rest of your life. That's true. All right, so today I wanted to give a more in-depth answer to how do you play medium swing solo piano? And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you eight different approaches you could take to playing. I'm going to do autumn leaves because that's a tune that lots of people know. And what you're going to see and what gets me excited is that even within these styles that I'm outlining these eight different styles, which I'm sure it's It's not everything that you could do, but it's a pretty good list.

There's all these kind of subsets of what you can do. And it's your list. And he goes to all of, and by the way, he, Jeremy has a course with us here at Open Studio of just this, of medium swing solo piano where he's dealing with a lot of the same concepts that he's talking about here. It's in his book, obviously. So if you want to go on the deeper dive, I highly encourage you to buy the book. And I highly encourage you to get Open Studio membership and check out the course where you can see him and all the notation as well. He's a fabulous teacher with unbelievably clear and concise ideas.

is. I'm a big fan. Yep, absolutely. Cool. I think we covered everybody. I mean, you know, we both love YouTube. So this is like our favorite YouTubers. This could have gone in a lot of other directions, including Sam Harris or Rich Roll, I'm sure. We could have done our favorite TikTokers. Favorite TikTokers? I love the way you say that. It's your way of saying it. What about our favorite Facebookers? I'm thinking of my aunt, Linda. Shout out. Antina from Sunshine. Tina from our favorite Facebookers.

Oh, until next time. You'll hear it. Oh, until next time. It's a good decision, Peter. It's your decision.