You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Our Favorite Jazz Websites

Episode Date: September 10, 2019

It's time for a shameless plug as Peter and Adam talk about their two favorite jazz websites: https://www.openstudiojazz.com/ and http://youllhearit.comTo see all the courses Peter and Adam mention in this episode, go to: https://www.openstudiojazz.com/pianoLike those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. What's up? Do you like the World Wide Web? Yes, I do. Do you know that it's now worldwide? Hasn't it always been? No, no, not at all. I'm Adam Anus.

And I'm Peter Martin. You're listening to The You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Jazz and Technology Advice coming at you. You got me again, man. It was just so weird what you said that I was great. Weird or witty? I mean, I don't know. Neither?

More weird than witty. But you got me. So why are we talking about the World Wide Web? First of all, I haven't heard anybody use those three words in that combination in a while. I've been around a little longer than you. We used to call it the World Wide Web because it was available somewhat worldwide. Do you know it's still not available? I believe there's several countries that there's limited Internet availability.

I'm thinking North Korea, perhaps. Although I do hear they're sneaking it up there. Wouldn't you, though? Yeah. We have some, I don't know. Do we have any listeners in North Korea? That would be interesting. Our podcast, Andrew, our podcast?

What's our numbers like? North Korea, man. That's a big country, man. A lot of people there. Yeah. That'd be a zero. Yeah, but we know they're sneaking across the border to listen to us. Question.

Yes. Does the World Wide Web have... Bears Beats, Battlestar, Galactic. Sorry. Does the World Wide Web have anything to do with the information super highway? Yes, man. This is bringing back remembrances of Al Gore, the 90s. That's great.

You know, big hair, big shoulder pads. Or was that the 80s? I can't remember. Anyway. So what are we talking about today? Well, first of all, we're brought by Open Studio, which we don't even really need to say today because I think it's going to come up organically

in this discussion because we're talking about our favorite jazz websites. Oh yeah, our favorite jazz websites. Plural, that's interesting. Well, that's the title. But it turns out we were talking about this right before we went on air here. Yeah.

And one thing that you, I, and Andrew all agreed on, we only have one favorite jazz website, to be honest. We actually have two. Oh, two? Yeah. Oh, that's right. We do have two. two.

We have openstudiojazz.com. OpenCoviojazz.com. That's number one. Best jazz website on the internet. Of course. And then we have you'll hear it. You'll hear it.com. That's true.

So we thought it would be fun today to focus in, just coincidentally, we were both involved with both of those. No, but we actually have been getting a lot of questions, I think partly

because of our big platform kind of migration. Yeah. And the fact we've got some really cool new courses. We've got some new packs. So we're like, you know what?

We're sponsored by Open Studio. Why not? We're just going to go through and kind of talk about the courses, tell some stories our favorites maybe. A lot of... Some little funny anecdotes

behind the scenes stuff. Yeah, a lot of our... You'll hear listeners are open studio members. And if they're not, they're not yet. Yeah, we look at them as open studio members in waiting.

Yeah, but... Ladies in waiting. I think, you know, we get a lot of... I mean, we get a lot of emails about, like, hey, what course is right for me? And so I don't think there's anything wrong with, like, making sure open studio members know what they should be checking out.

And, I mean, we have so much stuff now, man. We do. And it's just exploding. And, Andrew's been working so hard. He has. Poor guy. Yeah.

So the idea here is, why don't we just start with piano? Because, you know, part of the thing was we reorganize things at Open StudioJazz.com. And if you want, you can play along with this at home and look at what we're looking. But part of it was, you know, a lot of our courses have, you know, a valuable cross-pollinization, I think, between, you know, it's not just like, oh, I only stick to my instrument. But we do have, we started out as a piano site. And so that's kind of our heritage. I think we have the most number of offerings in piano. And that's actually the one that's most confusing.

But it's really exciting because I feel like piano, we kind of have cradle to the grave a little bit. I hate to put it that way. We do. Or as you like to say, couch to the band stamp. Like, we can take you from really neophyte novice level all the way up, which we don't quite have that completed with all instruments yet. So let's start from the beginning.

Yes. And this is, of course, we just launched this summer. It's called Jazz Piano Jump Start. Bam. Yeah. And it's you and I doing the course together podcast style, sort of you'll hear it style. It was kind of inspired by the podcast. We had done the elements which we'll talk about later together.

So it wasn't our first foray into co-hosting. But yeah, it was very, we wanted it to be informal. We talked about that. But we wanted it to be very, we wanted it to pack a punch and be like every day that you're practicing, every week. You're like, wow, this is what I'm getting done in a way that with sort of a clarity of progression that we did. never quite achieved, right? And that's exactly what we did. So we started off, I mean, this is really for people who maybe

know a little, little bit about the piano and maybe a tiny bit about jazz, but really want to understand how a jazz musician thinks about the music and creates this stuff. So we started with intervals and then just worked our way to building basic harmony and rhythm and swing.

And, yeah, I mean, a lot of cool things, forms like the blues and rhythm changes, which you just talked about yesterday. Yeah. Just kind of the beginnings of that, right? Yeah, no, really just what is the form? And even stuff like how to listen and really, really basic things. But we go deep into it about, you know, things like how to listen, like exactly what we listen to when we're listening.

And then one of the things that we've got the most feedback from this course, and we've got a lot of great feedback from this course, is I had the idea. I think you were out of town. And I dragged Andrew into a five-day-long excursion into things we call guided practice routines. Those are great, though. And these are like 10 to 12 minute routines where I practice with you. And I tell you where to set the metronome and we play the scales or the intervals or the A-2s that we wrote for the course together. Let's not hear you talk about it. Let's hear one of our members what he says.

Okay. This is Jesse H. He says, I particularly like the guided practices. It helps me stay focused on the material and keeps my practice time efficient. Yeah. I's got to feel good to hear that, right? Oh, man, it feels great because it was really just an idea. you know, I was, I was, I do these guided meditation sometimes, you know, with an app on my phone or whatever.

I was like, what if you could do this for like a practice session? Someone could just tell you like, okay, now do this and do this then. So, and you know what, we'll be doing more of these. We're about to record a course called jazz piano technique where we all try to play like Peter Martin. But we're going to, the crux of that course, like the meat of it is going to be through guided practice routines. We're really going to get you. It's going to be like a boot camp. We're going to get you into shape.

Yeah. And you know what? I love this kind of stuff because. I feel like, you know, for me, because I sort of came up somewhat equally in the classical in the jazz world from a young age, probably more, you know, certainly now more in the jazz world. But I've always felt that jazz musicians, and I know this might get me in trouble with some of my brethren and sisters, and that is that, you know, we need to share this knowledge

and give those, that guided practice routine. Like a lot of times we're like, oh, you just got to go here and you've got to figure it out. Yeah, that's great to do that. And if you have the time and the will and the stamina to do that, that's wonderful. But I feel like in the classical world, stuff is like really handed along in a very overt way. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to make it classical style or make it regiment. We're trying to give like the same kind of thing.

Like if you were to sit here with Adam Maness and say, help me practice for 30 minutes. And you were to guide you through it. You're going to be a lot more efficient than if you're just doing. Yeah, you can kind of figure it out on your own. But this is trying to bridge that gap. One of my inspirations was, you know, these sessions I used to have with my. friends when we were in high school and we would all practice together and it was it was people of different instruments we were practicing the same scales or the same things together really trying to like

listen to each other and and push each other and it was you know i would do that with a few different people and so i think there's a bit of a tradition of people helping each other practice this stuff so i think it's great man and i can't believe the response we've gotten so so from the jazz piano jump start yeah let's move on yeah and that course leads almost directly into Jazz Piano for Beginners. Jazz Piano for Beginners. Now, this has been, I believe, still, like, our most popular course. It's been around a little while.

That's part of it, but it's just, it really kind of resonated with people. I think it caught people at the right level. And Jazz Piano Jump Start, really, part of the reason we did it, too, was to fill in before Jazz Piano for Beginners, because some folks said, I did Jazz Piano for Beginners, but I feel like I need a little more preparation. So really, the idea is Jazz Piano Jump Start goes right into Jazz Piano for Beginners, where we get into some pretty good meat, but we're starting with the idea.

Remember the original idea with jazz piano for beginners was you can play the piano. We're not teaching where middle C is. You can play a little bit, not have to be amazing. You can get around a little bit. You love jazz, but you know nothing about jazz. So with the little bit of addition of Jumpstar Jazz Piano, once you get to jazz piano for beginners,

I think you're really ready to make some nice progress. You know, it's 23 lessons, and it moves relatively quickly, but it's the kind of thing that like really what I've heard from students what we've heard is that they'll go back over certain lessons and they're like man I'm really starting to click I'll watch it again I'll practice along

for sure you know the play alongs all that kind of stuff the living notation so this one is just really fun we've got the great workbook on it I don't know I'm kind of going into sales pitch but I get excited about jazz panel for begetters but for helping people find their level so for this you start with the blues and then you ramp up to even some more bebop

concepts a monk tune or two ballads, you know, things that we didn't were maybe a little too advanced for jazz piano jumpstart. Yeah. But, you know, once you're through with this, you'll have a basic understanding of this. It's a great course, man.

And what we really built on, I don't let me forget to tell you the horrible part of this course, so we got a full disclosure. We'll say that at the end. Okay. You know, we're really trying to teach in all these courses,

but especially at the beginner level here, is swing, feel. Swing and feel, which really are the same thing. And I'm a big believer in that being just as important as playing the right notes. And even more important than knowing what a C7 is and all that. We do that. But the idea is that you're doing a lot of listening and imitating learning,

just like you're a young child learning language, you know, so that you're able. And what we find when people do that, they're able to get the feel of jazz quicker than other programs where it's like, you've got to learn all this theory and stuff. So we try to give the theory as almost like not an afterthought, but not as the main, it's like the accompaniment. You know, it's a little asparagus on the side.

Play first, understand later. Exactly. And so because we want, you know, folks to be by the time they get through jazz piano for beginners, sounding good. Their spouse is not like yelling at them for practicing. Yeah. So from jazz piano for beginners, this is when I started with Open Studio. One of the first things that I did with you was do an intermediate course that

leads right from jazz piano. From where it lets off. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah. And that's called Elements of Jazz Piano. And this is popular with folks who like more structured learning. That is more, that sound is popular with construction workers.

Because that's an actual construction worker. Repaving a parking lot. No, but so the elements of jazz piano, you know, oh man, you could just tell this is me because everything is like, here's the structure for the course. I love structure. But people really respond to this because it really takes you on a journey via four tunes in different ways.

We cover the three essential, what we deem the essential elements of jazz piano, which are time, voicings, and lines, right? Right, that's three. Three, that's right. But there's all sorts of cool stuff. There's a great practice routine, like a sample month-long practice routine from the course.

There's this thing called creative scale practice. We have these play-alongs in different ways to practice scales. All written out is really, really popular. And this is the course, really, that we started discovering that folks that were really quite advanced, wanted to come down for some sort of brush-up work. That's right.

Especially with the play-alongs, giving them a chance to kind of work out some of these things. And I love this, like, this is, I remember that this was the first time we really hit on something that's become a core principle here for us at Open Studio, what to play, what to practice, and how to get better every day. Every day. So it'd be, like, you did such a great job of kind of pulling it a little bit from the esoteric and, like, you can do this and a little bit scattered approach, which for many works

great, especially the more advanced players, but really like, okay. Okay, what do I play today? What do I practice today to get better? Yeah. And to actually start to sound good. Yeah, elements was designed for people who are like, what do I practice. Right.

You know, this is exactly what you practice. And this is exactly what you do over this situation. Now, it's not going to give you the freedom of, say, just picking from a bucket and being able to conceptualize it in this high-level way. But if you're not there yet, you know, if you have to know what scales go over what chords, that's the one for you. Absolutely. So the next one I'd like to talk about is Jeffrey Keeser's first course that we

released here at Open Studio. We released an enhanced version. Let's add that. Are you involved with that at all? Oh, yeah. It was called Keys to Jazz Piano, and it was on his own website for a couple years. And he self-produced these lessons at his home, I think. I think so.

And they are incredible lessons. As soon as we saw them, we were like, oh, yeah, we're buying these. Well, first we said, let's steal them, and then we couldn't do that, so we had to buy them. Keys are threatened us. But, you know, luckily you and you and Jeffrey Keys are friends and have known each other for a while. And he was down. And he's like come on board fully. Like he's up in the Facebook group all the time.

He's responding to members. And the concepts that he lays out in this keys to jazz piano course are so specific. And he has so many targeted little specific exercises for all these great parts of your playing. I mean, I've become a better pianist because of that course for sure. Oh, me too. And like, and I think you came up with this laser focus practice. That's his. I mean, he goes through so many different concepts.

That's just his brain in general. But yeah, that's the thing. that's the thing that kind of the link between all these things and what really pulls it together because he goes, I mean, if we were to list

everything that he goes through in this, it's kind of overwhelming. But this whole thing of like, this is, I mean, are you going to be able to play like Jeff Kieser at the end of this course? Probably not. But don't worry, nobody is.

But not only you're going to be able to play some of it, you're going to learn, you're going to get an insight into his way of thinking about, not just playing. You know, everybody always wants to know, like, what are they thinking about when they're,

when they're playing. It's funny, whenever people ask me, what do you think about when you're playing? I'm like, that's kind of interesting. But to me, I always want to know what a Jeffrey Keiser is thinking about when he's practicing. You know, because that's how you get, you know, how you get to that point.

Because he's probably not thinking about anything when he's playing. Exactly. Being in the moment. Yeah, and this one's fun. We got the, there's a workbook on this as well. A lot of living notation,

which was painstakingly added. And is this the one? I know we're going to talk about advanced jazz piano. This is where he gets. to the two-handed stuff, right? Well, on both courses, but yeah, he does, but he does more, like, he does a lot of, like, very specific targeted exercises for harmony and, like,

playing outside on Keyes of Jesin. Oh, yeah, all the taking it out, taking it out. Rhythm, rhythm exercises. I mean, it's just so cool. And then he goes through, like, a bunch of masters. Oh, man, the block chord stuff, oh, yeah, like, Phineas Newborn, sorry, finest. Finis new boy, yeah, no, I mean, his block cord stuff

will either inspire you or just make you quit, one or the other, probably inspire. But he's got another. the course, but we'll hold off on that because I think next let's talk about... We're going in order here. I like it. Oh, no, we're not going to go. We're going to skip ahead a little bit. We're going to go to Rhythm Section Fundamentals. One of my favorite courses we've ever done.

Have you ever heard that one? Oh, man. This is the Peter Martin trio. This is you and Gregory Hutchison on drums and Ruben Rogers on bass, but pianists don't sleep on this course. There's so much good stuff. Peter plays. And I painstakingly transcribed almost all of it. Yeah. And it's really, really good. And there's just a lot to learn.

There's a lot to learn about how to play with other people. It's great. If you're struggling to, like, have a tight trio or tight rhythm section, check out this course. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, and this is something we're doing a lot more. Actually, we have some stuff coming up soon that's really focusing on the rhythm section, really just the bass and the drums, even stripping it down more.

We've got some good stuff coming in that regards. But this was a lot of fun because we did a lot of conversational things. We focused on each of the instruments in different lessons, but it was always about, there was always something there for each of the three instruments. So like when it's focusing on bass, we're looking at ways that the piano interacts with the bass, the way that, you know, focusing on drums,

like what is the pianists do and those kind of things. So it's very much about what we're doing, but I would say it's kind of equally for pianist bases and drummers. And it's just entertaining. We did a lot of playing. There's a lot of performances. A lot of transcription. The next one that we'll talk about is Jeffrey Keese's other course,

the advanced jazz piano concepts. And I wanted to put that after the rhythm. section because it's kind of like the rhythm section in that he had Billy Killson and Ben Williams come into the studio, which is incredible, and play, I think, five tunes. And then he broke down what happened on each of those tunes. So you can actually, you know, you say, like, people ask, what do you think about when you play? Like, he breaks it down. Here's what I was thinking about as we were playing that performance you just watched. Yeah. Lots of transcription. Just an amazing, amazing course, advanced jazz piano concepts, really high level. Not so much. Here's what scale

to play over what chord. But, more like, here's how I shape that solo, or here's where I decided to take it out because of this. Yeah, really, if you're having, you know, if you really want to solidify your phrasing, solidify your solo architecture, that's the one for sure. Yeah, and he's got some great original tunes on there. Is it all originals?

He does a couple of blues, but all originals other than that. Yeah, man. So it's like, I mean, it's just like a kind of Keiser tour to force, but you get to see what's happening and you really get to see the, yeah, I mean, that's used. So next, man, this is one of the most fun projects. I think this episode is going to be only the piano courses. I can feel where we're going with this.

It's already getting too long. But that just shows you how much we've done with piano. So the next one is Brazilian rhythm section. That was fun. We released this earlier this spring. It's this amazing group of musicians out of Sao Paulo, Brazil, just masters on each of their instruments. And just... Paolo, Felipe, Sesslo, and Marcus.

That's right. And when I met these guys down in Sao Paulo, I guess it was like kind of end of last year. They were already kind of starting to work on this. And it was actually, I don't know if you knew about this, they were basing this on rhythm section fundamentals. Oh, my course. Yeah.

They saw that and they loved it so much that they were like, man, we want to do this for a Brazilian rhythm section. So a lot of the concepts. So it was kind of a natural fit for us, something we've always been interested in a lot of our members and other, you know, piano members had always been asking about. So we're like, well, we can explain how to play Brazilian styles, but why don't we go to the source?

Yeah, no, they break it down. I learned so much about how to comp with other musicians when playing like bosses and samba's. And it's such a great chorus. They did a fantastic job. Again, lots of transcription, lots of like four-layered transcription. You can see every instrument if you want. You can take instruments away. Very, very cool.

And we got subtitles. So it's all in Portuguese because, you know, they're Brazilian. But we got the English subtitles there for you, which I actually love. It's like, you know, people that see foreign movies. They don't actually like to hear a dub because we talked about maybe doing that. Yeah. But it reminds you of a bad kung fu movie from the 70s. So you get to hear the beautiful language and you get to maybe even learn a little Portuguese.

We can't guarantee that, but that's part of the... Corosal. You know, to the ball, through the band. You'll hear it. The next while we're on Brazil, we were coming soon is a great course by Brazilian New York-based pianist, Aalves, incredible jazz pianist, played with a bunch of great people. Oh, yeah. Everybody, Joe Henderson.

We're working on this right now, actually. Yvonne Lins. Yeah, yeah, we're, but there's a couple of weeks, right? Everything is transcribed. I'm just putting it all in the sound slice. We're building the pages. It'll be two weeks away from when you're hearing this. And this is going to be great because Elio is really, I've known him for quite a few years as well.

He is, you know, he's a master jazz pianist. So we're calling it Brazilian jazz piano. And I mean, he's Brazilian, so it makes sense. But he's, I think he's going to fit in so well with you and me and Keyzer. Like, these are all, like, every pianist that has done in courses, we've never. never talked about this is the open studio concept. But we've gotten lucky in that we all kind of, we all have our own thing, but they're these sort of core principles. And that's part of what I was trying to put together with this, that there was an organic meshing of all these courses

so that you can see like different ways to do things. But there's like this current that goes between it. Yeah, that's great. Hey, speaking of, you know what's coming out this very week? What? Birdpack? No, my new course, jazz piano basics, lead sheet breakdown. That's very cocky of you to say that, because I heard. you practicing some of it and it hasn't even been recorded yet we're recording it tomorrow so that's gonna be great it'll be out this thursday if you're listening to this um and i have one course here on our piano courses that's the jazz glossary oh the jazz glosses that's for everybody that is for everybody but there is some some voicing things but everybody should know a little bit about voicing

but it's really just a glossary of like what does an f7 flat nine mean what does it mean what does it sound like and you demo everything i demo everything they're very short lessons about each one is about 45 seconds to 60 seconds long. And these are great because, you know, yeah, you can look up even probably online for free, like what is an F7 flat 9, and you'll see some theoretical description of it. But what you do is you give the sound,

you say what it is, you can hear it. You can hear it. Yeah, but it's mostly based on how it looks. And then we've got the great graphics showing what it is in the notation, but mainly you get to hear it, which is, that's how you,

that's why we call this podcast, you'll hear it. Yeah. It's been a popular thing. I've been surprised. It's been really cool. And then we should just fly through real quick. We'll just talk about the past. in general because this is kind of exciting.

They've been a recent thing. These are combinations of our courses by themes. And if you haven't been a member because you are not sure about how to get in, this has been one of the most popular ways for folks to first join with us. And if you go to the curated lesson packs, Open StudioJazz.com slash

For sure. Packs. And basically, we're joking about the bird pack. We did that last week. It's all lessons about bebop and Charlie Parker and honor of his, all stuff from jazz piano method. Yeah, yeah, really great. All right.

For those of you still... Oh, we forgot about jazz piano method. Well, that's what... The crown jewel. Oh, got it. I just realized. I was about to end it. Is the jazz piano method.

So the jazz piano method, for those of you who don't know, is this turning into an infomercial? It really is. Yeah. Well, I mean... But wait. There's more. No. We are going to give away a Japanese knife with every person.

No, I mean, we get a lot of questions about what does this course mean? So whatever. So now we can actually know what we can do when people ask us this? We'll send them to this episode. That's right. Yeah. So the jazz piano method, you've been doing this course since what year?

Man, I want to say like eight years now. Eight years of a weekly jazz piano lesson with Peter Martin. Seven or eight years. I mean, you have over 400 lessons, full lessons. Like, these are like 25-minute lessons. And the exciting thing is they're the range of fat Peter, medium Peter, skinny Peter. I see the whole gamut.

Yeah. You can see the chronology of Peter. Yeah. It's awesome. It really is like it is what, you know, Open Studio is based around. It's the most popular thing we do. The people that are on there are just amazing group of musicians who support each other. It's a really fun community.

I think the whole Open Studio community is great. But the jazz piano method is kind of a, just because a lot of folks have been around for a while, it's its own little subset. And the main thing about this is just that it's a new lesson every week. And we've never quite been able to do that. Well, we do a new episode every day. That's pretty good. Yeah.

But yeah, I do a new lesson every week. And it's really for folks that are more towards the advance. I think we say intermediate and advanced. I do some intermediate stuff for sure. But it's that you're just kind of looking for new inspiration from time to time. You can jump around. You can tune out for a couple weeks to get out time. No problem.

You can come back in and kind of find something that's interesting. You can jump back in the archive. There's plenty of stuff. I always tell you know, you've done so many lessons now. I tell people like, like if you're looking, you know, if you want to learn a new tune, there's probably a lesson on it. Yeah. You know, if you want to learn a new style, there's probably a lesson on it.

Well, except all the ones I don't know. Right. Right. If you want to learn a new technique, there's probably a lesson on it. There's probably four lessons on it. You know, I think three or four lessons on all the things you are throughout the history of the course. So it's like this become this amazing, amazing resource that is always growing. So check that out.

Yeah, for sure. Well, this was fun. Fun and infomercial. If anything, we've just made a reference for people who ask us, like, what course is right for me? That's right. That's right. We'll send them here. And until tomorrow.

You'll hear it.