You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Piano Talk - #11

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam discuss their favorite pianos. Both personally and professionally. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Ennis and I'm Peter Martin And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast Daily Jazz Advice coming at you Brought to you by Open Studio Yeah what's going on Adam Nothing much man just getting off my great weekend Nice playing my gigs Happy Monday

Yeah you know we had a bunch of We had a big festival here in St. Louis got canceled Kind of last minute Lou Fest Which has been going on for like nine years And it's kind of like this big outdoor music festival And Forest Park which is our beautiful jewel of a park here in St. Louis And you know the guy like totally messed up this year, the guy who runs it, and the vendors pulled out, and they canceled the festival

on Wednesday before the Saturday shows. And this is like Robert Plant is the headliner, but they also have a jazz stage. This is not a street fair. It's not a neighborhood street fair. No, no, no. It's like a big deal festival. This year was the first year, of course, that they have a jazz stage where like all the St. Louis jazz musicians were going to play. Totally unrelated to it being canceled. Let's just be clear. We think. Of course, it was, you know, like all these jazz musicians like, we're going to play for thousands of people. And then, you know, we're going to play for thousands of people. and then, you know. Right, right, right.

Well, that's a bummer. It was a bummer. Yeah, but actually, so everybody kind of rallied around. We had some gigs on Sunday. It was good. Nice, nice. Well, it's, you know, it is kind of festival season, or really the end of a lot of the summer festivals.

That's right. Over the weekend, I had a strange experience because I played up at the Chicago Jazz Festival, which is a wonderful event. It's totally free. It's got to be one of the bigger free jazz festivals. But we played at, Millennium Park at the Pritzker Pavilion, the beautiful, you know, Frank Gary designed

pavilion right there by the lake. And we started playing. This is with Diane Reeves and her band. So it's a quartet. We played one song just with the quartet, 10 minutes or so. Diane came out. The crowd's all hyped up. It's like, you know, I don't know, 7.30 p.m. The sun's just kind of going down. No, the sun was down. And all of a sudden, it just, I mean, Diane sang for about five minutes, it just starts raining and lightning and thunder. And I sort of see how the or my one of the officials or MC comes over and to the mic and it's telling people I kind of look at the out of the audience I see everyone scurrying towards shelter because the audience is totally open and it was like 20,000 people there's the big audience and then there's a big grass area some people

and it's free you know so um nothing like a free festival to attract people to a jazz concert we're going to charge four dollars it'll be like 100 people there but if it's free it's 20,000 no but it's a great event but it just started lightning and luckily it was a very mature crowd. I don't mean an old crowd. I mean thinking mature because it could have been like a panic kind of thing where everybody, because it was raining hard in the lightning. So we stopped.

They held for about 30 minutes and then they canceled it. So that was, it was kind of a sad thing because we were just getting rolling. The crowd was great and we were having a lot of fun. But, you know, this is the thing with outdoor festivals. Yeah. Either through weather or, you know, crooked business practices. Right. It's like a 30% chance that a summer outdoor.

And really, now, I'm always surprised there's not more festivals, like, especially in the Midwest. Well, really, anywhere in the U.S., like later September, October, when really the weather's a little bit. I mean, the thing is, if it doesn't rain, it's going to be 97 degrees. Because then on Sunday, we played North Carolina, John Coltrane Festival, which was amazing, high point, but it was hot. And it almost, it started to rain there, but we kept playing and we got through the gig. Yeah, the July August festivals are like. I mean, everyone wants to be outdoors, but, yeah, man. Anyway.

So what we got today? Well, we're going to talk about pianos, I think. Oh, sweet. Yeah, and this is, we had a couple of questions, one from our very own Rachel, who wanted us talk about our seven worst pianos. Rachel Morgan. That's right, but we wanted to also turn it a little bit positive. And from Joe, one of our listeners, Joe, he had asked, can you talk about pianos you've

owned, including ones you had growing up? Another idea are pianos you've played but not own, such as at clubs or other gigs, or pianos you've coveted that someone owns. Isn't there something in the Bible? That thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's piano or something? That's not covet, yeah, that's right. Yeah. But you get to play once in a while.

And then I like this part, how about places you love to see a piano? So maybe we'll do that at the end. That'll be a little teaser at the end. I like it. Cool. Yeah, yeah. So first, do you have some memorable pianos that you played on growing up? Well, so my first piano was a special, special piano from me.

So, you know, I had always picked out songs from the radio when I was a little little kid, and I had these little Cassio keyboards and stuff like that. And then when I got, when I started taking piano lessons, I was just, I was unstoppable. Like, I just, I couldn't stop doing it. So my parents, like, who didn't have a ton of money at the time, scrounge borrowed, saved or whatever, and bought me this little, like, Hamilton, spin it.

You know what I mean? And it was, like, from someone they knew it. Their dad's, from my grandpa's church or something, and the key key, key, he stuck. It was actually that piano was a half-step, sharp the entire time I owned it. Wow. And to this day, I can actually kind of like get close to notes by hearing them, but I'm usually half step off. Half step sharp. Yeah. So it was almost like an anti-baroque, uh, anti-baroque piano. Yeah, it was really, really odd. So, uh, but that little

Hamilton, I mean, that's just, you know, that, that, that first instrument, right? Alexander Hamilton. It was Alexander Hamilton. It was, it was Adam as a kid in his underwear on snow days, like, playing piano for eight hours. Adam and is Hamilton. It was Adam and his Hamilton. No, it's so cool, you know, with these little, I feel like these little starter spinnets for families or so become part of the family. Like, I have one now because I have my grand piano here in Grand Center where I can practice,

but I have one because my eight-year-old daughter takes piano lessons now. And she is on the little spinet in our living room all the time. They're fantastic. They're durable. Yep. They are, you can often find them for the low, low price of fruit. just to move it. And they're not that hard to move, the little spin.

It's two people can, I mean, it's heavy, but two people can get it up on. I mean, how many times have we moved to spin it over the years on a pickup truck? Yeah, totally, yeah. That's cool. So I, you know, growing up, I mostly played on a Yamaha Upright. It was actually like a pretty big kind of 50, 52 inch upright, probably circa, like 1972 or something. Similar to Circa, Peter Martin, is it, you know. And it's still at my parents' house.

I love a Yamaha upright. A nice little Yamaha upright. And so this was during the period when I believe they were being made in Japan, actually. And they still make some. And then they were – no, I'm sorry. This one was when they were made in South Korea. And I think it was the Young Cheng – what became Young Chang Company or the brand on there was making a lot of Yamaha's uprights at a certain period.

Got it. But it was definitely a good era. I love that piano. And, I mean, I still go over there and play it. It sort of needs some work. And both my parents actually play piano some. So it does get played. It probably could use a little work now.

But, I mean, it's held up. I mean, a lot of practice, a lot of, a lot of solos learned on there. Is it one of the, like, sort of furniture brown color, or is it a black? No, it's black. I mean, it's kind of concert black. Yeah. It's not concert grand. Is this the era where they had the felt?

Is that the style? You know, the felt apartment dampener? Oh, right. No, no, this was actually before that. Yeah, that was. Later on, I had. had a young Chang that was down in New Orleans, a nice new upright, big kind of like 54 inch or something that had that with the...

For those who might not know what we're talking about, there's some of these upright pianos have... The Yamaha is a famous model that has this, but it's like a pedal in the middle, and instead of doing what the middle pedal does, which I'm not even that sure, but... A sustenuto. A sustenuto pedal. It has one, and it has like a notch to the side. So you press it down and you move it over to the side, and in the piano it drops like a a layer of felt between the hammers and the strings, and it has this really dark, quiet sound

so people could practice an apartment and not bother anybody. New York City apartment practice mode. Last week, man, on All Things Considered, I heard this songwriter who was actually killing, and he did a whole album on just him singing and piano, and the whole album was the piano had that felt. Wow. And it sounded really, it almost sounded like an acoustic guitar or something, reported it. It was very interesting.

Nice, nice. Anyway. Yeah. That's a little history on Adam and Peter's piano. I've actually owned a lot of pianos over the years, or had. Yeah, I've had a few myself. You know, and it's interesting because I never look, I mean, I've had some pianos. There's one in particular that I coveted.

Well, I guess I wasn't coveting because I owned it, but it was a Steinway L. And I love this piano. I actually moved it halfway. Well, I moved it from, I think Chicago to New Orleans on a truck. Like I went up, no, no, I bought it here, actually. St. Louis, but I was living in New Orleans. I flew up. No, I must have driven the truck up, but I had checked out the piano and someone had told me about it, and I knew the price was right, and so I kind of came up on faith and tried it, and really liked it, and so got a truck,

got some guys to kind of helped load in the truck, and then drove it down to New Orleans, and then had it for years and loved, I mean, I can still remember the way that piano felt, but I think that's the only piano that I've owned or really played on a lot personally in practice that I just felt really attached to the way that maybe a saxophonist would with like their Selma or a violinist, certainly very personal. All the other instruments, and even now, like the different ones we have here and what I have at home, I like them, but I don't have that much of an attachment to them in a way. Yeah, it's weird, right? When you find that instrument that just works with you, you know, it works with the sound in your head and works with your hands and the way you play. I love that feeling too, man.

Actually, one of my friends growing up had a Baldwin acrosonic spin it. Oh, yeah. You know? And I actually really like, if you, if you're looking for an upright piano, check out these ball and acrosonics. They made them from like the 50s to the 80s. I always thought it was a Krosnick, but I could be looking at it wrong. Accrosonic.

Accro-Sonic, yeah. They're little tanks and they feel really good. But this particular one just like, I could just like fly over it for hours. They had nice, even actions on them without a lot of maintenance. Not a big sound. Not a big sound. But, yeah, absolutely, a nice little action on them. Yeah, and I still remember, do you remember the first piano that you, like, bought with your own money?

You know, like that, it's almost like your first car, right? Yeah, I think it was, yeah, I think that young chain, I think I got it on, like, layaway too. What's up? Back in the days, for you kids that don't know what layaway is, Google it. Google Kmart, Layaway. I bought a cable grand, like a six foot, five foot, 11 inch cable grand, which was, like made in Chicago in 1915 or something. And I mean, it was like that vibe, you know what I mean? Right, right, right.

But I just remember, like, having it home, and I was just like, it's my new grand piano. I can't believe it. Yeah. So for those that are not viewing us on YouTube, we are on YouTube. A big shout out to YouTube right there, but for those that are at the traditional podcast, all up in your ears, you might have just heard Adam playing the supple sounds of the Kranick and Bach. What do you know about this little piano that's in the podcast here? Well, actually, maybe we should go through the pianos that we have here at Open Studio,

because we have three pianos in this room. Yes. and technically another one across the street if we need it. And really four, if we consider the Kranick and Bach, if we split that off into two different, or they're together, their partners now. Kranik and Bach is one thing. Ever since 1896.

Are they still together? So Kranick and Bach came with the room. It did. It was like, it came with the lease. Yeah, came with the lease. It came with the lease. There was a piano in this space. This wasn't a musical space before.

I don't know why they had a piano here, but they had this upright piano. I'm guessing for decoration. And, yeah, they were like, do you want to keep it? And we were like, yeah, sure. Yeah, we had enough space, though. I actually bought a house in New Orleans once that came with the piano. That's so New Orleans. Yeah, it was totally New Orleans.

Like, actually was it a ball went across. Acrosonic. Acrosonic, nice. And I remember the woman we bought the house from was super nice. Everything is so laid back down there. I think, like, the day we're going to close, we, like, did the walkthrough or whatever. And she saw a bunch of stuff. She's like, oh, I'm going to come move that if y'all don't mind, you know, tomorrow or whatever.

And then she's like, yeah, the piano, I don't know. you play piano ride. I said, yeah. She's like, you want to buy the piano? I was like, I got two already. And she's like, okay, you want to have it? I was like, yeah, sure. She's like, okay.

And so it just kind of stayed there. And so, yeah, I mean, sometimes pianos are, if you get the right situation, you can just sort of pick them up as part of a deal to acquire property. That's right. Well, we have one. Like it's a washing machine.

They don't want to move out, you know? We have one in our office. You know, we share kind of a bullpen office and we have an old Steinway in there that we're just holding for a friend, basically. That's a nice piano. I want to, hopefully the friend's not listening now because we're going to do like, what is that when, like a squatters rights thing?

We claim it. We've had it for seven years. It's ours. That piano, and that's from that kind of early 70s, Steinway M, I think. And that's from a period when there's a little bit of inconsistency with the New York Steinways. But I think that's a really good instrument. That feels good to be. Yeah.

I mean, we haven't even really done any of the kind of work after it was moved from Florida and stuff. And then there's the beast, the beast that we do all the, lessons on that if you're an open studio member or you watch any of the two-minute jazzes or whatever, that's what Peter's playing. And that's a generous loner from Steinway. Right. We might do a little squatters rights on Steinway to Big Schild Steinway. Is that an M or is an O? Or what is that? It's a, uh, oh. It's an O. It's a, it's, I love the sound of the piano. Yeah. It's a hard piano to play. It is. The action's a little on the stiffer side, a little on the definitely gives you a workout, you know? Yeah, it's kind of cool for practicing on because you feel like you're like

practicing with weights on and then you can go to the real world where everything feels light exactly and then what do you have at home at home I have a Steinway S that I actually love the only thing I don't like about it is it's brown it's the first brown piano I've ever had um and I don't know why just brown always brown pianos always make me think of like old ladies with a lot of pictures on top of the piano like where it's more furniture oriented than instrument oriented so it's clearly doesn't doesn't uh do anything to the sound. There's nothing superior about a black piano sound over a brown piano or a white piano.

There is something about a black piano that just seems to sound better. It does. And brown, I mean, to me, there's a hierarchy. There's the black piano. There's the shiny black,

which I kind of like the matte black a little better than the shiny. I have a matte black. Yeah. And then, so then shiny, then there's the brown. And then the bottom of the barrel would be your classic white piano. No,

your Liberacee special. You ever done a gig on a white piano? Oh, yeah. I mean, you've done gigs in Europe. You've done gigs on a white piano. Yeah.

I did a gig in China on a white piano, like a shiny brand new, like still smelled of some bad Chinese chemical factory chemicals. Why do they sound worse? They really do sound worse. The browns seem like they sound worse. The white sound worse. That's right. That's right. That's very odd.

Okay, so maybe, so I have across the street here at the Cranzburg Arts Center, I have Essex. Oh, yeah. That's my piano. Yeah, that's the Steinway design made in South Korea at the factory. I got it at a Steinway sale, actually, at Washington University here in St. Louis, and, you know, they do these big sales or whatever. It's nothing special. But it was a room full of Steinways and Bostons and Essex. And Essex is a Steinway starter brand. Steinway design, but built, I believe in Korea. Yeah. And by machine. And I played all those pianos. And the Bostons are supposed to be better, but this little Essex, like, outplayed all of the Bostens. So I kind of felt like I got to steal that day. Like, it was better than all the other Essex, too. It was, had a little shine on it, you know? Yep. And so I've had that for like 10 years now.

I love it. I'm going to trade it up eventually for a real Steinway instrument. Nice. Cool. Well, I want to jump down. Look, we could sit here and nerd out and talk about pianos all day. Oh, man. But to wrap things up a little bit here, man, you're getting a lot of, you getting calls,

you're getting texts, you're getting a Slag. That's a busy Monday for you. It's a call from the owner of that piano. Oh, that's true. Oh, I wonder if he heard us already. I don't know if he's feeling it. He's like, don't take my piano. That's mine.

But one thing I wanted to jump to, which I thought was interesting in Joe's question, how about places you'd love to see a piano? And I was thinking, this is kind of crazy, but I think I saw a picture one time of a piano on an airplane. And I would love spending a lot of times on airplanes. That would be so fun because what an icebreaker to kind of go over and start playing a little misty or something. Or just a little shedding. A little shedding time. Maybe everyone else is trying to sleep.

That wouldn't be annoying at all. You know. Blah, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. It's not a piano. but it's always been my goal in life to have one of those Herbie Hancock spherical spaceships that are that's controlled by a keyboard yeah right you know what I mean from thrust yeah the cover art from thrust that yeah I've always wanted that but also um I was like I always kind of every spring I get this crazy idea where I'm like try to convince my wife

let's let's get like a flower you know thing in the garden of an old piano you know what Yeah, kind of like how they have the toilet with the flowers coming out. Yeah, like that. Like there's a great spot. You could put it against the fence and then put plants in it, like a piano planter. Right. But she never lets me do that. Nice.

Yeah. So in the garden on the airplane. How about on the beach? That would be fun. Piano on the beach. It would be a little unstable. You need some kind of platform. Actually, you know what?

I played a gig on the beach one. But it was a festival. Yeah. And they had a stage and everything. I've known that a couple times. Yeah, no. You need to go all in there with like a piano in the waves crashing against stage. I see like a Barry Manel little video.

I was thinking more like Joe to see your boys to men. Oh, of course. Yeah. All white, white it out, you know what I mean? Like, bear a foot on the beach playing the piano. Michael, who's that? Michael McDonald? No.

I'm going to blank. He did the thing with the Loan on the Island. Never mind. Okay. One of those cheesy cats. Nice. Cheesy cats. Cheese cats.

Cool. Well, that was fun. Talking about some pianos. I love pianos, man. They're just like so, they're so well designed. They're such a great instrument. Yeah, we're not biased here. So, yeah, please keep the questions coming.

Folks can go, where would they go if they wanted to leave a question? What's the best way to do that? Then go to you'll hear.com. Ah, I knew it with something like that. That is the best way to do that. You can leave us a question either by voicemail or you can leave a comment. You can leave us a rating and review on iTunes if you're feeling that way. Have you been checking up on the ratings?

I haven't, but by tomorrow I will. I'm, you know, I drifted off over the week. a little bit. We've been getting a lot of love, I know, but I will check it closer coming up tomorrow. But the, also, people can tweet at us. We were talking about this before. If you tweet at, hey, open studio. That's our Twitter handle. Hey, open studio. Like, hey, and then, because we're trying to up our Twitter game. You know, I've been, I was tweeting a little bit over the weekend. I was in Boston and Cambridge on North Carolina and did a little, I realized like Twitter is great for like just little nice conversations. You know what I mean?

I mean, Facebook and Instagram, you have to have cool pictures and all that, which sometimes we do. But Twitter's just great kind of old school, you know, have a conversation with someone. You know, or if you want to call out your political enemies, seems to be the popular choice. We don't usually get political on the show, but there you go. Yeah, it's a beautiful, humane medium Twitter, isn't it? Only used for good, of course. Well, I guess until tomorrow, you'll hear it.