You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Playing Free - #82

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

Peter's back in the Podcave with Adam as they answer a listener question about playing free. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Pete. Yes. Are you actually here, or have we perfected holographic technology? Yes, I'm an avatar holograph. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the Yule Here at Podcasts back at the Podcave. That's right.

We've reassembled, well, by we, I mean, somebody else besides me, I ever assume. Reassembled the Podcave, and we are back in here. You know what? It's not as, it kind of got aired out for the live session I think we had last week. Yeah, we did a big live concert here with Jeffrey. Jeffrey Keiser and, what's up, what's up, Brian? Oh, no, I just realized I didn't need the headphones because I'm actually physically sitting across from you. We did a live, a live session with Jeffrey Keeser and his trio here last Thursday.

Right. Just awesome. We had a great crowd turn up. We had a great live stream on the Open Studio Facebook page. If you want to check out the full concert, you can go to the Facebook page on, just search for Open Studio in Facebook. Like us too while you're there. That's right. Give us a like and subscribe. Give us a thumbs up, man. It helps our concert. It helps our ego. But yeah, we had to disassemble the pod cave.

And have you noticed they added ventilation, which I'm like, what are you trying to say? Well, that's what I was saying. It got aired out. Maybe it's part of the design now. So interesting to see what that will do acoustically. I don't think it's going to affect that much. Well, so I do have headphones on because we have a voicemail. Yes.

Someone went to you'll hear.com and left us a voicemail on speakpipe. Let's check it out. Here we go. Hey guys, it's Zoom from Vancouver again. Thanks for answering my previous questions. I listen to your podcast every morning while I'm getting ready for work. Eight stars. My question today is if you guys have any tips for playing free,

meaning no core changes, no predetermined structure, just pure improvisation. So if you guys have any tips for that, I'm sure listening will be number one as usual, but we'd love to hear six other tips if you have them. Thanks a lot, peace. We are training them well. We are. That's right. That's right.

Well, the first, when he said, any tips for playing free? I was like, well, that's, especially when you're starting out, that's going to come easy in jazz. You're going to do a lot of gigs for free. You're not going to have to worry about that. But besides that obvious pun there, I would say number one is. Listen. Right. There we go.

Yeah, not to reiterate, but really, or to recapitulate, I guess. Cool. The thing about listening when you're playing free, and thanks so much for this question, because this is an area that we hit on a little bit, but it's great to talk about and kind of iterate on and just think about and to discuss. But of course, we're always listening. But when you really go into a truly free situation, and we can talk about like kind of degrees of freeness, no changes, absolute freedom, it's very hard to achieve that.

But being in the moment, I think, because. becomes so important, you know, much more important than even the specific sort of melodic, you know, harmonic and rhythmic techniques that one is going to use. So I think a lot of the preparation for getting there is similar to being able to improvise in a number of different styles, so to speak, but the ability to really be in the moment and to be listening both to what you're playing, to what the moment needs and to what any other accompanying musicians that you have there becomes paramount, really. Yeah. I mean, free playing can be some of the most challenging kind of of playing to actually pull off in a way that's interesting and you know and you're right about listening and how important that is because you can't do anything pre-planned you know I mean or else you're just going to lose the vibe any kind of lick you try to throw out there is not going to be like if that's not how this works it's only good if there's communication yeah between you and the other musicians if you're in the moment like you said just just as much as you can be

for as long as you can be, it becomes almost this, like, meditation. I don't really do this very much anymore. I used to do it a lot when I was young. Right. Like free playing? I mean, you do it in context of, like, a not free gig. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like, you know, me and my buddies used to do it endless hours into the night.

Because you have time on your hand. Man, dude, let's just get together and just create, man. We've been playing changes all day. Yeah. Yeah. So then it's interesting, too, because he asks him the question, he kind of mentions without changes. And I would just say we can definitely talk about that, but I would just say that there is a whole way of playing free also that involves not planning out the changes and not having the structure of a progression of chord changes.

But you might still end up playing something that sounds like it's an exact progression. And I think that, I mean, Keith Jarrett kind of comes to mind. Well, you're alluding to too. It's the Witten-Marcellus burnout. Right. C- minor burnout. Yeah, yeah. But that has that has that same kind of vibe.

That kind of has changed. Even as a starting, it's like playing free over some. There's like an idea of a change, but they don't stay to it. Right, right. And I think if anything, there's more of a rhythmic and kind of structural thing within the form that's there that's, yeah, that kind of leaves harmonically very, very quickly. But there is a rhythmic foundation in that it's like usually four, four, a certain temple, that kind of thing. But when you're talking about like the Ornette Coleman style, the Eric Dauphy style of, I mean, sometimes there's even a head. and then you just go into this free.

It just says free. Yeah. And what do you do? You know, how do you work on that? I mean, you know, the best way to work on that to be prepared is, I think, to make sure that you, I mean, it takes so much preparation to be good at that. You have to, like, really be on your textures, your colors and like, and how they, not how they relate to a rhythm changes, which is, it's a simple formula. And that, you know, if you're doing it to that, but how they relate to emotion. and what you're trying to say

and what you're trying to convey to your other bandmates and to the audience, you know, and how you fit into, you know, the free ensemble. That's another thing that can be very challenging. Like, you know, I think human nature is to want to always add, you know, and sometimes, like, you don't have to do very much at all and you're making a bigger contribution. That's right, yeah, the few, and I haven't done a lot of free playing,

but I have done some, and thinking back to the ones that I think that were most satisfying for us, in terms of ensemble playing and most edifying, hopefully, to the audience, it was definitely a less is more kind of thing. It was resisting that urge to overplay, and I think part of the really number one listen will keep you in that sort of space. Because if you're listening, I mean, yeah, you can be playing and listening at the same time, but there's that more reflective kind of listening and thinking about not,

where am I in the changes? Because there is no changes. But you are still saying, where am I in the flow of the, music. And remember that the chords and progressions, harmonic progressions are not the only thing that delineate, you know, sort of that spacetime continuum of music. There's all different other things. And the main thing that links up any kind of performance art is the fact that you're going from time A to time B, there's a beginning and that there's an end. What are you going to do to fill it up? Yeah. If you have chord changes, Bop chord changes or a blues or symphony or

Rondo or all these different, that's just sort of a roadmap of how to do. That's just sort of a roadmap of how you get there. Yeah. But we are in free place playing still going from A to B. You're just going without a map. But maybe we're making the map up as we go. Yeah. And maybe we're like,

oh, we're here at B, but now I'm going to duck out and go to E. That's right. And maybe we're making up what we're saying about free jazz as we go today. Much in the same way as one would. No, but it is. It's like,

you know, we're trying to be more free about even how we talk about this because it's so easy to say, well, how do you play free? And then now we're going to give you a whole bunch of rules. How do you play free? Well, you're not free then. You know what you could do also with this

to get a little more in the weeds on some details to maybe think about working on, even just listening for. This is a composition exercise that you've probably done too, but like how does foggy sound? You know, like how does... A foggy day.

Like to get descriptive... In London town. Different foggy side. What does breezy sound like on your instrument? What does, you know, obviously angry, happy, sad? We can all do that. but like I'm judgmenting reason

but composers have to really think about this kind of thing you know like like what is perturbed sound like what does impatient sound like what does you know all these things that you might think about adding to your repertoire of textures

and you know what does what is sandpaper sound like on your instrument you know what I mean like it sounds a little hokey but if you actually practice that and try to think of you know what what's in your head for those textures for those like

moments for those ideas, pictorial ideas, you can really come up with a nice arsenal of that kind of thing. And that works great with free stuff because you can stay away from melodic content that strongly implies something and be a little more ethereal with it. But it also works really great if you're just playing modern jazz or whatever, pop music. You know what I mean? That stuff can come in handy. I mean, Herbie is like a master at that kind of stuff. Right. Yeah, it's almost like sound effects that you can make with the

instrument and it's very important to really think about your instrument and what it's capable of and stretching it to its boundaries when you're into the kind of free playing. So we think about piano. It's sort of the natural time to go inside the piano maybe a little bit. But, you know, much as a lot of great jazz piano, it doesn't have to only be when you're playing free. Yeah. You know, that can be at any time. And I think that, you know, I think successful free playing really takes advantage of really strong and confident melodic material, at least at some part. So I guess that's something that you could work on. The thing about it is is you think, oh, well, playing a simple, beautiful melody isn't free.

Well, actually, that's very free because you're not placing it over chord changes, right? I mean, I always say Ornette Coleman was one of the best blues musicians of this generation, because he would play these really longing, beautiful blues melodies, you know, during these free sections or whatever. Yeah, and he was an intensely melodic player. So like when you're playing piano and stuff, this becomes a challenge because a lot of the techniques and sort of tricks and tactics that we use to convey different emotions are attached to, you know, harmonic movements and we can do it so easily. So it's not that you can't play a chord when you're playing free, but you have to be careful that you don't start to pull it back into like, well, let's play free. And then, oh, no, no, yeah, I know, I'm playing the changes to Don Lee because I just happen to freely be hearing that. just because you're in the habit of playing it.

Another kind of concrete technique that you could check out. We've talked about this on the podcast because I've been fortunate enough to study with and play a bunch with George Garzone, who has this whole approach to playing outside of changes, completely free of changes, where he's not considering the harmony, even if he is playing a rhythm changes.

And it's this triatic chromatic approach. And you can look that up, Zoom, and check it out. It's George Garzone's triadic chromatic approach. And it's like this whole, approach of being able to go outside of, you know, what we consider harmony with these strung together triads. It's really, really fun, and it's very challenging to do. Yeah, and I haven't I'm familiar with the concept. I've never actively practiced within that, but I like that to

apply that a lot to free playing because of what we were just talking about, you know, melodies, simple, beautiful melodies, being able to use those in your free playing. And so, you know, the triad is always such a great foundation. Super strong. For any kind of melody. And now, when you have the freedom to do any of 12 triads, and that's not even, you know, just 12 keys, of course, different inversions, different minor, diminished, major. Exactly. That can really be your foundation.

Well, and when you string these together, they're not randomly, because there's some rules that, you know, are involved with learning this, but when you start stringing these together, completely, you know, devoid of any sense of chord changes or harmony, you start playing melodically in this really interesting way in a way that you're thinking about the rhythm and the phrase in the way that you're thinking about the shape of the old,

overall line and the range that it's covering. And it's really freeing because, you know, you're not thinking about, okay, I have to play melodically over a C minor seven. You know what I mean? You're thinking about just that one thing. Yeah, yeah. And just just one last thing. Maybe we can end on this is just remember that all the rules of putting together great musical art still apply to playing free as in. Well, no, I mean, a lot of people just take this to like, I'm going to kind of zone out. Well, we talk and we started here too saying, you know, just in terms of like really concentration. and attention to detail, which to me, those are linked up with listening.

I mean, you can't be, like, concentrating on really creating something without listening and vice versa. So in terms of, like, the techniques of building up drama and telling a story, I think it's so important. And sometimes it gets lost. So if you don't use those great elements of putting together something that's going to be edifying to the audience, you're going to end up playing free for free. That's right.

That's right. So, good. Well, thanks for the question. Absolutely. Please keep the questions coming because why, Adam? We're running out of ideas. Well, partially. We love our listeners.

We do. And speaking of loving our listeners, if you want to show us a little love, what are some ways you could do that, Adam? Not you, I mean, the listeners. You could go to iTunes or Google Podcasts and give us a big time rating and review. I've lost my voice. You have. I think people should actually go to Apple Podcasts. Go to Apple Podcasts.

I mean, you could do it on Google, but we don't know how to track. Have we found, we need to get an Android device. up in here because I feel like we're not. Andrew. Andrew, do you have Android? No. Oh, you do? He's the engineer, man. Of course he's Android. That's right. All right. Start looking at Google Place. No, go wherever you want. But, you know, iTunes, we're kind of, you said we're over

100 ratings and reviews. Is that possible? What 105 ratings in a hundred and five? Yeah. You know, Adam calls me at weird hours like three in the morning. Guess what? Got another one. But yeah, give us a rating and review. Seven stars, although Zoom did give us eight. He gave us eight stars. You know, we're like seven minimum. But also. So YouTube, what's up YouTube?

We're getting a nice little following there, and we're encouraging you to go in there and comment. Even if you don't watch us on YouTube, no problem. Keep listening on the podcast, but you can go to YouTube and comment today on any techniques or ways that you like to play freely. And we are enjoying the discussion over there. Thank you guys for engaging with us there. And also, maybe give us a little thumbs up. What do you do on YouTube? It's a you give it a like and a subscribe.

You can give it a subscribe. You can put the bell on, which means that you get notifications when a new, episode is released. That's going next level. Put the bell on. Ring that bell. Ring the bell. You can ring my bell.

You can ring my bell. We got a bell ringing. That's right. Thank you, Dan. All right. Well, until tomorrow, you'll hear it.