You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Rhythm Context - What Is It and How to Practice It

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Peter and Adam take You'll Hear It live to YouTube and answer some listener questions - on today's episode, they discuss practicing over rhythm context, why you should sing while you play, and more.Tuesday's Open Studio Live Events:1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Piano Guided Practice Session with Adam Maness on YouTube4:00 PM - Open Studio Demo & Tour - Register here!8:00 PM - Listening Sesh with Peter and Adam on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alex then asked best Bud Powell record. For me, it's the genius of Bud Powell. Yeah, that's a great one. Buddy Rich and Ray Brown, yeah, 1950. That's a good one. I don't know. Bud Powell, yeah, I mean, his stuff has been repackaged so much.

Amazing? Amazing. That's the one I was, yeah. It's amazing, like volume one, volume two. But that's been repackaged too. But yeah, if you're just getting into Bud Powell, I like going with the genius of. It's got that T for two.

It's so fast. Yeah. Might be a little fast than that. Yeah. Yeah. Killing. Good stuff, good stuff. How to practice rhythm context like odd phrases and some displacement.

Displacement from melody shine. I don't even know what that means. Wait, say that again. Melody Shine, she says how to practice rhythm context like odd phrases. Oh, she must mean. like over the bar. Yeah, and some displacement. Displacement.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the displacement, I think is kind of tied into what we were talking about before as far as like your, like, letting your personality come out. Like, you don't want to have rules by which you do it, but you might want to have a way that you do displacement. And that really comes down to, like, just like when we want to leave or dance on top of the harmony with our melodies. Yeah.

Like, if you really know the form and you have a very good confidence, in your feel and your ability to, you know, kind of play over this groove, then you can start to look at the displacement that you do as just like another kind of dramatic turn. So give an example of some displacement. Okay. But it's all about like, that one was corny, but you have to resolve it at some point. You can't just keep displacing forever.

Let me try it again. So like I'm, and it doesn't have to be on one like I did at the second A. But you got to, you have to resolve it sometime because otherwise it's just displacement for displacement's sake and it's kind of like you know syncopation it's not syncopation if you're constantly going on the upbeat at certain point's got to be like it has to have some kind of revolution revolution resolution yeah yeah um otherwise you're just playing off the beat all the time yeah and the displacement can be rhythmic like this kind of where you're using the melody and you're stretching it off but it can also be you know some of the stuff we talked about on serenity where you're displacing your

approach to the chords with what your melodic improvisation is. So if you take like there's a lot of displacement built into that melody of Donnell Lee. And since this is the 100th birth month and year Charlie Parker, this is appropriate. So you've got A flat major.

We're still A flat major. This is just a passing note. But now we're on F7. But we've got four notes of still straight A flat major before you get to the F7. So there's like some harmonic displacement. And then same thing, B flat 7, everything's like delayed there. Yeah.

And that's the kind of interesting stuff you want to put it into your playing. I hear too many people play the melody and then they get to the solo. They're like, you know, as opposed to equally as sloppy, but a little bit more displacement in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then even things like that, like you can displace your resolution from the obvious kind of thing. And like Betty Carter used to love to do this. And I learned a lot from playing with her even for that short time about how, you know, you do it at the unexpected play.

and then you come back with that end of four and it's like bam there you go i think this is from a practice i like that username i think one of the things that makes sunny rollins one of the greats is his way of developing themes and tunes versus playing scales on changes what do you think about this aspect of improvisation i mean as we've been saying this is such an important thing and i've been thinking a lot about how to practice that like again that's why i kind of wanted to ask you peter about like what do you think about when you think playing melodically yeah i think it's a i think it's a big, what we'll call a overhead goal of all of us

as artists. And so I think a practice, one of the things that you can do that's so effective in your routine as a practiser to get this is to sing what you play. Even if it's in your head. If we were to do that, can you support me on that?

Yes, sir. We want to keep on with the St. Thomas for now. Okay. But like even if I were to play so if I were to just run my fingers over this then it becomes like I can do all my language stuff or whatever but if I were to try to sing while I'm playing it's totally different and it gets me more to that promise land

one two one two three four exactly but we can really hear that that's a lot different than just like shaboo dab a do bit you bow which is fine if I'm hearing it it's fine but if you're not hearing it gets weird Well, and did you check out even the way that Adam started that solo once he was singing?

He was like, da-b-bop-bap-b-b-du-bop. Like you really clued into telling a story, like, and capturing the listeners' ears immediately. And that's because, you know, that's the way we sing. That's the way we hear things. That's the way, you know, when we pay attention and when we're concentrating from that standpoint, as opposed to just letting our, as I used to say, the yellow pages. I don't know if you remember the yellow pages. Let your fingers do the walking.

Yeah, Southwestern Bell, remember that? Oh, come on now. When you had to dial a phone like an idiot. Hello. Exchange, who can I connect you with? Hong Kong, Phooey. Now you're just like Tesla. Call my wife.

Yeah, but I mean, if you go, if you think about it as we don't, we want our fingers to be following what our ears are hearing, you know, playing what we hear. You'll hear it. That's the whole point of this whole podcast. But, I mean, that's not. That can be kind of a cliche, but singing a solo will pull it right back home for it. You don't force you back to.

So Mika says how to condition yourself from playing just with muscle memory or fingers. So this is exactly what we're talking about. Is singing more. I love it. Alex says or sing and put your fingers over the keys. but don't play the keys so that you're do do da da da da but getting really

the way I like to think about it Peter is there's a pathway right from our heads from our heart whatever you want to however you want to think about it there's a pathway of music that's in us that needs to get out to our instruments and then get out to our audience

and then enter the matrix no no but the idea like this kind of work is we want to clear a pathway for that right we want to if there's a if you imagine a path in the wood and it's just overgrown and you're just running your fingers over your instrument. You're just pressing buttons and no music is really happening, right?

There's such a, it's such an overgrown pathway. We're just, we're taking our machete and we're clearing away. Right. Sounds violent. But we're trying to get that music out from our souls out to, first of all, this box of buttons, but then out to people and other people's souls. And that takes work and it takes doing this kind of thing where we got to think about clearing clearing a space for that path every day.

It can't just be about what notes sounds good over this chord. You have to listen to a ton of music to help with this too. That can't be overstated. You have to listen to music every day. You really do. That's one of the clearest ways to clear that path. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly. That's it.

I can't even really add much. I can just, just to reinforce, listen, listen, listen. And listen to listen and then engage, you know, as a musician with what you're listening to. I think sometimes we, it's great to enjoy and listen for enjoyment. And of course, that's what it's all about. I mean, that's one of the biggest joys ever. But, you know, we want to engage as practitioners of this craft.

So we want to sing along to what we're hearing. We want to stop it and see if we can find at the piano, at the guitar, maybe other drums, maybe at a different instrument. Find another angle, another entry point. It's like if you're studying film, if you want to be a great film director, you're not going to look at, you know, the Godfather part two the same way a fan is going to look at it where you're like,

wow, that's such a cool story. And you're going to be like, wait a second, let me pause it and see what is the angle, what is the cinematography here, what is that? So like we want to know it from every angle. We want to know inside and out. We want to know it upside down. We want to know it in different keys.

All these things are to give us confidence as musicians and to further our skills. Man, I was reading a book about how masters of any craft spent their time like these really nerdy professors did this study where they kind of they analyzed diaries of people like Beethoven, Mozart and even like Da Vinci and Einstein and whatever they can find on, you know, the greats. Wait, was that Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo DiCaprio? I said Da Vinci.

Oh, Da Vinci. I know it was one of the Leonardo's. I couldn't remember which one. Anyway. No, but so one thing to think about this is you think about clearing that path and again about listing the music and you were just nailed it about why. why it's so important. But one thing that has really changed the way I think about listening to music is to take

some of the like, what should I be listening to maybe out of the picture? First of all, listen to things that you want to listen to. Yeah. First and foremost. Like, don't just rely on what other people tell you you should be listening to. Follow your heart into what you should be listening to. And the masters would apparently spend, you know, an average of three hours a day consuming what they, what it is that they were famous for.

making. So Beethoven would listen to concerts every day or listen to or study other people's music every day. It's probably the way that he did it at that time. But they would also spend time doing things from like older established works. Yeah. And mix that with newer works that were kind of challenging perceptions at the time, which is something to think about. It's really changed. I know this sounds, there's kind of a long way around to get here. But like thinking about like, okay, I'm going to listen to like some Sonny Rollins, some older Sonny Rollins. Some older Sonny Rollins tonight and maybe I'll listen to a new Sunny Rollins later or maybe after that I'll listen to like Logan Richardson, someone who I think is, you know, on that same level influenced by him.

You know what I mean? Like really mixing up the old and the new when you're listening can really help you to not only just learn a bunch of new things that you might not be exposed to, but like put it into context in a way that is very helpful for our monkey brains. Absolutely. Yeah. Faith comes by hearing. Faith comes by hearing.

I'm not trying to get all religious on this holiday because it's not a religious holiday, but, you know, that's what's up. What's up? Luke says, Luke says, hey, guys. Hey, what's up? All right, maybe this will be our last question because we got, you know, we got something else we've got to do after this. That's true. And we're going to make this a one hour program, I think, right? Because people love us for an hour. I've noticed after an hour, the love affair with you and I goes down quickly, right?

Yeah. So Luke is asking, should this be our last one or do you have another one? I didn't mean to preempts. We can do whatever you want. I feel like these are, we're just hitting our stride. Oh, okay. Well, no, we can keep going then. I don't want to call the party early, you know?

Luke says, I have a question. I was taught altered scale used on a minor 5-1 looking at Donna Lee. Minor 5-1 looking at Donnelly. The melody uses altered scale from F-7 to B-flat-7 and also E-flat-7 to A-flat, which suggests you can use altered on major-5. What does that mean major 5-1 as opposed to, you mean going to a minor or going to a major? So the conventional wisdom is you use the altered going to, right, a minor chord, but you could use it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, you know. But what is he talking about melody-wise? That? No, because I think that's all, that's diminished, right? No, you know what that is? That's the B-flat harmonic minor, right?

Oh, the ascending. Oh, no, the, oh, right, harmonic. harmonic, yeah. Yeah. Huh. So I don't, yeah, I'm trying to think of another place in that tune. Maybe there. Yeah, because that's five to a major one.

But that's just as much diminished as it is altered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the same part, it would be the diminished. Maybe, let's see. We're trying to work it out here, Luke. Yeah, that harmonic minor. But I mean, I think in general, like five to one or five to minor one with the altered, I almost kind of like, like there's more drama.

with it built in when it's like to a major. Ramping up the level of tension. When it's when it's like you've already got that minor third in it. Yeah. And it just stays there. The flat 13 becomes the minor third.

Yeah, yeah. I use altered all the time going to major chords for sure. What I don't do a lot of would be like a straight and unaltered dominant going to a minor. Like a G7 to a C minor six, right? That's illegal. Like a, that wouldn't really happen like a,

that sounds terrible to me. Well, you know, the jazz police are in effect. That's how we do it. Cool. Well, thank you, everybody. Yeah, thank you guys for being here. I think you were correct. Your instincts were correct to that just a little bit an hour.

That's just a perfect amount. Well, yeah, I think, yeah, we start to fade after that. But also, we've got some audio podcast to record next. We still have an audio podcast? We still have an audio. And we're even, I don't know, I don't want to tease this out there, but we're considering I'm going back to Daily

Can you hear me? What? What the hell do you say? Going back to D-A-Y-L-W? Going back to daily. Don't say it. Oh, five days a week. That's not even daily.

That's just five days a week. We had some requests. I know exactly. Did we start out daily? We started out seven days a week. Come on. So dog bad. We were so desperate then for love.

So dumb. We're desperate for love. Cool. So thank you guys for being here. We are here every Monday at the You'll Hear at Live. program. This is like a sitcom. We consider us Laverne and Shirley.

Iggy and Squiggly. What were their names? Squiggy and Squally. Squally. No, no. It was Squiggy and Lenny. Lennie and Squiggy. Yeah, Lenny and Squiggy. Yeah, caricatures. How do I know that? That was before my time. Because you had like, you know, adult swim or something when you're growing up on cable TV.

Cool. Thank you everybody for the great questions today. Holy smokes. These were good. We'll be back here next Monday as well at, of course, 4 p.m. Yep. And until then, you'll hear it.