You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Should You Specialize?

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

In this episode, Peter and Adam decide whether it's better to be a Jack/Jill of all trades or if you should specialize in one instrument.Like 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, Peter. Hey. Jack and Jill went up the hill to find what? A bucket of water. Jack fell down and broke his... Humpty, dumpty. Sat on the... No?

Okay. I'm Peter Martin. You're listening to the You'll hear a podcast. Daily jazz advice and a certain inability to remember nursery rhymes. You know, some of our intros are better than others. And that one was the best. Oh, good. The world is upside down, apparently.

Truly, truly special. No, I was never like... I mean, I knew some... For a couple of professional improvisers, sometimes we fall straight on our phases. But this is... We're unscripted here. So we want to welcome you.

We want to thank our listeners. We don't do that enough. We love our listeners. For sure. And we've been getting a lot of love from all around the world. We love our listeners in the U.S. and Canada, of course,

Australia, UK, the English-speaking countries... Mexico, North American brothers down there. Well, no, I was going to say the Mexico, France... You know, the countries that English is not the main language. We really love and appreciate you guys for tuning in.

We even had a... couple folks that say they're practicing their English based upon listening to our podcast. There's a guy in Japan that told me that, and I said, wow, you're getting a couple of bad St. Louis accents. I was going to say, you're not getting the real deal, but we appreciate you guys. We love you. Thank you for being here with us and taking this journey with us. For sure. Speaking of that, well, we talked about a little bit yesterday. We'll just tell people, is there anything new developing for New Orleans, January, you'll hear it live. We don't have our date yet, but we do have, we are guaranteed. Well, we have the date range. We're still a little far away, right? Yeah.

We're very, very far away. So that's January 7th through the 10th is the Jen Conference. Peter Martin's given a talk there on something about business and jazz or something. I don't know. But we'll have our booth set up, come by and see us. And then come by the podcast on either the 9th or 10th. I'll announce the date probably next week. And you know what?

I'm going to go ahead and put this out there. Because we do improvise. If we can get enough, you'll hear it in an open studio, people there. We're going to do something special. Offsite, probably. They probably won't let us do it there. We're going to do the podcast. We're going out for drinks.

we're going out for dinner, we're going out to a gig. Something's going to jump off. I mean, we should probably get a gig down there at that time. Oh, yeah. Just go play somewhere or something? Yeah. Let's do it. It's going to happen.

All right. Put it on your radar. But today we are talking about something that I think is interesting and something that we've never talked about on this podcast, which after hundreds of podcasts, I figured we've talked about everything at least once. But this, I don't think we've talked twice about how we hate jazz. I know. That's something.

Okay. This is your idea. This is, is it better to be a Jack slash Jill of all. styles. Yes. Or to specialize. And I think this is a great topic because this is something that I think about quite a bit. Do you think about like your role in as a specialist or a generalist in the music? Absolutely. Because, you know, I'm interested in so many things, even beyond music, but even like as a pianist, I think, you know, for pianists, this is especially difficult because the training to become a pianist, it kind of lends itself to being able to go in a lot of directions, you know.

I mean, if you play the piccolo and you only play classical music, there's a focus that's kind of built into what you're doing that's beautiful. You know, because, you know, not to say that you couldn't learn to do different styles, but most likely you're kind of pushed into one area, but then you can really specialize. And you don't have to go through that decision. And then if you do go through the decision to do different things, it's such a violent thing to be able to do it.

You're probably going to rise to the occasion. But I think for pianists, like we kind of, you know, have that ability to go in a lot of different directions and it's a blessing and a curse, I think. So I'm not even sure exactly, I can't answer this definitively, and I know I put it on there.

You know, I think about this in the context of other musicians I know. So St. Louis has a rich history of sort of style of piano, like the barrel house style. Very blues-based. Yeah, boogie-woogie and blues-based. Leading into ragtime,

Scott Joplin was a Missourian and wrote a lot of his great rags here in Missouri. And half a mile from here. Yeah. So we actually have a small group of pianists that have moved here from places like Boston and Indiana and Europe. And Europe.

Yeah. To just come and play that style of piano here in St. Louis. And they're awesome. They're awesome. I always feel bad when I have to be the one to break to them that Scott Joplin is no longer alive because they come here thinking they're going to hang with him. I know, yeah.

But they're here to like, you know, absorb the culture and to be part of that. Yeah. that very niche genre, but I often think, like, well, I could never be that kind of musician. This is not how I roll for some reason. I don't know.

A part of me wishes I were more like that, but then a part of me is like, I don't know about that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Because I'm like, and then we also have a trad jazz scene here that's really rich, which is great. But then sometimes I'm like,

well, call me when you invent bebop. Right, right. And I'll join you. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't know. There's something about it that if you get super, super specific, like, I don't know. I think there is a way, you know, to kind of straddle the fence here.

I mean, I think about sort of the way, you know, there's always like the who do we want to be and then who are we? And I think as all of us as musicians, and certainly as people too, but, you know, music has a way of making things, especially being a jazz musician or kind of like creative improvising musician or artist. It has a way of clarifying things and like kind of cutting through all the BS from the who you think you are and who you actually are. of the fact that you are required at different times to get up and perform and be yourself. There's not a lot to hide behind, you know? So I look at it more as like, who actually are we? And, you know, I've spent like a lot of time learning very specific skills that a lot of people would view as being very, very narrow within the jazz world.

Yeah. And so then people kind of view me as that. But I'm always like, well, I'm so interested in this. And I'm all. And I'm, and I think you can be interested in those things. but still specialize in your thing. And once you find it, if you're lucky enough to kind of find it

and rally around it, you can really have some success. And I don't necessarily mean like, you know, doing big gigs. That might happen too. There's always the kind of luck factor of that, but just personal success to be like,

wow, I'm here kind of at least a good percentage of the time doing what I'm supposed to be doing, like what I was put here to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that, if you look at the percentage of humanity over the years and right now, not a lot of people,

a very small percentage of people can say that they're doing that. So if we can hit it like 40% of the time, that's a blessing. I mean, in a sense, then we're all kind of specialists

in that regard as far as just doing... I guess I was more talking about like a genreist like someone who's like... No, but I think that's... That actually becomes part of it. This whole thing of like saying like,

well, I'm a jazz, I'm a modern jazz player. Yeah. But I love like funk and I love doing this and whatever and you would get some chance to do that but you really do specialize in doing this thing

and like people are calling you to do that and like that's the genre you're associated with so you specialize in that. Yeah, yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that, I think. But it also doesn't mean you have to be like, that defines everything of who you are.

Yeah, I guess I just don't want to think about myself like that in those, in those boxes. You know what I mean? I don't know. It feels really it feels really limiting to what you can do. You're a little younger than me. You're not as enlightened as me. You're going to get there. You're going to get there. No, but I'll, okay, so let's, let's take you.

Let's take you. I'll give you my assessment of... Oh, here we go. No, no, no. So I would say, that you specialize in, like, you're a very flexible musician and flexible composed, like, your skills are super wide and varied. So, like, you could look at that and be like, well, you're a generalist, but those specific skills are actually applied to, you know, several genres, but actually in a very specific way.

That's true. So I would almost say that, like, you're very well focused on things that you have a great chance of having a lot of success, and you do have a lot of success because you're not really a generalist. Some, I think other people might be like, oh, he can play different things and whatever, but you do it kind of an umbrella of the way that you look at music and look at the world and surround yourself with other people and musicians, that I think it works

well. So you're actually kind of a good example of pulling together these different interests into something that's fairly specific. Do you think that just part of it comes from, because you mentioned yourself in that same way, do you think that just part of it comes from the role of the pianist? You know what I mean? We have to have, like, kind of both of these things happening to... Absolutely.

And I think that we both benefit and can lean into, as you've been saying, like our instruments. And when we do that and have some success, it usually means that we got lucky and got with the right instrument, basically. Because, you know, I mean, there's certain things that are obvious, like, you know, we associate a certain, like Christian McBride. I was talking about Christian. Like, as a baseball player, he's like, wow, he looks like a baseball player. He's, you know. But actually, it's like that was like a lifetime of a relationship with him and the. instrument as much as him defining the instrument and the instrument defining him maybe much more.

And so, yeah, it was a good match. And so it continued on. And then he becomes like, you can't see him as doing anything else. So it's like, you know, as much as the genre and him being a jazz bassist, primarily, like he can do a lot or different things. I know. I mean, he can DJ. He can play electric like crazy. And so he does that. But he really is actually a very specialized player. Like, if you look at the bread and butter of what he does, and I think he understands, the fun thing for me with Christian is I've known him so long. Like, he's leaned into him being just like a straight down the middle bass player for a very long time, like since he was a teenager. Yeah.

So he has, he's very comfortable with that. That doesn't mean he doesn't explore other things and he does. And so I think like the duality of this is what keeps it exciting. But when you do become comfortable, I mean, I know for me, like people are always like, man, you've got like this touch and like this kind of like, you know, harder swinging thing or whatever it is. You know, for me, that always resonated with me. So at a time when I was younger, I was kind of like, no, but I can do this, and I can do keyboards. But then at a certain point, I was like, you know what? Not only is that sort of my thing, I actually like that a lot.

So I don't stop exploring other things and trying to grow, but I'm cool with saying, like, this is my specialty. And then around the little 10, 20% edges, I've got some other stuff happening. That's a good way to think about it, I think. Yeah. All right, I'm going to try to expand my... You look skeptical. Well, I'm just not there yet. I just don't know.

You know what? as we were talking about earlier, you're a millennial. So you've got to, you're on the old side from... The oldest millennial. That's right. We were going to do an episode today called the world's oldest millennial, because you may actually be that. That sounds like a PG movie from the late 80s.

Well, and Andrew may be... You're a very young millennial, right? You're at the very beginning? I have no idea. He has no idea. That's typical millennial, though. Typical moment. A non-acknowledgment of it.

So we have a nice span here. All right, well, that was fun. Did we answer the question? No, I don't know. It was your question. I just don't feel. I think it was good. I think that, like I said at the beginning, this is not something that we should, no one

should have to answer it. And there isn't a right or wrong. I agree with that. It's like, how do you find the percentages and like, how do you find what works for you? But I think this thing we kind of hit on at the end about the instrument, like, that's a bigger thing than we realize, like how the, because as you get better in an instrument and more acquainted with it, it really does start to define you. And even if you start to learn another instrument, we were talking about,

that too, kind of learning other instruments. And you're a multi-instrumentalist. Like, how much do you decide for the piano defined? Like, are you... Like, I say that and you're like, so you probably would say, I'm a pianist. And so that means you're letting the piano define you, and I'm a pianist. And, like,

that puts you in a club, but it also is like, wow, okay, so that sort of tells me what I need to do. Like, that becomes its own little genre. For sure. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Hey, if someone wanted to leave us a rating and review, what would they do exactly? They would go to wherever they are listening or watching this podcast and just do it.

Like Nike says. How many stars would you recommend they give us? Well, I would recommend. I would require seven. I'm not even going to recommend seven. Okay. With that in mind. I haven't been dogmatic about that recently.

So I'm glad that you brought that up. Well, no, I'm just saying with that in mind and knowing that it is impossible, in fact, to give seven stars on most podcast. This has been disproven many times. I don't know why you always say that. How many times have we gotten the seven stars? Yeah, but in the comments, right? So I think that's the important.

So leave the review. and say seven stars, obviously. If you feel like it. So tomorrow then. You'll hear it.