You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Special Guests: An Interview With "Switched on Pop" (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

In this special episode, Peter and Adam interview fellow music commentators Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding from the hit podcast Switched on Pop.Links From This Episode:Dive into the world of pop music and learn about the song craft that goes into writing great pop tunes with the Switched on Pop podcastCheck out Nate and Charlie's new book Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why It Matters for more information about critical listeningToday's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)4:00 PM - register here for the Open Studio Demo & Tour8:00 PM - Peter and Adam present another Listening Sesh on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkIn light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.Interested 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.

Hey, Pete. Hey, Adam. Yo, man. Yo, man. Do you have a musical blind spot? Um, I do not. Why? Were you thinking of trying to expose it today?

I mean, maybe. Okay. We'll see. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Coming at you.

We have a very special episode today, Peter. Very, very special. I'm going to go dope you on you. You know how I like. to do that. You do like to go dopio. And we're, in fact, we're going to go quattro in a second. Have we ever gone quattro on one of our episodes?

We've done, what, 500 something now? Yeah. I mean, we've gone quattro quality occasionally as in one fourth quality. But no, we're going, we have some extremely special guests today. One of my personal favorite podcast, and I know a lot of our listeners

love this podcast because we've talked about it before and heard from folks, but truly one of the pioneers in the music commentary category of podcast. None other than Switched on Pop. We have Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. What's up, fellas? Hey, thanks for having us.

Hey, Adam and Peter. Great to be here. Honored to have the Quatro distinction. We're going Quattro. We're going quattro. And for the few folks that may not, we do have an occasional jazz nerd with their head buried in the sand, possibly.

Occasional? Are you kidding me? Well, you know, this will be a good test. This will be a good test. But we always feel like, you know, we're branching out. So for those few that have had their heads buried in the sand that went directly from, you know, the Manhattan School of Jazz, of Music, Jazz Department to wherever they're burying their heads. I want to just give you a quick thing about Switched on Pop. These guys have one of the most thoughtful, one of the most entertaining podcasts.

Their official description for Switched on Pop is a podcast about the. making and meaning of popular music. And Rolling Stone says, none other than the Rolling Stone. Not Papa has a Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stone magazine. Switch on Pop expertly delves into current pop radio, placing the creative output of Taylor Swift, Beyonce at all in a larger cultural and historical context. Music theory class was never this fun or addictive. But I've got a better description than either one of those.

These guys put on a podcast that is pop music for woke people. Can we put that on our website, Peter? Absolutely. I don't know why I wasn't there. I mean, I'm joking, but that really is a lot of what it is. Nate is a musicologist at USC at the Thornton School of Music, Charlie. Harding is an accomplished songwriter, musician, et cetera, and you can go to their website and listen to their stuff to find out more. But welcome you guys.

It's so good to have you here. Thank you. We love your work and really appreciate the dedication of your audience. Oh, man. Yeah, I was going to say, you got this, the music theory class was never this fun or addictive tag there is apropos. We were just looking at some of our most popular episodes. They usually involve things like jazz piano voicings drop two. So welcome, welcome.

And you know it's bad when you have a word like voicings that I constantly get auto-corrected on? Like, it's not even a word. It's so niche, you know. But when I say you guys are pop music for woke people, I was just thinking about. this. Okay, this is going to explain it for folks that haven't heard it. You guys use Kanye and Astonado within just a few seconds of each other on a podcast. And it's totally natural. And it like makes sense. And you guys break things down. And it's just a lot of fun. And I was just looking up. So I kind of got hip to you guys. Actually, the Mike Posner, beard face, beard

growing phase episode is when our mutual friend hit me to you guys or at least, you know, so I was a little bit late on the bandwagon because you guys. has been doing your thing since, what, 2014, 2015 around then? Yeah, exactly. 2014. Yeah, which is like, you know, a little ways in the podcast game. But some of the recent episodes that you guys have done, why Lofi is the perfect background, we were just joking about that one?

Were we wrong about Kanye? That's one of my favorite episodes. I got a lot of Kanye fans in my house here, my kids. Did Fiona Apple just release a perfect album? and a very topical one recently was the murder ballad of Joe Exotic. Tiger King. Little analysis of some supposed country music there. So that's good stuff.

So we thought we would just kind of talk about a couple things and break some things down and try to bridge the gap. Adam has some ideas on this in terms of the jazz audience, the pop audience, but really we're just talking about the music audience, right? Yeah, I mean, you guys talk about music and such an interesting and, accessible way. I'm wondering if you could just tell our audience, you know, what is Switched on Pop

and how did it come to you? What is your goal? What are you doing when you do a Switched on Pop episode? Yeah. Switch on Pop is a podcast that's always trying to balance two things, which is like revealing something about

the musical construction of a Top 40 Pop song, but also telling you why that, why you would, why that information might be important for the way you understand the role that music plays in our culture. So we always, we try to not have one thing without the other. You know, we never want to just like, like you were just saying, Peter, you know, we don't want to just drop a term like Astonado, tell you what it is, and then, you know, end of episode. Our goal, and the, the challenge is to introduce a term, a term,

musical concept and then like try to make that part of of your own vocabulary going forward so that the next time you hear a song with an ostinado you can identify what's happening in that song and then maybe understand why that song makes you feel a certain way every time you listen to it. I think we're trying to to both decode the modern songbook and to understand the role that pop music plays in our lives. I mean, very effective way that you guys do it. Well, I also thought, you know, it's interesting because I don't mean to, Peter, I'm not trying to degrade us or our audience, but we are.

We are due for some degradation, man. Come on. We are super jazz nerds, and our audience is. And I mean that in the most loving way possible, you know, we absolutely love to get into the weeds of music theory and break it down ourselves. and as we were kind of, you know, talking about doing this episode with you guys, it kind of dawned on me. Like, we were talking about the newest Fiona Apple album, which is great.

And you, Charlie, you did such an amazing breakdown on the Astonados in that opening track on it. And we were talking about maybe doing that. But then I was like, you know, Peter and I had just done this listening session on Kenny Garrett's songbook album from the 90s. And it was so popular here with our audience. And I was like, you know, the Venn diagram of people who love Kenny Garrett. and Fiona Apple is very, very small. And I thought maybe we could just have a conversation about why that is. Like, you know, both audiences are sophisticated and are listening deeply.

And there's obviously great, you know, musical mileage to get out of both of those recordings. But what is the difference? What, how are we listening differently? Are we listening to different things? Are we listening for different things? Are we hearing different things contextually? Is it just a matter of taste? I don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that

on how someone who is like super hardcore into instrumental jazz and really picks apart and listens very deeply in very sophisticated ways can't get behind something that's equally as sophisticated and heavy and can't hear those same things. And vice versa. Why someone who's super into pop music

and I know plenty of these folks too who can't hear jazz in the way that our audience can. We recently put a book out called Switched on Pop, how popular music works and why it matters that was trying to answer this question to get at why are there so many different ways of hearing and how can we adapt our own ear to be able to listen for all of the different kinds of musicalities?

When we listen to music, I think we really try very hard to suspend, especially for our show. we try to really suspend our tastes and try to enter into the music, trying to understand who's writing it, what were they saying, but also who's the audience for this thing

and what are they getting from it? And how is that music trying to translate whatever it's trying to accomplish? It could be something as silly as like, let's dance and have a good time. There's plenty of great jazz works that wants you to dance and have a great time in the history of jazz,

just in the same in the history of contemporary pop music. And the way and we're, which it tries to accomplish that goal might be really different between various genres and styles of music. So just to one point, jazz, of course, is highly technical, proficient music across all kinds of musicalities. But one era where it's probably less creative as a whole would be timbre. And in many ways, timbre is the most important part of pop music.

you might be using very simple harmonies, simple melodies, syncopated rhythms, but nothing that's going to get you to the point of, you know, the best drummers and jazz. But what's going on in the sound design and the production is what's giving that song and identity. And so oftentimes I think about if you hear a song, you're a total jazz head, and you hear work and it's something outside of jazz where you're just like, that's bad, it's not for me. I think it's always a question of like, how am I listening?

through what ears am I listening Am I understanding the way that that work is trying to say the thing that's trying to say And oftentimes it just means that we have tastes that value one thing over another Some people listen a lot for harmony Some people listen a lot for rhythm Some a lot for melody

So I would just encourage different ways of listening Different kinds of musicalities That's how I think about it But I'm also not the jazz professor I bet Nate has a lot more to say No that's amazing actually I think that's very true and a lot of the most

famous jazz recordings and some of the best, you know, the pianist has no say in how, and even the piano and the instrument they get to play. They just walk in, it's whatever's there. It was tuned in whatever way is possible. They have no, nobody has any say on how it sounds after it's mixed and master. I mean, they're not a part of that process. It's all just what, literally the content of what is coming out of our instruments, you know, and in the moment. So it's a great point. But I wonder too, I mean, to this point, Charlie, about timbre and texture and sound design. If we think about some of the most popular, you know, we were talking about pop music and what is popular, the most popular jazz records were very attuned to the sound. You talk

about kind of blue, and, you know, that's kind of, I mean, to me, you know, a lot of real, you know, jazz heads are like, they want to kind of put that record back a little bit because they're like, oh, that's not the greatest. But the playing is amazing, but it's also got this incredible sound. There was a lot of attention to the kind of detail. I think you were just referring to, kind of an outsized amount from most jazz records, and it's one of the best selling jazz records of all time. Interesting. Interesting.

Yeah. Is there a connection, correlation? But I mean, you know, jazz drummers think about texture and timbre and sound and nuances so much in a live situation. And it is, I think, a problem in so many jazz recordings. It's like, we'll sit there and debate. Are we going to play a minor six or minor seven, sharp 11? And then we don't spend any time talking about what, let's go back and really hear what the sound of the.

the bass is. Like how can we adjust that or whatever? Whereas in pop music, you know, I mean, now we're getting into some generalizations. But for sure, it's an element there. I don't mean to say, of course, that jazz musicians don't care about tamper. I mean, tone is essential, right? And certainly, there are so many examples where jazz is pushing at the boundaries of tambour. But I would say that on the whole, tambour is overly privileged in popular music and that so much of, you know, Like the large body of jazz, again, this is a generalization, is generally on live recorded instruments and less in synthetic and sampled sounds that can sort of really alter and create unhuman, never heard before sort of things. Do those worlds blur? Absolutely often. Not that often. And I think on the whole, statistically, one prefers the other. Right.

Yeah, I think jazz, to put on my, as Charlie suggested, my professorial elbow patches for a minute, I think jazz has a historically kind of uneasy relationship with technology, certainly not an entirely adversarial one, but I think so much of the sound of pop music is entirely predicated on its, it's newness and the idea that you turn on your radio and you, you know, might hear a sound that you've never heard before, a timbre, something created in a digital audio workstation by Scrillex or someone, that is the kind of foundation of that song is the newness and the boldness of it. that, you know, doesn't always track with a certain more backwards-looking impulse in jazz, I think. Right, right.

So I'm wondering if, like, you know, the Venn diagram you referenced before, Adam, Kenny Garrett's songbook and Fiona Apples. I would actually love to know the statistics on that. Yeah, yeah. I really do want to know demographics. Well, you know, if in the middle, like, to me, me somewhat of the missing link in terms of influencing. We have to talk about Stevie Wonder because he's not a jazz musician and he's not a, I mean, obviously he's extremely popular and you would put him in the pop genre,

but he is the one that can link, you know, I mean, you talk about being at that cutting edge of technology. He's been there since the beginning of that. And not only Stevie, but I mean, you have artists like this that are able to bridge, you know, texture, sound, timbre. sound design, harmony, you know, jazz influence blues, obviously, you know, rhythm and blues, all these different elements in such an organic way. But what I think that you guys do that's so cool, you mentioned Nate earlier, decoding the modern songbook, I think is how you put it. And,

you know, in some ways, switched on pop, analyzing pop music, it's kind of easy and almost lazy, as much as I love Stevie Wonder and all the OGs of pop music, you know, it's a lot easier to go back and like analyze or James Brown's funk groove. And I know you guys got into a thing about that. It's like, it's kind of easier to go back. Yeah, we know that stuff's great. We love listening to that. But it's like what is happening with modern, you know, modern pop music and how is that

taking those elements? And I think that part is very much like the jazz world in terms of, you know, we have these things with young jazz players. It's like, well, how much are you taking from that? Are you playing too automated? Are you using technology too much? Is it quantite? You know, all these same kind of things translate over. But was that like a conscious decision? Did you guys kind of have guardrails up on Switched on Pop in terms of how far you're going to go back? Yeah. I think the, you know, our backgrounds are probably a big part of this story. And the fact that I think we, you know, six years ago, we were really sitting where you are now in a way. Like, we. we were outsiders. We were not, we didn't know anything about pop music.

Frankly, I don't think we respected pop music very much. I think we would probably self-identify as a jazz snob, myself, jazz slash classical, Charlie maybe. And I was probably the rock electronic own form of snobbery. And, you know, we started this podcast. Sometimes we describe it as like, the idea was it would be kind of a Trojan horse that, We wanted to introduce musical, technical ideas and vocabulary to people through this kind of Trojan horse of pop music, like this kind of friendly, approachable body of music. Always very contemporary. And then we would sneak in, yeah, sneak in harmony and melody and sygapap and other ideas through that.

And then what happened was that we kind of Trojaned horse ourselves. and ended up, like, really loving and respecting and, and kind of having our ears stretched open by diving into this repertoire week after week for years on end. Was there a moment or a track that did that for you? Was there a moment where you like, this is like this thing I've loved my whole life? What is that? The song that kind of started us on this journey was Call Me Maybe by, Carly Ray Jepson, the Inescapable Summer hit of 2012.

And I still, I just taught a class today and I showed, we, I analyzed that song with my class, and I'm kind of amazed how there's still features of it to unpack that I never noticed before. And it's really, and I think it was the perfect vessel for us, because on the surface, if you're familiar with Call Me, maybe, and if you're not, go check it out. It is like a very kind of bubblegum pop song with a really kind of simple message in the chorus and all these synthesized textures. And it's kind of this like three minute little escapist fantasy sung by a teenage girl. So it was like everything I think that we kind of rejected about pop in one song.

And yet as we listen to it more and more closely, there were these things that emerged that we begrudgingly were like, oh, that's actually kind of clever, you know, the way the chorus never lands on the tonic chord of the song, which is G major. That kind of keeps the harmony

unsettled and unresolved. The way that the lyrics switch from past tense to present tense in the chorus to at the same time as the melody kind of explodes into dynamic motion, that sort of mirrors the narrator

transformation over the course of the song. And as we went on, we were like, uh-oh, have we been, you know, are there other songs that we kind of rejected out of hand that also might have surprising depth to them? And I think our, the, trying to find the answer to that has been what keeps motivating us to do the show week in, week out. Oh, that's great stuff. Okay, so you're, I think that you're opening the door just a little bit with your Trojan horse the nose of it is you're helping me out here because

go on Peter step through. Well, no, I mean, this is, no, I've talked about this before. We're actually not nearly as dogmatic, probably as our audiences, first of all. Most of the stuff I listen to, like, there's a record Kirk Franklin long live love from last year that like, I mean, when I'm in my car, like, that's all I listen to. And it's not that I don't love John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins or Keith Jarrett. And I know these records and Miles Davis, of course, Kenny Garrett, Stevie Wonder, but there's something about, I mean, I know exactly what you're

talking about, like when you have that intersection of, I mean, for me, it's groove, and I want to talk about the funk thing, because I'm super interested in that and how that, because to me, blues and funk just intersect all these, you know, rock and roll and R&B and jazz much more than we always, you know, than we ever give it enough credit for. But, I mean, you know, that Kirk frankly, the groove, the gospel groove, which is another thing kind of like jazz, it pulls it all together, but you're talking about a highly produced, you know, I mean, the bass drum is just like perfectly tuned. You guys could do, in fact, can I put a request in for an episode on the basestrum on that road? We're overdue for a Kirk Franklin deep dead. I don't know if he's,

he was canceled though for a minute, wasn't he? Hopefully he's uncanceled now. I think he's uncanceled. Yeah. Okay, good.