You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Talking Politics

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

It's another live edition of You'll Hear It where Peter and Adam take your questions. It's Election Day in America, so today Peter and Adam discuss politics - workplace politics that is.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.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 on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet 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.

Good stuff, good stuff. All right, let's do our quick, before we get to the Q&A's, give you another chance for the Q's to show up. Fitness and Diet Check-in, where you're at. Where you're on your diet, not your diet, your food lifestyle. Let's call it that. My food lifestyle. So, dude, I eat, I pretty much do the whole 30 now. Did I tell you about this?

I investigated what my diet has become, and it's one of these challenge diets. And I'm not trying to challenge myself. This is what I kind of like win. into, right? I'm eating no processed foods. That's good. Essentially, like zero. Yeah. Like, no dairy even because it's processed. Like, no cheese or anything like that.

I was eating a lot of night cheese, man. I was eating like pounds of cheese a week. She's good. Cheese is so delicious. But I'm not eating any dairy. I feel awesome, not eating dairy. It's weird. I also feel super focused. What's that? Bread? No bread at all. No bread. I got a good bread for you. I'll tell you about that a second, though.

Is it processed? See, this is what I'm saying. No, it's sprouted. See, I can maybe get into that. but yeah and then like very minimal grains like barley and you know wild rice or whatever yeah and then minimal meat like you know I still eat plenty of meat but not as much as I used to for sure and then once a week I'll have a bit of a cheat meal like we had we got some max local eats burgers on Saturday night for Halloween I had a bunch of Halloween candy at a great time yeah that's all processed it's all processed yeah so I have my like you know my little cheat time right

not even a cheat time though. It's just like a little time to celebrate with my family and then kind of back on it the next day. But it's interesting because when you eat so cleanly throughout the week, you have that cheat meal. Man, you feel like crap. I know. You feel terrible. I know. Dehydrated and just. Right, right. Did you have many kids for Halloween at your house? We had, man. So we got, we forgot to turn off the lights. We had these Halloween decoration lights. We meant to turn them off so that we wouldn't get kids. Yeah. Because we just, you know, for safety reasons. And we forgot to. So we got some kids. And, Luckily, we had some candy available.

And, but it was funny because I put the candy in a big bowl. We had a big, like a plastic Ziploc bag of it that Heather had had out for a couple of days. So we put the candy in a big bowl. I just dumped it in the big bowl when the door was being knocked on. Put it out there. And this little girl was dressed up like Wednesday Adams from the Adams family. She's going through the candy. And she's just like, there's just a bunch of empty candy wrappers in here.

And I was like, ah, so the kids had gotten into the candy into the big plastic. throughout the week, right? And have been sneaking candy and then just putting the rappers back in. They're like raccoons in the wilderness. They're like raccoons. And I felt so bad for this little girl who's like, I gave her a bowl of candy.

It's just like half empty rappers, you know, and so she finally got enough. But then I fixed all that. I put the bucket out. Yeah, it was basically a bucket of candy just out on the front porch, you know, like take whatever you want. And within 15 minutes it was all gone.

Like someone came by. You know what they did? They left one little piece of candy. Like their parents were like, don't take all of it. Right, right. And they just left one little thing. I was like, thanks everybody.

We did not have a lot of kids this year. I mean, we maybe had eight or seven. I mean, it was kind of depressing. We were sitting out there because the weather was nice. And just no, there's not a lot of kids came by this year. We had a few. We had a couple neighbors. And yeah, we did the same thing, left it out.

But there was still stuff left in the morning. Really? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And we had like across the street and across as they do great, like scary. They have like the haunted house and the front and everything. I think 2020's been scary enough. That's what it is.

Nobody's, nobody wants to be scared. It's scared anymore. No one wants to be spooked. Yeah, reality is just terrifying enough. That's right. So, Milin O'Ritchie asked, have you guys heard of Dr. Michael Greger? It's funny, I was just about to mention, I'm a huge, yes, I'm a huge fan of Michael Greer.

Are you a fan of, do you know about Michael Greger? I don't know who that is. Michael Gregory, this is a game changer. Now, somebody sent a question, and it might have been on the chat last week or something. I saw it somewhere talking about nutrition facts. Dr. Michael Greger is the brains and the brain. Braun behind nutrition facts.org, which I highly recommend. Somebody sent me a couple links because we were talking about caffeine and alcohol in relation to playing and practicing, I think a couple

weeks ago. And they recommended some videos. And so thank you. Maybe that was Myelin O. Richie, even that did that. But Michael Greer, this nutrition factors, like anything you want to find out about in terms of nutrition and how it might affect you, he does an analysis only of his whole thing is, let's put it to the test. He analyzes scientific studies of how food causes disease or solves disease or cures diseases, but he only analyzes ones that are like not sponsored by food companies and drug companies, which they're not a lot of actually. I know, I know.

I mean, he'll look at ones that are sponsored by a food company, but he'll always like expose the implicit or explicit bias that it has. And like, you know, it has to be a certain double blind study and blah, blah, blah. And he's very, and he takes no advertising on there. There's no like drug companies or food companies that can sponsor. it. And so, like, for instance, you can go and find out, you know, like, is caffeine safe? And he'll basically just go through a bunch of studies that have looked at people's health and not when it's like caffeine and exercise and alcohol altogether. Because then you never know cause and effect and all that kind of stuff. So it's really, I highly recommend it to everybody. Now, I'm not a doctor. I've been called Dr. Jazz before, but even that, I'm not. I'm not. No. Adam, are you a doctor? I'm not. Okay. So we put that out there. Now, we're not doctors. But Dr. Michael Greger is a doctor. That's right. And no, he's great. And no, he's great. And I mean, full disclosure, he's a big plant-based guy. Yeah.

But the reason he is is because of all the studies. And, you know, he's coming out of the origins of, like, Dr. Pridikin back in the 70s and 60s and stuff. His grandmother was actually one of the case studies from Pritkin back in the day on the early plant-based diets and stuff. But it's really, you know, like heart disease, you know, talks about the causation of that. And, you know, these studies from all around the world that have shown over and over again, you know, how a plant-based diet can basically cure all these things. So you have a fitness check-in, though, that we should talk about because you've had a pretty big day yesterday. I had a, yeah, well, it was, you know, it was early. So it wasn't the whole day.

I got some arranging it afterwards. Yeah, so I did a half marathon. My fifth half marathon. I would have, man, that would have been my whole day. I would have been celebrating. I would have been high-fiving the rest of the day. Yeah. Well, you know, during a pandemic, marathons are like you get to the mask on until you start running.

Then you can take it off. Staggered starts. And then when you get done, mask back on. No high-finding. and get off the course. I was going to ask. So it did happen live, though. It wasn't just like on your phone.

Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. At least you got to have some of that. Yeah, there's been very, very limited races. I mean, there's stuff around the country and there's been very little in St. Louis City and County, but this one was approved, limited numbers and spaced out. And it was great. It was very well done, very safe.

Weather was nice. Got super windy. But it was fun. It's always fun to get out there and knock off some miles. And so my fifth half marathon, I like to also. call it my second and a half full marathon depending on how you count it is that okay?

I'm doing the math in my head yeah that doesn't work oh it doesn't work I keep trying to I keep saying if I say it'll it'll work all right good so shall we get into the oh yeah somebody mentioned on here I mean that you could give this a like oh you know what it is remember when we said

we're not going to come on until they give us to see we exposed ourselves early they didn't give us a like so give us a like if you're enjoying these Monday lives I want to do that intro again. I wasn't ready for that intro. Let's do it. We can't do a redo live, man. No take twos.

Thanks, Luke. Thanks for the congratulations. Not politics, politics. That's a different thing, exactly. Okay, so let's throw this one up there from Pickingstone from our friend Alex from the left coast here. I got the question. Getting a little frustrated at work and I want to know, do musicians have to deal with work politics? You know what I mean.

If so, how do you both deal with that stuff? Well, this is a little bit of a sensitive subject because Adam and I ostensibly work in the same workplace at times. Although, I don't know, I think I wouldn't really look at this as a workplace or even Open Studio in general. I mean, I guess it is. No, it certainly is. It is a workplace.

Tell it to HR. I know, yeah, tell that to HR. But I would say. But we've worked on musical terms as well, and that's a different vibe. That's, yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, whenever you're getting frustrated with work politics, like, I think that there's like kind of a mindset that you can go into any situation. Like I would look at bands that I've played in, either leading or being a sideman in over for a number of years as the equivalent of workplaces. They very much could become workplaces if we're not careful, I think, and we start to treat it like work. And I think it's important for us as musicians. that we recognize if something, you know, this is such a gift and a blessing to be able to play music and to teach music and to talk about music because this music is fun. You know what I mean?

Like this is something that we do whether we're making money or not. So like there should be a gray area between the professional and the fun part of it. Like that's the whole reason I think that we're doing this. I'd be playing music no matter what, even if I didn't get paid to do a gig or to teach. teacher or whatever. So it shouldn't feel like work. Now, do we work hard at it? Absolutely. Because we want to get better because it becomes even more and more fun. So I think the politics that in a lot of, say, corporate situations or even smaller company situations, it becomes about like how can I pull somebody else down or how do I get ahead? How do I get the boss's attention?

How do I get to this position? How do I get to this corner office? How do I get to go on this special trip? Like there's all different things that you can aspire to that are not necessarily directly related to the actual endeavor if it is a law firm, if you're a doctor, if you're whatever. Like if you're chasing your firm belief, like Dr. Greger, like his whole thing is about, you know, helping people to eat better and to live on it. I mean, like, that's his mission. So that's what he does.

He writes books. He does this website and stuff. And then the reason he doesn't take, you know, sponsorship on there is because it would get in the way, not because he doesn't want to make money. I don't even know how he makes money. He somehow makes money. but that would get in the way of his main goal, which is getting this information out to help people change their lives.

So when we're playing music, the whole thing is about like, how do we play music better? How do we help others play music? Like when you keep your eyes on that, I think the work politics part of it, which is really based upon you against somebody else. You know,

like there's probably, it's almost like the problem we're having in politics in general now. It's all about I'm better than you. You're better than me. My party's better than you. It's not about how can we serve the people more. Like, what happened to public service?

Like, that's the actual job of a politician, you know, and we shouldn't even call them politicians. We should call them public service. And also the job of the citizens, ideally. It's not just a take. It's a give and a take between. Right. Yeah.

Man, we really got on real politics very quickly. I know, I know. Well, so I think the only, I mean, to your point, there's not many political situations that I think it would be like what you would consider Alex like normal office politics, but there is between artists, like say someone wants to get booked at Jazz St. Louis, they only have so many shows a year that they would book, right? So there are touring artists and local artists that are all sort of vying for those coveted spots. And the only

difference is, and maybe it's not a huge difference, but it is kind of a difference is you have currency if you can sell tickets or if artistically, you are, you know, in the zone of the place that you're trying to get booked. Or even if you think about as a player and you're trying to get a gig, right, with a band or another artist, like if you can offer them something of value, anything of value, then this could be where politics comes in, because people like to avail themselves of value that aren't necessarily musical, right? So it's like, you know, well, I can get you into this venue or, you know, my cousin plays with Santana so we can open for Santana, you know what I mean, or something like that. There is that kind of thing. But in general, the great thing about

music is, is then you have to get on stage at some point and play. Right. Right. And so, So you can't still suck. Like you have to have some kind of results that happen. Right. Now, there are other ways that you make yourself valuable or not valuable, and that definitely matters. And also, like, you know, I mean, I don't know, politics is such a strange word to use with this. But like, you know, if you're an a-hole, like, that's not going to, even if you can play, there's certain people that just don't want to be around you, right? Or if you're just...

But that doesn't necessarily mean, like, if you're a good person to be a real person to be a real thing. around, I think sometimes, you know, people would be like, oh, he's so political, she's so political. That almost becomes, has a bad connotation. I think what you're talking about is just not being an a-hole. Right. Just not being somebody that's pleasant to be around. You don't have to be like, hey, how you doing? And like, let me hook you up and playing the political game, as we would call it. But you can be easy to work with, and that's valuable. Yeah. I think being easy is valuable. Being fun is even more valuable if you are. Yeah. You know, but ultimately, again, If you're all those things, but you're not valuable on the bandstand, it doesn't matter.

Right. I just, I look at like music, it becomes, it's such a, it's such a singular purpose to what it is we're doing that it should clarify things. You know, like, I would rather work with somebody that is not only a great musician. Like, say you're in a performance situation. You're in a performance. Okay. So somebody that is a great musician and wants to work with others to. to put out the best performance possible, right?

So, like, they might be hard to work with outside of that, but for that purpose, they're very easy to work with. They might be totally introverted and not even want to talk to you, but when it comes to, like, their professionalism of playing music and knowing that, like, we're coming together to do a job here. That job is not to make each other happier for me to get ahead or whatever. That job is to put on the greatest performance possible, given the elements that we have.

To me, that's the greatest thing. And they might have be seen as, like, the most politically, you know, great person to work with or whatever. But because music, I mean, it's just like kind of, you know, you're on a basketball team or whatever. Are they fun to hang around with after the game when you're on the road? Okay, that's good. But like, do they pass you the ball at the right time?

Do they give the ball back? You know, are they ready to shoot at them? Do they play defense hard? Like those things, what you do on the bandstand matters. And I think that, you know, we're keeping that in mind. So sometimes certain workplaces, it's kind of unclear what the purpose is. You know what I mean? So it's like for playing music, it should be very simple for everybody to know.

You're trying to lift up and serve the audience. To me, like, I'm a people pleaser. If I have any problems, if I have any fault, instead of. No, but I mean, we're not playing for ourselves. We're playing for people. Now, we are people. So we're part of that people. But I mean, this is a service oriented industry.

It's like being a waiter. I look at it like that. You're not there to be like, look into my great food and now I'm going to go eat it. No, you can stay home and cook then or present food to yourself. But we are here to like serve others. people food. We are here to serve people music. We're just the conduit for them. Totally great.