You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Tension in the Body

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Today, Peter and Adam give their (non-scientific or medical) advice on how to play in a way that's physically comfortable.The ending theme song for today's episode is "Billie's Bounce" by Clyde Stats. To get your music featured on You'll Hear It, send an MP3 recording of your music to [e-mail] 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.

Peter, hey, you look tense. I feel tense. I'm Adam Menace. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear's podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. I'm still having backspasms from when we sat up straight the other day. I know.

That was hard. Yeah. And there's a lot of tension in my body when we do this podcast. I have not found my podcast posture. Well, you know what? Just that today's subject matter has been a little bit tense, which is could work against it because I think what we're trying to preach here, the title of it that you have is tension in the body.

We don't mean we're going to give you tension in your body. I mean, we might a little bit, right? How do we, but I mean, as it pertains to, I think, playing our instruments and we've been talking about meditation. We've been practicing what we preach up in here, working on posture. I got the mic up high. I've got it adjusted for a six foot three individual, and I'm coming in at about five, six and a half. So that's pretty good, right? Yeah, yeah.

You know what? This subject, tension in the body, holding tension as you play, I think it is an underrated subject. If you talk to a, say, classical musician, they think of it. think about this all the time. Right. I mean, they do like, you know, Anderson technique stuff or whatever that is. You know what I'm talking about? I've never done any of him.

Alexander technique. Anderson technique is a different. That's a whole different thing. No, the Alexander technique, you know, sitting with great posture and keeping things in a lot. Alexander Hamilton. All right. We're way off the rails. We're already off the rail.

Isn't it named after him? I don't think so. I don't think so. This is from a email that we got from. He was named after Lamar Alexander, the senator, the senator from. Tennessee. Okay, no. We need lunch, man. We need lunch. This is a listener question from Darren. I was wondering if there were any podcast or two-minute shorts on what to do about tension in your neck, shoulders while playing. With my luck, as soon as I send this one, we'll pop up. No, because we haven't done one yet. No. Because we're not doctors. So I've always, I've always struggled with carrying a lot of tension in my back and shoulders when I play. It badly affects my ability to swing and play natural sounding music. Yeah. If you've ever dealt with it or help students learn how to relax and have good ergonomics, it would really help me to hear it. Cheers.

Darren. Okay, I will say again, we're not doctors. I want to really, because we rarely get into areas where we could get into trouble with our advice, but I feel like we're going to today. So I will say again, we are not doctors. No. We're not even doctors of jazz. No. But we both play Dr. Jazz. Great too. Jellero Morton. Shout out to New Orleans. I don't even know if we're bachelors yet. No. No. Yeah. But so we want to tread lightly and really encourage you. And this is not just, you know, from the you'll hear attorney team to consult a doctor before partaking in any kind of. treatment. But seriously, you should. Dr. Chiropractor, yoga. I mean, there's a lot of different things physically that you can do in general, I think, to help. So maybe what we can try to do is today is to keep it close to the vest and talk about things. Maybe we've experienced or things specific to music, to practice, to performance that have worked for us in terms of relaxation and removing tension, you know? Or not even getting to the point where you're not even getting to the point is the big part. And you know what? Tension starts not in the but in the mind.

That's right. And you're allowing your body to reflect something that's going on in your mind as you play. Right. And that just should not happen in the way. Dirty mind, dirty body. That's what they say. But the good news is you can practice not being tense.

Yeah. You know, and I think it starts in the practice room. It starts whenever you touch your instrument, every time you touch your instrument to practice, that you are aware of being relaxed, that you're aware of any tension and that you're not beating yourself up about the tension, but you just kind of let it go.

And allow your shoulders to relax, allow this entire carriage here, which is your shoulder and your arms, to just feel loose and relaxed at all times when you practice. That's where you start. Yep. And I think that just being mindful about the relationship that we physically have with our instrument and with our body, and it's absolutely with our mind. So that's why I'm saying being mindful of that. But the manifestation of that is a physical relationship we have. So it's not even like there's specific things for each instruments and we're maybe somewhat experts on piano but only that so you have to also consult really good players on your instrument as to what i mean like i hear trumpet players talking about i remember

terence blanchett has a whole thing about like how the breath comes through and the you know the horn all those things those can be super helpful so there's instrument specific things but then there's just your relationship with the instrument and being at a place where you can even possibly start from a relaxed standpoint you have to start from a relaxed mindset first yeah and then the tension that's in your shoulders, like I said, it starts in your head, in your mind, but it doesn't go right to your shoulders. It actually comes through your breath. Because if your shoulders are tense, I guarantee that you're not taking full deep breaths. You're holding your, you know, like that. You're holding your breath in, and you can start by deep breaths at your instrument or even just that's for

every, that we do know is for every instrument. I mean, just breathe. Like practice being relaxed and playing and breathing in a relaxed way. I mean, so many times we, you know, and a natural. Relax. way. Yeah, I mean, Ruben Rogers, the great Ruben who has done some of our great lessons on this for our courses. That's right. He talked about this. Yeah, it's so applicable to every instrument. Like, he's such a master.

And I've seen him do this. Like, he has such a good intuitive feel for this. He's automated it into his playing that when he gets to more tense parts of the music. Because look, there's going to be tension in music. I mean, tension or release musically is so important. How do we not manifest it? Like, he'll do a thing where things are getting really intense. And he just, like, automatically goes to.

into these kind of breaths, even as he's playing in a way, maybe with no breath. He has such a great relationship between his physical approach to his instrument and then his kind of intuitive understanding of the music and where it's going. But that all happens when we practice because when you get into the moment, no matter what you're doing practice-wise, if you're not practicing the right techniques for this and things that are going to keep you relaxed, you have no chance of doing it once you get on the gig, because there's going to be many things that bring tension to your mind and to the moment

who's in the audience. Do I know the music? I'm nervous and all these kind of things. So I think that we can think about practicing, you know, the breathing and relaxing and like all the things that we've talked about before in terms of like strength in your arms and wrist strength without tension, which is a very advanced technique but can be practiced every day. Like the other day we had the episode, what can I practice today? You can always start with doing that.

Just like if you're training for a marathon, it's like you can't go out the first day and run a marathon, but you can go out and run 100 meters or 400 meters or whatever you can do, That's where you're starting. And so this is, there's no preparation for being relaxed and strong with how you play. There's just advancement levels for you in the future. That's so great. Another thing I would say to this as I'm reading your question here is to stop trying to swing with tension. Like stop trying to use tension as a tool to swing.

I see this all the time. Don't you see this where people are like. Especially drummers. Yeah, see, we both went right to drums. Or even, but pianists do this too a lot. It's starting to swing and I really want to get it swinging. so I'm just going to, it just tenses up so easily. That does not, as you allude to here in your question, Darren, that does not help with swing.

In fact, it's counterintuitive or it counteracts the swing. Yeah. And you know who I would listen to for this? There's actually two modern pianists who I think swing super hard and are incredibly relaxed in their technique. Wait, one of them, one of them, let's see if we'd say it at the same time, see if we're thinking of the same person. Ready? Ready? One, two, three.

Kenney Carlin. Oh, that was my number two. too, so that's good. Kenny Kirkland is also one. I mean, listen, every great pianist just relaxes they swing. But I was thinking of Sullivan Fortner and Bill Charlep. They both have what I would call like a big movement technique, right? Where they're rolling with their hands.

You know what I mean? Big circles. And they sound super relaxed and they swing so hard. Bill Charlotte and Sullivan Fordner. And then, you know, Kenny Kirkland and Chick-Corps, I think, are two people in the same vein of swing. Exactly. And they sound like they're, they have a lot of tension. because they have so much intensity in their sound,

but if you watch them play, they're so loose. Oh, man, Kenny was, and Chickoria has such great, like, you can just see his relationship with the instrument. He has such a great physical, natural relationship with the instrument. Obviously, so much control, he can swing so hard. And then he does a lot of things that are very musically tense. That's a big thing. Like, we have to decouple the tension in the music that's inevitably there.

You cannot bring that tension on yourself. Like, you have to stay relaxed and strong. and be able to bring out the musical tension. That's different than physical tension. It is. And I think that's how tension happens in swing because swing creates this tension. I mean, if you're swinging,

you're starting to create tension and resolve it. And so I think people think they need to use that tension. Stop using that tension. You can only swing if you're relaxed. So practice trying to swing, really swing, and completely relax straight. And I think that there's things that you can do. I've always taken a lot of inspiration from athletics

for the physical approaches to playing the piano, Partly because, I mean, I think this can be done for a lot of instruments. It's just piano and violin, I know a little, but piano is the main one I know. And the reason I say athletics is, this could be any sport from, like, ping pong to basketball to running, to weightlifting, to yoga, you know, anything, to walking. I mean, everybody, some people say, I'm not an athlete. And I'm always like, everybody's an athlete. If you can walk, if you can, you know, do this, you're doing something on some level athletic. It's just from the idea of not competitive athlete, from the idea of, like, control of your body.

And so if you look to, yeah, certainly Kenny Kirkland and Chickerea and Bill Charlap, you know, for specific techniques of how they do the piano. But if you also look to people that know how to control their bodies in a very advanced way, I'm thinking like Usain Bolt, you know, the sprinter because it's such a specific thing. Talk about power with total relaxation. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And everybody thinks like, oh, like if you slow down, like I've looked at these analysis of his running form when he slow down, a lot of these same things like you're saying with Sullivan Fortner, like with the, you know, big round thing. That's the same thing. Like, it's never like,

eh, eh, and, see that, YouTube. You can see my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, he's making a very jerky, weird running motion. Yeah,

but I mean, everything is like a circle. Everything is like, economy of motion. Definitely not tense, like, eh, you know,

and his shoulders, it looks like he's reading a book or something. Yeah. It just looks like he's sitting in a chair relaxed and he's, you know,

the fastest man in the world. Yeah, and so we can take kind of large scale, you know, I think, almost like advice physically about the way an athlete would control their body and then apply it in ways that they're not obviously exactly the same but conceptually are very similar and then I think

what's important is you got to do something a way to balance like this is what I've learned from yoga a lot from from my very unadvanced yoga practice but I've you know my wife is a yoga instructor and I've followed her and watched her because I like her but I mean it's like you know like seeing like learning about yoga in that there's always a balance to everything. Like you're never doing something just on your right side or whatever. And so for the piano, we have to think about this because you can get out of balance

because of what the hands do. Of course. You know, how we are with the instrument. The instrument's physically awkward. So doing something, and I mean, I love and recommend yoga to a lot of pianists

in terms of getting in touch with your body, the athleticism of it, being able to control it in a way and being able to just do stuff, you know, balancing, push and pull. Like,

there's so much stuff. And then there's the actual balancing things that I don't know. And it's not about like, Look, was Oscar Peterson a yogi and doing yoga? He was pretty good without doing that. But so it's not like you have to do that. But that's one way when you can start to get in touch with your body and being able to control things on your instrument in a way that's effective.

It's just awareness, isn't it? It's just self-awareness. And that includes your body and the tension that's there. So, Darren, if you're serious about this, start practicing, swinging relaxed. You know, and make that a regular part of your practice until it starts coming through on your gigs when you're playing with other people. Yeah, yeah. And I think don't ignore it. Yeah, absolutely. That's like the way you actually can practice it on the gig. And I think if you think about the lack of tension and stuff, you want to go very, very basic so that you can be aware that you're in total control. So that might just be a C major scale where you're like, I know this. Of course, I know the fingers, but I'm going to be totally relaxed. I'm going to have, you know, be aware. Be very aware. Because when you're doing something difficult, it's just natural. Your body's going to tense up. You will start to be able to control it, but that's always going to be a part of it. I've seen the greatest performers still have some tension. So it's more. about like how do you control it how do you kind of ramp it back when it gets there if you feel

tension coming on you know take a step back in your mind focus on your breath that always helps absolutely and just stop sometimes stop don't just yeah stop you know kind of loosen it up another thing is like and i've actually never gotten that much into this but gregg hutchinson great drummer like he gets a lot of massages in specific areas because the the drums have i mean as physical as the piano as the drums is a very physical thing and so like i think his technique is very natural and stuff, but he's so aware of his body. He's like, I need, you know, massage here or whatever to get ready so that I'm real. And he's an amazing physical shape and an amazing musical shape. So I think that there's certainly some benefits of that. It's not an area I know

a lot about, but it's great. Good. Cool. Nailed it. Okay. So we have, we have this new program that we haven't been attending to, but has been a wonderful part of what we're doing, which is the listener tune as the outro. Did you know about this? I don't know listen to the you'll hear a podcast. I try not to. Okay. Well, I do occasionally. I don't always make it to the end. But the idea here is that you would send in something because we want to give the listeners

some love with their music and we want to hear it and we want everybody to hear it. So this is a chance for you to send something in. We just ask that it maybe be good for outro music. Like you've heard what we have here. Yeah, yeah. And so today we have something. We have yeah, a tune by Clyde Stats. Well, he didn't write it, but it's his

version of Billy's Bound. And we love the name too. But we also like the track. That's a great jazz musician. Actually, we haven't heard. Have you heard this? I haven't heard it yet. I haven't heard it yet, but we're about to hear it. Okay.

You know, so Clyde Stats is a great jazz musician name. I don't have a great jazz musician name. It's Adam Manus. First of all, there's the double M that we've talked about. Yeah. But, you know, my dad is Lester Earl Manus Jr. And so there was never a possibility because he didn't want to name his kid, but I could have been.

There's Lester Earl Manus III. Yeah. That would have been an awesome jazz. Could you imagine Lester Earl Manus, the third, big bands featuring Mildred Snitzer. I could totally see that. Okay, but as a professional jazz pianist, if my name were Lester Manus, come on.

I don't know. That could go either way, but... I don't know, man. It's pretty good. It changed my career. Good stuff. Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.