You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Best Of "You'll Hear It" - Culture

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

Today's "best of" episode deals with the culture of jazz. From episodes 2, 21, 23, and 30. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hi, folks, Adam Mattis here, and today on the You'll Hear It Podcast, it's a very special episode. We are taking a little break from new episodes this week, and we're airing some best ofs. And today's best of is on culture. It's on the culture of jazz and the community of jazz, and we hope you enjoy it. We've been having fun with these so far this week. We'll be back next week with some new content, but until then, please enjoy today's episode on culture. Peter, should you worry about the jazz, please? No. And do we think that anyone should worry about the jazz police?

No. Okay. So we could end it there, but let's just unpack, as they like to say, this concept a little bit. First of all, the jazz police, as I know it, can appear at any time. They're like the FBI and the CIA and the KGB all wrapped into one. They're always undercover. They're always undercover. But once they rear their ugly heads, you'll be able to identify that. Yeah.

But, I mean, basically, the jazz police are people that say, jazz is this. Jazz has to be played in this in X way, and this isn't jazz if it sounds like why. And I think, you know, for me, it really just goes against the creative and boundless and fenceless nature of the music to even be thinking in those ways. I totally agree. If you are always worried about what, you know, some kind of nameless, faceless entity that decides what isn't anything, you're never going to make good music. What you want to do is take in as much knowledge and opinions and you want to listen to what people are saying about the music and what they have said about the music. And then you want to do what's right for you. This is a

personal music. And if you're trying to appease in a way that's not natural for you, the audience is going to smell it out way before the jazz police will. So just do what you are, you know, what feels right to you and that will always connect with the audience. Absolutely. And I mean, this is the thing. When we say, don't worry about the jazz police, we don't mean just string together bunch of random notes and play whatever you want without any attention to the detail of the actual rules of music. That's very different. So that's all based around, you know, playing things that sound good, however you're going to do it. And there's many ways to do that. And that's what we're putting our energy and attention into how the music sounds as an ensemble and how we fit into that.

Well, and you can actually string together random groups of notes if that's your concept and you have a reason behind it and you know what the opposite of that is and how it works and it grooves and you're connecting the way you want to. I think that's part of it. That's what we're kind of saying. Like, you do you as long as there's intent. You want to make sure that your audience knows the intent of what you're doing. And if you're doing that, I mean, there's no police, jazz, or otherwise that can tell you

what to do. You know what I mean? You have the right away. Absolutely. The first thing I would tell my younger self is absolutely to relax. This took me longer than it probably should have to learn that when I, I'm a lot of, that when I want to increase the intensity when I'm playing, that I actually need to be more relaxed than I think I do. You know, we tend to tighten up, we shrug our shoulders, we forget to breathe,

you know, we do everything we can to try to coax the music out in a way that we think is, like, you know, I don't know, cool or soulful or something or whatever, but it just makes you tired. I think I heard that somewhere. Right. So I would definitely tell little 16-year-old Adam, who wasn't actually very little at all, because I was a, large person even back then, I would say, yo, just chill out, just relax, man. Right, right. Okay, that's cool. So one thing I would definitely tell myself and even tell some interesting players that I know now, probably tell their younger selves as well, is don't try to play everything you know in every solo or in any one solo, right? That's good. Yeah, I mean, we,

you know, it's such a skill to be able to develop, but I'm like, why did it take? me so long to finally get to this point. There's going to be another tune. You know, it's very rare that you're only going to have a chance to play one solo for any particular audience, you know, and even if you do, if you try to shove too much in, they're never going to want to hear you play again anyway. They're like, oh, we caught everything that he knows how to do. So, you know, although we want to impress people and we want to put our best foot forwards, we have to think about playing what the moment needs, and that's very rarely everything that you know, unless you don't know much, you know. That's, that's category I found out. Well, you know, I mean, I think I didn't

really know much younger, Peter, but I had a certain facility to play a bunch of stuff, even that I didn't know, and I felt the need to always put that into all my solo. So what I would do is tell myself, say, look, just take one thing that you know you can do well. One little nugget, maybe? One little nugget of melodic information or whatever for your improv, and just develop that and concentrate on that and be confident to know that you can bring up all those other great ideas. you may have in later years. I mean, it's so funny, but we do learn it as we get older, that confidence of just like, you know what?

This is going to be good. Even if I don't play a lot right this second, it's going to be good. And that takes a little bit to understand, but try it. On your next solo, try. Just having the confidence to say, like, you all are going to wait for me,

and it's going to be very rewarding by the time we're home. You know, the phrase you'll hear it is often used on the bandstand in context of, hey, let's try this tune. And the piano player says, oh, I don't know that tune. And then the person who called the tune says, you'll hear it. And what they mean is, we're going to play it.

And you should be able to hear what's going to happen and anticipate a little bit. Follow the bass player, figure it out. And hopefully by the end, you've got the song. Right, right. And I'm just thinking, too, I guess a lot of times, unless it's sort of an adversarial bandstand situation, it's often preceded by, don't worry, you'll hear it. Exactly, yeah. So it's not necessarily a negative thing in terms of, oh, you'll hear it,

and then that's a challenge. Yeah. It's more of a, we're going to lay it out in a simple enough way that you'll hear it, or you're such a great player that you'll hear it, or some combination maybe. Yeah, and sometimes it's not even about a whole tune. Sometimes it's like, hey, I do this thing on the bridge. Don't worry, you'll hear it. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like I have this substitution I like to use, or, or, hey, we do this, we usually put this tag on the end, don't worry, you'll hear it. It's a very common way to express that maybe something's going to happen that you don't know about, but we're going to make it clear, hopefully you'll get it, and, you know. Yeah, and I think it's a little bit of a kind of a call or signal to talking about or communicating something within the music amongst the musicians, and then hopefully even to the audience, in really just a musical way.

It's almost like, you know, sometimes we'll say, oh, we're going to go to the D half diminished, but before the G we're going to go. And they're just like, oh, you know what, don't worry about it. You'll hear it. It's almost like we can, I'm going to show it to you, but I'm going to show it to you in the music where it's a lot easier to describe with the sound of the music as opposed to words. That's right. And, you know, jazz traditionally is passed down, you know, from musician to musician. It hasn't really been passed down with written music as much. Right. It certainly has, you know, in certain situations.

but in general it's passed down on the bandstand, on the jam session, in the practice rooms, you know, at house parties. And so this, you'll hear it at a lot of brothels. In the brothels. That's what the books say. Dude, we've all, no. But this idea of, you know, an oral tradition of you'll hear it, I think is part of this music and part of probably many different types of folk music, American or otherwise. Absolutely. I'm going to go out on a limb a little bit and say what I'm going to say what I'm.

I think is the greatest jazz club not only that has ever existed, but the greatest that exists now in the future, in the past ever. And that is the Village Vanguard in New York City. It's a great little place on 7th Avenue, south right there by 12th Street. And anyway, the Village Vanguard, I mean, I played there, had the pleasure to play there quite a few times, heard many great recordings, iconic recordings made there, of course, course, it's got a great history that goes back almost 100 years at this point, which is pretty amazing. Max Gordon, of course, founded it. But the greatest thing I think about the village

vanguard is that it never changes, or it changes very little. I know a few years ago they got rid of that that loud old school cash register, and I heard that they actually started accepting credit cards recently. But basically, they keep the stage, the dirty old curtains behind the stage. Everything kind of stays the same. Even when it's replaced, it's kind of replaced the same. So what you get is this incredible sound on stage for the musicians, incredible sound in every seat throughout the venue. I mean, one of my favorite places to sit there, a little pro insider tip for you guys, sit at the bar all the way at the end, the furthest away seat, which you would think is the worst seat. But there's great sound there. And that was Betty Carter's favorite place to sit.

That was Cecil Taylor's favorite place. I saw them almost getting a fight over that seat one night. That's amazing. I love them there for that. But the Village Vanguard, you know, they booked the right people almost all the time. I mean, you can kind of just show up there and don't even worry about who's playing and just know that you're going to have a great experience. Yeah, I mean, how many times have you done that where you're just like, oh, let's just go to the vanguard. I don't really even know who's going to be there, but you know it's going to be good. I always know it. I'm just saying you could do that if you wanted. I have actually, when I lived in New York, I used to do that all time. Yeah, well, let's go to the vanguard, check it out, see who's playing,

and it's always killing. And sometimes you get lucky and you get to be right up front in one of the greatest jazz clubs in the world. But like you said, man, there's no bad seat in that place. Everything sounds good. Everything sounds like the records you've heard, you know, all the iconic records. It's the best jazz club in the world. I mean, I think, too, if you were like, you know, there's things, all the seats are great, but if you want a special kind of thing, if you're a drummer, get there early, and you want to hear the drums sit on that bench kind of back there by the drums.

You'd get a very special experience on that back bench couch thing. And for the piano, there's the other side. So there's specialized things, but yeah, yeah, it's all good. I got to see Paul Motion on that bench. That was incredible. All right, cool. Hope you enjoyed that. Please go to you'll heara.com and leave us a question.

Stop it and say hi. Leave us a voicemail. Please don't forget to leave your ratings and reviews. Leave us a vacation rating of eight stars. I'm sure Peter would appreciate seeing some ratings and reviews as he's traveling the world this week. We appreciate any of those that may come in. And we'll be back tomorrow with another best of episode.

That one's going to be on tunes, some of our favorite moments from episode. that are on specific tunes. So until then, you'll hear it.