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

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

Today's "best of" episode is all about gigs. From episodes 5, 26, 31, and 35. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What's up, everybody, Adam Manus here. And this week we are doing best-of episodes of the You'll Hear Up podcast. Peter is gigging out of town. And it's the middle of August, summertime, and thought it would be a nice time to take a little break. But we are doing these curated best-of episodes, mostly from the first half of our run here. We've been going hard at it since January,

so we have quite a few to choose from. But today's theme is gigs. These are episodes of the You'll Hear at podcast all about gigs. And our experiences and how to gig. get them and a whole bunch of good stuff. So hope you enjoy. If you get a gig, you want to keep the gig, right? Ideally. So the first thing I think about actually has nothing to do with music, and that is personality.

And that's basically being somebody that others want to work with. I guess we could look at a gig, like a solo piano gig, and you might say, well, you don't need to get along with anyone with your personality, but you still have to get along with the audience in some respects. But a lot of times we're talking about getting a gig and keeping a gig. It's interacting with other people, usually on the bandstand. And so I think the same things that really are simple and work in life in terms of having the kind of personality that people want to be around, somebody that's listening, somebody that's contributing, somebody that's part of the conversation. You can't be too inward thinking just to your own thing. So, I mean, develop your personality.

If you've got a good personality, just be confident and let all that out on the gig, and then other people are going to want to work with you. If you've got a crappy personality, maybe try to change some things in your personality. Just like when you're working on your music and practicing, you know, you're trying to improve certain elements of your playing. I think it's the same thing with your personality because it's got such a big part of making music together. Yeah, I agree. And I think some people get this idea that, oh, an artist is a tortured soul, a jazz musician is this dark figure that whatever. But you know what? In reality, this is still a business and you still have to be professional and that is a huge part of it.

I'm glad you brought that up. If you're a leader, you should lead, though. Flip side of the corner. Yeah, if you're supposed to be picking up the check and calling the tunes and letting folks know what's happening, you need to do that. You can't be like, oh, this is a group thing. Yeah, of course, when you're playing, it's a group thing. But you need to really be there as a leader. That's why you're making more money or have your name up there or whatever.

I mean, the actual reality of being the leader of the gig, you usually make less money or somebody to know money. But it doesn't matter. You're leading the thing. you, part of leading it is not only taking care of business, that's the etiquette of it, but it's also trying to put everybody the best, most comfortable position to be able to play great and execute and for the whole thing to look great. And your name's up there as the leader, so you're going to be the beneficiary of all the glory. And then kind of side-chaining on that, if it is your gig, you know, speaking of the business, if it is your gig, be prepared with the

music and the money. Don't show up and expect everybody to know your arrangements because you have them. You know, make sure that the people that you hire, that you give them the opportunity to excel. And, you know, if you have complicated arrangements, maybe bring a charter, at least try to walk them through it beforehand. Right. And then be prepared with the money. You would be surprised, even as you get higher up the jazz hierarchy,

how this still doesn't happen, even with some pretty big names. But, you know, if it's your gig and you're promising some money, be at front with the money. Right, right, right. Don't get funny with the money? Don't get funny. Is that another way to put it? Okay. Now, I'm going to just push back a little bit on what you say i mean i agree with that in terms of you know if you're a leader be prepared with the music and all that but i would just say as a side man or especially for younger musicians or you know almost like you're you're coming up and you get an opportunity to play on a gig that maybe you're ready for but you're not totally maybe your name isn't that big and somebody's

you don't want to say do it a favor but they're they're putting you in a position for you to possibly succeed i would say as a sideman you know do what you can't don't just totally be like i'm a cog in the wheel everything has to be presented to me. Like, you know, if you're getting a chance to play with somebody, you know, go and see if there's some YouTube videos of them playing recently and maybe learn some of this stuff and kind of reach out to them to say, hey, I saw you've been doing such and such on these things. And I learned those tunes. Is there anything else you were thinking about doing?

Yeah, ideally the leader is going to have everything organized and laid out. But be proactive, I guess, would be a good thing as a sideman. Because then, you know, you're going to be seen as a good player, but someone that's prepared, someone that if you know as a leader you kind of lose track of or forget something they're going to be there for you another way you can make some money playing jazz is to seek out different kinds of performance opportunities so the obvious ones that you're probably already thinking about are you know playing gigs at clubs and concerts and that's good but there's a lot of other interesting places and adam you're great at this like you know we're in here working on different things and you're

be like, oh, I've got a gig at the Chess Museum, or I've got a gig in the atrium of the little boy and little girls' home or whatever, you know, I mean, just examples. Yeah, totally. And, but I mean, tonight at 8.30 p.m. Yeah, don't miss it. Yeah. No, but I mean, there's a lot of situations, and I'm not just talking about background gigs, although that's a good way to make money, too, you know, kind of a little trio in the corner

kind of thing. But, I mean, there's all sorts of different venues that, especially, like, anything that has to do with, like, art or things. like that that this music can really fit in well. So sometimes you have to go actively seek those out and talk to the people and say, hey, have you ever thought about having a little gig here or something? Yeah, and just to hop on that a little bit, you know, the gigs you're kind of talking about usually are concerts that I book like this. And the key is most cities, even a medium-sized city like San Luis, has a really thriving art scene with people that want

to throw up to put on concerts. So if you can put together a compelling program, a show, you know, an actual like where you're not just playing pickup tunes or whatever and, you know, but actually make something that that has a compelling story to it or something like that. It's easy to book gigs with these organizations that are always looking for opportunities like that. Right. And don't believe, you know, what you're going to commonly hear, nobody likes jazz, nobody wants to hear jazz. It's hard to get a gig. Sometimes, ironically enough, that's at jazz clubs. Totally.

Like you'll go to a club and say, look, I want to have my tree on, my quartet, and the surly you know, book, you know, old school guy who's booking the club is like, well, what kind of audience do you have? What's your latest CD and all this? They make it hard for you. You're like, well, I'm a jazz musician. This is a jazz club. Whereas when you go into, you know, a small gallery or something and say, you know, I've got some music that I wrote and we're going to do some free form improvisation in between it that's going to relate to this new exhibit that you have. Wouldn't that be a cool thing? They're looking for those kind of ideas a lot of time. Totally. I mean, that's exactly right. Well, first of all, we're talking about on-stableness.

stage, right? Yeah, we're talking about, you know, if someone gets lost in a tune, if you get lost after a drum solo, or maybe someone calls one tune and the bass player starts playing something else, maybe you start playing something that not everybody else is playing. It happens to the best of us, but there are some things you can do to kind of bring it back. Yeah, and I mean, this should be happening sometimes. I don't want this to happen to any of you, but it should happen because we're improvising jazz musicians. This is not a classical concert. where the program is set a year in advance and everyone has a listing of it and you have a librarian putting the music out. And even in those situations, things go wrong sometimes and you need to be able to deal with things.

Yeah, totally. But I mean, when you're in a fluid situation as it should be on a fun jazz gig, stuff goes south sometimes. It's just the way of the world. So our number one thing to do is don't panic. This is good advice in life as well as in jazz. But I can't tell you how many times I've seen, you know, like in a jam session, or something, a drummer might drop a beat during a drum solo or a four, and everybody loses their minds.

Right, right. I mean, physically you can see it. Physically, you can see them turn white and start to sweat, and the audience knows something's wrong, but they don't know why, because no one is counting the drum solos. Right. No one's even listening. No one really cares. But seriously, you, it's not as bad as you think it is outside of the band stand.

Now, you don't want to get lost the drum solo. Obviously, it's not a good thing, so you should feel. a little alarm and be on alert. But the first thing is, don't panic, don't sweat it, don't make the audience realize that something tragic has just happened because really nothing tragic has happened. Right. You know what I mean? Like, so the singer started singing autumn leaves in the wrong key.

That will not be the last time. What is it, Wednesday night? Yeah, exactly. That will not be the last time that happens to you probably this month. So don't worry about it. Right. And I mean, when we think about panic and not panicking, what is the opposite of panic? that's being cool, right?

And when we think about, I mean, this is a little corny, but if we think about in the jazz world, the iconic most cool character around this music ever is probably Miles Davis, right? And he never panicked. Now, that's not to say that things didn't go wrong and that he didn't specifically play quote-unquote wrong notes, and he even had a concept and a quote,

and I'm going to screw it up a little bit, but the general thing of what he was saying is you can't play a wrong note it all depends on what you play after that's what decides if it was right or wrong so if you're panicking you're never going to be able to do that because you're staying you play something wrong something happens

wrong and you go into panic you should be going into let me fix that let me correct that and that should be your whole persona that's the way Miles was and a lot of times when people would see him play and we as musicians know we're like whoa is that the right note he wasn't panicking he's like that's the note it is I'm going to play something now and make it right

retroactively. I mean, it's almost, you know, people talk about Miles as like, you know, almost a Buddhist with this kind of thing because he wasn't, I mean, judging when things are, he would shoot you a look if it was wrong, but it was a little judging. No, but he wasn't judging the music. Right. You know, he would take the music as it came and then turn something beautiful out of that, and that's what your goal should be. Even mistakes are going to happen. So even if they do, you know, as you do with meditation and you, you, you, you, thoughts come in or whatever, just accept them and then, you know, gently nudge it the other way.

Right. Well, there you go, everyone. That's our best out episode on gigs. Hope you enjoyed it. You can always go to you'll hearit.com and you can leave us a question. You can leave us a voicemail. Please don't forget to leave your rating and review in iTunes or Google Podcasts or Spotify. You know how important that is, especially to Peter.

Seven stars and above only, please. Thank you very much. And we'll be back tomorrow with a new curated best of. episode. That's going to be on the culture of jazz. You're going to want to hear that. So yeah, and then we'll be back next week, of course, with all new episodes. So come back for those as well. And until tomorrow, you'll hear it.