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

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

For today's "best of" episode, we've made a mix of conversations to motivate you from our archive. From episodes 12, 14, 19, 20. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, everyone, Adam Mattis here, and today is the final day of our best of week here at the You'll Hear at Podcast. We're having a great time, air on some of these great conversations from our archive. Today's episode is all about motivation. These were some inspiring conversations that occurred kind of in the first half of the You'll Hear at Run here. But stay tuned next week. We're going to start season two officially of the You'll Hear at podcast. Just want to give a big shout out to everybody who listens and everybody who participates and writes in and leads a voice message. and leaves ratings and reviews.

You all are what makes this podcast go, and we really, really appreciate hearing from you. Really, really appreciate all the love. So hope you enjoy today's episode on Motivation. Well, maybe the key is to making sure that we are taking on the right jazz information, and then we don't have to worry as much about getting overwhelmed with too much.

There's never too much of a good thing, but I think that there is the pacing of it and there is the right thing. We're living in an age now where there's just an overload of all kinds of information. So I think we need to regulate that. We need to, and we can, with self-discipline, you know, control how much information we have coming in.

The tricky part is, with jazz, is there's so much great music. There's so many great recordings. There's so many great things going on now, live, and being streamed and on people's websites and on Facebook. I mean, this is a golden age for jazz information for sure. So, but we have to have the discipline to limit what we have. have coming in. So one way I can think of that I like to do is just limit myself to what I'm actually working on. So when I'm working on something, if it's, say, learning a solo or learning a

tune or maybe doing an arrangement or a composition, I'll only listen to that one recording. I won't listen to anything else. I mean, maybe I'll have the news on or something at some point, but in terms of music, I kind of limit myself to just hearing that for a period. And that's hard to do, but it's definitely possible. So like, even if you're, say, looking at one YouTube video and that's what you're listening to. There's always that little thing on the side where it's like, you know, related video and stuff. So the tendency is to click over there. You just need to stay focused. So whatever you need to do, if that's to get an old school iPod and only load one song on and put yourself out on a desert island, then that's what you have to do. Most of those

can kind of hit something between that and just sort of information overload. But it's just limiting. And then, you know, what goes along with that is really knowing that if you learn something deeply some jazz information, and we're really talking about music here normally, if you limit yourself, but go deep. So you're not going wide at this time in terms of I'm going to try to learn 30 tunes this week. I'm going to say I'm going to learn one tune this week, but I'm going to go very deep with it. Listen to a lot of different versions. I know I just said listen to one, contradicting myself a little bit. That's okay. You'll figure it out. You'll hear it. But really going deep with that one song, with that one solo, and then having the confidence to know that you

In going deep, you're really developing your ears, you're developing your vocabulary, developing all these elements, your sound, your personality that you need to be a great player. You know, I was on vacation last year for around 4th of July, and I read Herbie Hancock's autobiography. Oh, yeah. For the first time, and I'm, shame on me for not reading it earlier, but it was so great. Well, his life is still unfolding, so that was good. You're waiting to see what the next chapter was going to be. Oh, man, he's still making good music, too.

But even just reading about, you know, you think like, oh, I mean, the story is great, and it's inspiring and it makes you want to practice and all the stuff. But he actually, you know, in a lot of these autobiographies, like there was some good musical advice or good, you know, anecdotes about how he thinks about music that opened Maya. You know, when he said that Miles told him not to play the butter notes and he thought that it meant, you know, don't play the thirds and the sevenths, and that's how he got those voicings.

And then you go to the back to the piano and you're like, I'm going to try that. And, you know, you start sounding a little bit like Herbie in those, in that era. You know, it's pretty cool. And, you know, then this one time when I was on vacation in St. Croix and I picked up a book on Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and I wrote this whole musical

Wait, right, no, that's not me, that's not me, that's not. No, but just think about like if he hadn't Lynn Manuel, if he hadn't picked up that book and created, I mean, you know, art springs forth and artistry springs forth from a number of different areas and you hear continually about how books, you know, can really spur some great ideas, so. That's right.

So, well, I mean, Another thing along those lines is really just, you know, art in general inspiring our artistry. And so, you know, I like to read poetry. I mean, I'm not trying to sound like I'm overly cultured because I'm actually not. I just enjoy reading some of it. Tell me about your wine cellar. Yeah. But, I mean, the thing with the, you know, the poetry is there's some rhythmic things in terms of how poetry flows.

That it's a little different than listening. I think listening too, I mean, you know, like the way prose or say in hip hop, the rhythm of how a lot of that great music flows we can really apply to our playing. But that's more than the listening to music that you discussed earlier. So this would be reading, but not reading necessarily for information, more for the art of it, which is really what poetry is. And it can kind of get us into the forms, the flow, the rhythm of the words, things that we can bring over to our improvisation in a way that I think is interesting. And I mean, that really just would go into any of the arts. You know, the visual arts, when I'm traveling, I love going to different museums and just, you know, I don't even necessarily know what I'm looking at, but I know I'm looking at great things. The number one tool that will help you learn how to play jazz, I believe, is great jazz albums.

Now, if you're under the age of, what, 38 or so, you might be like, what is an album? Oh, no, if you're under the age of 38, but over the age of 17. That's right, man. The kids are into the albums again. That's right. So by albums, what I really mean is a complete recording. So they used to come on LPs and then on CDs and then in streaming, and now there's many ways to get them. But the concept, I think, is the same for all of them.

It's like thinking about a record like John Coltrane's Crescent or Ella Fitzgerald Live in Rome, you know, any kind of recording as a complete performance. And I think that there's so much we can get from just listening to one track, one solo, sometimes even one phrase. But if you use the tool of a complete recording, you can learn how to put a set together, how to segue between tunes, how to create a specific kind of vibe with a kind of tune

and then shift to something else. All the tools that we actually need to have to learn jazz. So it really gives you everything within that. And I think it's just important to think about the concept of a whole recording because recordings used to be made and really still are as sort of this between 35 and 67 minute statement, musical statement, of tunes and put together in a way by the artist and the producer and everything that would really satisfy somebody that sits and listens to the whole thing.

So now, am I saying that you have to listen to entire recordings all the time? Of course not. But if you do that some, I think that will be one of the greatest things that you'll have. And always listening to these albums in the context of what's happening on the whole album as well. So you might focus in on a certain tune, but make sure that you understand the whole recording too. It'll go a long way towards helping you learn jazz. It's just such a great way to listen. I like to use the film analogy, which is that, you know, a song is a scene and the album is the film.

And so if you don't watch the entire film, you know, some scenes are going to be out of context. And obviously, if you watch, we hardly ever just watch scenes. I know. It's funny how we've done that with albums, but now what's true. Yeah. I mean, great scenes. I mean, you know, we're always quoting great scenes and stuff. scenes, but you're just more rewarded for the whole thing. Of course.

All right, the next thing we're going to talk about of a tool that will help you learn jazz, and this one seems obvious again, but it's great ears. And we can't harp on ear training enough here in this podcast. It makes or breaks you, I think, as a jazz musician. As a musician in general, we need to be able to hear these things to not only come up with our own ideas, but also to interact with the people that we're playing with. So developing your ears, ear training on a regular basis is incredibly important tool that will not only help you learn jazz, but help you play jazz at a very high level.

So in your daily practice routine, you got your scales, you're playing through some chord changes, maybe you're working on some voicings if you play the piano or the guitar, but always include some ear training, always include some transcribing, always include some testing of your intervals or of your relative pitch or your perfect pitch, if you're so lucky, to have worked on that and develop that. Always make sure that your ears are just as sharp as the rest of your chops.

Good. I like that one. Now, I would say that one thing that is constant among all these different ways to swing and to phrase and stuff is that very strong rhythmic foundation. So that's kind of a thing that binds things together. And that you can really practice. You can practice that by playing along with recordings. There's some great backing tracks and stuff out there now where you've got some really swinging rhythm sections where just playing around those musicians and that kind of sound, I mean, yeah, it's not going to give you exactly what they have, but it's going to start to acclimate you to their way of swinging and then maybe seeing how you can fit your way of swinging

into that. And I would say even you can extend that then once you get that sound in your ears to practicing with the metronome because the metronome is going to keep you steady, then you've got to use your imagination a little bit to really hear that swinging, stuff around you, but you're doing it in the context of that steady time, because that, no matter how you swing, is always super important. Absolutely. And then once you get that steady time, be confidence with your feel. You know, in your swing, I mean, swing is kind of a swagger.

It's a confidence. A couple weeks ago, my five-year-old son climbed up to the top of a very tall tree, and it was like, I was convinced he was going to fall on breaking. You know, I was like, yo, how'd you get up there? And he said, confidence. And I thought like that is the key to so much in life, and it's no different with swing. If you're confident about it, you know, it's going to sound stronger. It's going to be more swinging.

And the little guy is still alive, right? I think so. Okay, he made it. See? It wasn't false competence. Absolutely. Yeah. I thought you're going to say he swung off the top of the – that's how he learned to swing.

Yeah. No, that's – I would say, yeah, the confidence thing is so important. And that goes right along with, you know, having a personality within the swing. So it's fine when you're practicing to emulate different ways that musicians swing and like learn their solos and really, because I mean the swing is like that intersection of the time and the phrasing, I think is what it really is. Totally. You know, you can't take a way, like if you talk about, you know, I always come back to that, the Winton Kelly, Freddie Freeloader's solo as being a great definition of swing. Of course, it's not the only way to swing.

Tread lightly, tread lightly. I know, but I mean, it is one way. And, you know, harmonically, you can look at what he's doing, my lot. And of course it's swinging, but if you take it, you know, as great as those phrases are, and I'm trying to phrase it as closely as I remember him playing it, having that steady going while you play that is really important for those phrases. They're not just on their own. So it has to be you got to have that boom, boom, boom, that heartbeat. That's the foundation of the swing, no matter what sample it is. Well, that's it, everyone.

We are wrapping up our week of best of episodes here at the You'll Hearit podcast. That was motivation. We hope you found that motivating to at least get off your butt for a little bit in practice. That's what I'm going to do after listening to that. And yeah, you can go to You'll Hear.com. You can leave us a suggestion for a future episode. You can leave us a voicemail question. You can just stop it and say hi.

you can please leave us a rating and review on iTunes or Google Podcast or Spotify. That would be great. And Peter and I will be back next week with some brand new episodes of You'll Hear Podcast Season 2. Super excited about that. And until then, you'll hear it.