You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Vibe-Free Jazz

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Peter and Adam discuss the repercussions of the "vibe" and it's positive and negative influences to the different generations of musicians. Watch MonoNeon's performance of the national anthem right here. Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Instagram

Hey, you Peter. Yo, what's up, Adam? At this time, we ask you to please stand and remove your caps. Really? For the anthem of the podcast. Oh, okay. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Music advice. Coming at you. This is an open studio podcast. Go to Open StudioJazz.com for more information. Peter, we got a lot to cover today. Yes. in the jazz piano world.

This is our, this is, um, Poperi Tuesday. Pot Paris. Poe-Pourri Tuesday. Um, or whenever this is hitting you up in your eardrums, dear listeners. That's right. Hey, thank you guys. Oh, you know what?

We forgot to remind folks in the last episode, but we're going to do that at the end of this episode. Gentleman's agreement. Yes. Gentlemen and ladies agreement. Okay. I had, I had some requests that we extended to the gentleman and ladies agreement. So we're going to talk about it at the end.

So make sure you stay tuned for that. We have a, some exciting. We're also going to talk a little bit about mono neon's amazing national anthem. Yes. And we've got a little bit of advice from Roy Hargrove that has been kicking its way around the internet. But we'll start here. Value bomb. Hello.

We're going to start with vibes and not the good kind. Not the good kind. It's up with vibing. Peter, what do you know about vibed? Have you ever been vibed in the career? Oh, my gosh. I've gotten vibed a lot. I mean, not as much at the piano.

I continue to get vibed in different situations. Yeah, let's talk about vibing a little bit. Like, first of all, we should set up what vibing is, because there's probably a lot of people listening that don't know what vibing is. They've probably experienced it, but they don't know what it's called. Is it somewhat, does it,

is the origins of the term in the jazz community even? Is this something that's commonly known? Do you know, producer Caleb? Is this something that the... Well, no, I mean, like, if we were to go out on the street now and say, hey, man, stop vibing me. Would they look at us funny? Would they understand what we're saying?

The word vibe is out. Okay. Well, that's one thing about these jazz terms, like the cats. My kids, I don't know if your kids ever say this. They always thought it was funny when they were younger and they'd hear me talking about the cats. They were like, oh, that's so funny. Because no one else talks about the cats. And they're like, certain people you're on the phone with, I can tell it's one of your jazz friends.

I was like, I don't have anything with jazz friends. That's all I care about, of course. They're like, I could tell it was a jazz friend because you were talking about the cats. The cats. So his vibing is sort of like that. Viving. So the word vibing is out, just in general, or, Caleb in the music community.

I've been, I've said it one time. In case they can't hear what he's saying. Someone vibed you for using the word. So producer Caleb, in case you can't hear what he just said. He said some, we gotta get a mic back on. Was it? Yeah, no, we gotta get a Caleb mic. So we were, so just for the context, the context was you were like,

hey, this is a really good vibe or something. I was like, the vibe on this thing. The vibe on this thing, he was just used, the vibe on this thing. He was just using it casually. And they're like, oh, vibe. Really? Are you going to be that guy saying, What is this?

2019 or something. Did you slap them, hopefully, right after that? Oh, connections with astrology. Oh, we do want to avoid that. No,

no, no, no. Well, we're going to use it. In that case, I'm okay with it. That's fine. Well, the thing is, like,

I do feel like it's always been something interesting. We haven't talked, we talked, we've talked hit it a little bit on the pod, but not enough. And that is, you know, phraseology

and little terms that have originated in the jazz world for many years a lot. It's kind of cool. It is. That's one of them. That's kind of hip. It's kind of dope.

All of us. And we love dope. Whoa. That got vibey. No, so we should make a line in the sand here. So there's things like, oh, that's got a vibe. Yes. And then there's like that that guy was vibing me.

Those two are kind of different, although we're talking about vibrations here. Right. And kind of the feeling of something is really what it is. But it gets really confusing when we talk about vibing the vibraphonist. That is. Yeah. Then there's vibes, which is an instrument, which is also a different thing. But to be vibed or to.

To vibe usually happens in the context of a playing situation. Yes. Where you're playing with someone who you probably don't know very well. Right. And you don't deserve to be there. No, no, no, no. This is, it's most common at jam sessions. Yeah.

And that would be your classic vibing situation. That would be the classic viking scenario is here's, here's, let me, let me paint the picture. Change the picture. Classic vibing scenario is you go to a jam session. Yeah. You are new to maybe a beginner or intermediate player. You're a little nervous. You go sit in with more experienced musicians.

Maybe you're not sounding your best. Because you're nervous or because maybe you're just not at their level yet. And they give you sort of a like cold shoulder or a you don't deserve to be here kind of energy. Or maybe even straight up say like, you know, stop playing. Which has happened. and that is traditionally viving. Or they'll even like, I'm not going to name names because we're friends now.

But when I was a kid, I went to the jam session up the street here at Sprules. I was 15 years old. Yeah, you got vibed. You got no business sitting in with Willie Akins. But I went and sat up with Willie Atkins and this pianist at the time. He played right after me and just stared at me the whole time.

Just vibe. Like, viving me like crazy. Right. Yeah. Well, I'm just remembering back, I'm kind of like, oh, I've never been part of vibing, but I think I have.

Like you will hear terms or you used to back when this was legal of like, oh, man, this dude came in there and he was just sad and was all, well, did you vibe him? Oh, yeah. I vibed him. Oh, no, this was like a, it was like a, um, it was a ride of passage. Well, it was a tool used for sort of policing. No, no, no, no, no. So let's talk about this because this is important.

Jazz police or a different kind of police? No, this is definitely jazz police. Okay. This is definitely jazz police. But it was a tool used to sort of like quality check. Yeah. What was happening. and like to vibe someone was to actually like

consider it a defense of the music. This person needs to know that what they're doing is not right. So it's interesting because we're talking about this because I've been seeing more and more like vibe free jam sessions. Yeah, that's the term I did not hear until about an hour ago. Yeah. So I've been seeing this more and more, especially for like Gen Z players who are doing their own thing.

And these are like jam sessions all around, you know, the country, even in New York City, there'll be a vibe pre-jam session where we're not going to vibe it's going to be very positive and I think it's interesting so like your knee jerk right is like oh man that's not that's BS or whatever or it's soft or you need maybe even you need some vibes in order to well be self-correcting but that's what that's what I'm thinking is do you now right because like so before the only way that people would learn how to get good at this is to just go and play and the only feedback you got was from the people you were playing with it like a jam set

or whatever. And so viving was like a necessary part of the process of getting better, the process of teaching the music. But now there's so many ways to teach the music and there's so many ways to learn the music that viving might not be as relevant. Is viving relevant when people can learn how to play in all these different ways? And is it, you know, a mentally healthy? I don't know. In this context, I don't know if it's necessary. I'm sure we're going to get pushed back. Of course it's necessary. I'm sure going to get people that say like it's absolutely not necessary and why would we ever do that to ourselves. I think it was at a certain point just part of the process of doing this and I both am terrified of those days from when I would get vived and fond of them.

Right. And then whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Is there an element of that? And I also understand why it's, you know, with things like YouTube and, you know, conservatories and loads of jazz programs, even in middle school and high school, why it's like do we really need to teach people by like shaming them essentially right well and I would just I would not even push back but I do want to make like a little bit of a um a marker between different kinds of vibing like there's a vibing which I've always has always shaped me and irked me which is vibe shaped viving somebody that I think there are some situations where if somebody's not playing at the level they should be for where they are

and they should know better that they can be. be vibe, but where it's not, what I don't like it is when it's somebody that's young or old or is the only female on stage or is part like of a different, like, is not necessarily coming in with a full understanding or like part of the club. Like I don't, I hate it when there's like vibing because you're not part of the club. Like a little bit of, of, it's almost like positive feedback versus negative feedback. Carat versus stick. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that when people use that to be like, oh, you're not in the club. You're not good enough to be here. I believe in both. It's like I do believe that there's a certain level and you should respect the band stand and stuff. Yeah. But I think that the human element is more important and not everybody comes with this kind of understanding.

And then also if you vibe somebody, like let's say that you had a gig and you're going to invite some people to sit in. And everybody that you had on the gig like is a, you know, a pro player. And they come in and like the bass player comes in unprepared or, Or drunk. That's definitely grounds for vibing. That's grounds for vibing. If you're all peers and you're all working towards the goal and someone isn't doing the work

that everybody else is doing to try to make this good and is bringing, honestly, the vibe down and the vibe, not vibes, but like the energy of the music and not respecting the music and the band and everybody's time. It's a different level of expectation for them, right? Totally. But then somebody is totally appropriate. But somebody comes to sit in and they just don't, they're not quite on the level. Like, give them an energy to try to elevate them as much as possible.

Absolutely. Don't vibe them and be like, how dare you come up here on this stage? Because, you know, honoring the bandstand is different for different people with different experience, different ages, different. You know, I don't like when like older players sometimes that are having trouble because they haven't been playing a long time, but they want to be part of it. I think you meet people where they are as much as possible. But that doesn't mean you, I don't know that you have to have a totally vibe free situation all the time. We can't promise that because there is a lot of learning. I mean, for me, I got vibe on gigs for sure.

and like you know your experience with sitting in and stuff and i think that there is a certain amount of encouragement for yourself in terms that you can give yourself after that like no i care about this enough that even though i got vibed i'm going to keep my eyes on the prize i'm going to go back and practice i'm going to get better i'm going to come back and vibe them with my great playing that's a a fire that can be ignited that i want young players to still have hopefully yeah i do think that the benefits of kind of like surviving, viving is that you can survive.

Like, nothing's worse than when an audience is viving you. Yeah. And that's your ultimate. Right. That's your ultimate judge of what you're doing. I just written that down. Vibed from the audience. That might be more important. It's more important. Yeah. And if, you know, you need to be able to understand that and work your way through that and not be affected by that. Yeah. For sure. It'll happen. It'll happen. You'll be

playing a gig where you're not wanted. Yeah. Exactly. And sometimes that just means you're not really noticed. That's a vibe. Don't think that like, oh, I got through this gig without being vibe. Well, will you not, not vibe? Were they clapping for you? Were they giving you energy? Because no vibe is bad from an audience, you know.

But I'm, you know, I think it's move on before we get into anymore. No, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, no. So vibe free sessions, are we thumbs up or thumbs down on them? I think we're thumbs up on them. I think you do what you need to do. Do whatever, you know, helps you to get better.

And I like, I like the trend of that. And I would just say that though, for, like, if you, do want to keep progressing, put yourself, it's fine to go to, but don't be, don't be exclusive vibe free sessions. At least one out of 10 jam sessions, go to a vibing potential session. Because that'll bring something else in you too. Like we don't need to be as players always in the most comfortable situation because it's harder to grow like that. Now, don't go to somewhere where it's going to be so discouraging. You're going to want to quit or whatever. But that's also on you. Like your connection with the music has to be strong enough in order to like, you know,

you got to care about vibing yourself or not vibing yourself more than anything. If you go to a vibe free session and you sound bad and you go home saying well nobody vibe me

so unless it sounded good there's something wrong with that too. You know who's the ultimate viber. But in jazz you know we play all the notes 12 notes of the scale John Goodman. Not three chords on a ukulele.

That's vibing. That's a definition of vibe. Let's talk a little bit about so there was some chatter on the jazz piano subreddit. Shout out to all our jazz piano subreditors out there. What is that?

I don't even know what that is. You know, Reddit, the worldwide famous. Yeah. So it's, you know how Reddit works? You know who the founder of Reddit is? Yeah, he's a Serena Williams husband. So he's kind of like, he's got some good accomplishments, you know. Yeah, yeah.

In the, in the getting married and discovery. I mean, he's doing it right. Is it more of an accomplishment to found Reddit or to marry Serena Williams? I think it might be the latter. They're both top level in their own areas. Yeah, it's pretty good. Like, that's high level marrying Serena. So, no, there's a great active jazz piano subreddit.

And, and there was a, question specifically regarding open studio courses, which I thought we could kind of address, which was, do I need to be able to read sheet music to take open studio courses? Yes. And then what's so great about this is we have so many great open studio members who are all active on all of these things. And they, like, came right in and had lots of great informed answers. So thank you everybody for addressing this person's question.

But we can talk about a little bit here, too. If you're on the fence, if you're wondering about, like, do you need to, and we don't, it doesn't even have to be open studio courses. Right, just to learn jazz. Jazz piano. The answer is like, no, you do not. Any skill can help with this. Yeah.

But you definitely don't need to learn how to cite read music or to read big, thick piano music. Like the book is thick or the notes are thick? The notes are thick, like big old, like to be able to write. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you hit it. But, no, you don't need to be able to be a great reader of music to learn how to play jazz piano at all. Right. I mean, isn't it like, do you need to be able to read?

read the printed page in order to be a great poet. No. No, not necessarily. But it might become a part of it. It's likely going to become a part of it. Being able to read poetry would probably be beneficial, but you could also just go listen to a bunch of people reciting poetry and get added benefits.

And so specifically with Open Studio, I think their confusion was, you know, we have a lot of notation, which we love to provide because there are people who are coming from classical. They're people who never improvised. So it sort of takes some of the fear away from them. They're like, oh, I feel comfortable here. There's notation with what's going on. We have our living notation system,

which is sound slice that we embed in pretty much all of our courses at this point. There's some level of that. And that's very helpful for those people. However, if you do not read music, don't feel it's necessary. And in fact, what a lot of people on Reddit were saying, which is something that we say often in the courses, is that we have the notation here if you need it, but we encourage you to just use your ears at first.

I totally agree. And I think actually one thing that's misunderstood about this, but can be very encouraging. when you come to learn anything new, especially when you're not learning it at what could be seen as a more intuitive age, like three or four or five, where you're just jumping into something. Like if you're jumping into the water to learn how to swim or whatever, you're not worried about like what stroke. You're just learning or like breathing or what you're doing something, potentially on a more instinctual level. So once you get past being a child and learning something, there's such a potential to over intellectualize, overthink, you know, paralysis by a. analysis that what we find works really good.

And what I mean, what's been proven out from, you know, talking to a number of wonderful jazz musicians from the very highest levels, you know, professional to just really, really good amateur players is that not only do you not, can you decouple the skill of reading music or sight reading,

which is really another thing from even being able to read music, but that at the beginner level and even into the interoper, intermediate level, reading music is actually can be a barrier unless you're very careful about how you calibrate your interaction with it. That's right. So it hopefully can be a very encouraging thing for people in terms of like when you come to something and you don't, you know, we always think about like, what do I not know how to do and what's going to be my handicap into going into this?

This is a perceived handicap that's actually the opposite of that in terms of like when you come to learn jazz, if you're not reading very well, you have an advantage. That's right. If you learn the right way. That's right. And so, but don't get that, don't get a twisted and think that that means that if you are able to read music, that that's a handicap. Or that you shouldn't learn to read music. Oh, that you shouldn't. Right. It can actually work either way. It's just that you have a little bit of advantage because you don't have to sublimate that skill as you learn in order to train your ears. So it's a very interesting thing. And I'm glad people are kind of talking about it. And I think that, you know, I think back to, well, you know, I came up in the Suzuki method. I'm a big proponent of that, and that has nothing to do with jazz, but I think it's a wonderful method. I was just talking to some young parents. For those of you don't know, that method starts with ear training. Starts with ear training. Starts with ear training. It starts by learning everything by ear. Learning in an age where we kind of be potentially debilitating or at least, you know, counter to progressing on the violin in the case I actually learned on violin before piano, where you're so young that you have an ability to kind of absorb and to imitate and learn an instrument at a

pretty amazing level. I mean, you can go on YouTube and put it in Suzuki, young, you know, amazing kid and see incredible stuff, but they can't read any music yet.

Yeah. You know, and had they learned music that would have slowed them down. So we think, oh, that's just for little genius kids. No, if you read Nurture by Love by Sennichi Suzuki,

and it's very clearly laid out how this is for anybody. You have to nurture children. We have to nurture ourselves to become adolescents and toddlers, adolescents, adults or whatever that have musical sensitivity and a connection with our heartbeat

and all these things, that we can actually. actually all do that. And a lot of times that's decoupling this whole reading music thing. So I think it's a fascinating thing. I've thought about it a lot in different ways of approaching music. That's great. Let's move on here to an event from this past week that, man, I really want to check out, which is, you know, the bassist and insanely great artists based in Memphis, Tennessee, mono neon. Right. And I just, how did I, I guess I did know he was from Memphis. I didn't know he was still based there, but I'm a huge fan and have been. I've got this actually pulled up.

He just played the national anthem, sang and played on the bass, the national anthem, at the Memphis Grizzlies game, which you were just down there. Right, not for this game, unfortunately. No, you just missed. I was going to say, he just missed it. Yeah, let's check this out. But this is one of the, probably the coolest and most unique national anthems since Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock. And Memphis's own, mono neon. Love it already.

Swinging, Wawa Pettle, right? Looks like it. Yep. And bright stars. Through the perinous. Rebits.

Fully knit, quilted. He has a quilted. on his head. A knitted balaclava in a fully knitted outfit. I love your terminology.

Strong groove. Strong time. So strong. Time clinic. I love this arrangement. This is gutsy to go Robato at this point. Well, he wants to bring it home in a way

that is landing, which I think is good. That was killing. That was killing. I'm a fan. That was really good. It's so good. And I mean,

you know, it was cool about. that too was yeah the arrangement how he started out with you know with time well he had that little bit of a kind of out of time intro yeah which is which is a great way

to get in when you're in look whenever you do I've seen great performance performers do the national anthem and like season performers it's nerve wrack because it's so different and a lot of times they're forcing them to play to a track he wasn't there I'm sure yeah but at least have like a backup track like there's a lot of stuff going on the sound is whack you know it's bouncing back at you have you ever done it no

Oh, I've accompanied. I've accompanied a couple of singers doing some pretty big national anthems. Nice. And, but the biggest one I ever did, we actually pre-record or, am I allowed to say? Everybody knows this stuff is pre-recorded. For the Olympics in Salt Lake City. Oh, yeah. The Diane Reeves sang at the opening ceremonies.

2002? 2000. Yeah, maybe something like that. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. And she was out on ice and the whole thing as she did it. And she was just like, I want to sing it, you know, live.

And they were like, a billion people are watching this. You can sing whatever you want, but we need to pre-record it in case something happens. Right, right. And we're going to mix it in and out. And I think a lot of times they do it on those really big productions. So we just wanted to record it. But it's, yeah, no, but he did, this great technique for anyone who's in a situation, just play a few chords to kind of, I don't know, maybe he planned that,

but he just played that little bit at the beginning before he went right into it, you know, which is so cool. And then hit the time. If you ever done it on a big stadium like that, it is so weird. Because it's not like you're playing a show at a big stadium. Yeah. And you have like in your monitors or whatever.

Right. You don't get to hear yourself very well. Right. You're just hearing it swirrower. Have you done it the baseball at the Bush Stadium? I've been, uh, I've been on the field when Aaron Bodie was singing it. Yeah.

I wasn't a part of it. She just had extra field passes. So I was just down there. And it was like weird. Yeah. Really weird. Yeah. What's your hair back is strange.

And then I, we did it. The 442's my band did it for the, St. Louis Blues game, the hockey game. Okay. Which is probably about equivalent to that as far as size. Arena size. And we were playing this like, you know, it's a string thing. So like, it was, that was actually really cool because I did an arrangement that was like

very like aggressive kind of, which I think works with that crowd for sure. But it was still weird because you're just hearing it slap back at you, you know, seconds later, like two seconds later. Did the four of you get it when you finished it, did you guys get into a fight on the ice? Does that typically happen? Yeah, I pulled Bjorn's jersey over. through a couple of haymakers, yeah. Right, right.

Well, that was cool. Yeah, it was very cool. Big shout out to model neon. For sure. Yeah, I mean, so he's somebody I think that doesn't get enough. I mean, a lot of people know him and he gets, you know, just because of his, his, his outfits and his brilliant, man. A lot of people think it's a gimmick, but like, he's such a great player.

You know, one of my most favorite bands, like my top five bands of all time is, is Parliament Funkadelic, those projects. I think he's ever heard of them? Yeah. So like, for me, I'm just so happy that people are still funky. I think the rest of the stuff we can save till next time. I hate to even say that because we got to talk about what we promise them. Is that okay?

Yeah. Why are you looking to be funny? I know. Okay. We got to talk about the gentlemen and ladies agreement. Gentleman's agreement. Do you know about this? Let's do it.

Okay. No, do you know what the gentlemen's and ladies agreement is? I'm agreeing. This is, for those of you that are new to the pot, I'm going to get a little bit serious. Can I put my serious cap on here? Sure. I've got my serious cap on. Social bubble.

Is that a serious cap, though? That doesn't look like a serious cap. That's a nice one. Is that new? This is new. Yeah, it looks good. We'll talk about it after the pot because we're talking about the gentleman

and the ladies' agreement. Okay. This is when you guys agree. Okay, the reason this gentleman comes out of gentleman's agreement is because you're not here to shake our hand. We're not here to have you sign something. This is how in the old days they would do

before there was docu signed. We're not going to email our listeners anything. But you're here listening. If you made it this far in the podcast, you've gotten some of that. We dropped some value bombs. today, right? I would like to think so.

Well, it's not today to last episode for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so all we ask for you, we don't even ask, this is a requirement, this is part of the agreement. We require for you to go to YouTube, okay? YouTube. Because I figure out, this is the easiest thing for people to do. Go to YouTube. Find the you'll hear a podcast.

You're not to be able to spell. What if they're on YouTube? People are watching right now. If you're watching right now, you're going to subscribe. Okay. You're going to press like. And if you've already done that, you're going to leave a comment saying, General's agreement, done, or ladies agreement done.

So you leave a comment saying, gentlemen's agreement, done. Gentlemen slash ladies agreement, or whatever you want. Okay. Let them choose. Okay. Yeah. Agreement, done. Okay.

Yeah. Does that make sense? No, but I'm sure. Why not? Because we've already put this out there for them. And the reason is we're trying to grow the YouTube channel. We're also, if you want to leave us a rating a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, we encourage that as well. That takes a little more effort.

So we're not requiring that as part of the gentleman's agreement. I'm just saying it's the most open studio thing ever. Literally what you're just. describing here is how content is made and produced and spread is that people put up free content and then other people like and subscribe and open studio i you and me are putting a new we're putting a new new twist on it and we did feel this but i found out who i stole this from i wasn't going to mention them i sold this from another podcast that i like but i found they talked about the gentleman's agree i was like we're stealing this okay but it turns out they stole it from another podcast they admitted so it's not

stealing anymore right it's just part of the part of the culture it's part of our gentleman's agreement so anyway until next time you'll hear it Oh.