You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - What is Equanimity? And how can it help your playing?

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Speakpipe Wednesday - Equanimity - /ˌekwəˈnimədē/ noun - mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation. Peter and Adam discuss how equanimity can help your performance.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 Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Peter. Hey. So it's Wednesday. It's supposed to be speak pipe Wednesday. We don't have any speaks in the pipes. This is, I think, the first time we have not had a cue of speak pipes. Oh, you know what? I just realized why we don't.

I'll tell you the second. Okay. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Jazz. Explained. Perfect.

Yes. 10.0 in the spirit of the Olympics. Yes. I mean, I would say 6.0. Remember when figure skating used to be 6.0? Now it's like some indecipherable algorithm. that they score the figure skating with. It's hard to watch.

It's AI scoring, isn't it? It's very strange. See, I remember AI scoring that I'm interested in is Alan Iverson, taking it between. Oh, that's good scoring. Between somebody, you know, breaking, breaking some ankles. We're talking about practice. That's right.

Not a game. Nope. Not a game. Nope. Not a game. We're talking about practice. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, they got a different kind of AI scoring. But yeah. Okay, so it's speak pipe Wednesday. We don't have any speak pipes. Do you know why? I'm embarrassed about this. just realized we don't have any speak pipes because um i got a little email a few days ago okay i

forgot to share it with you i meant to forward it to you or somebody okay of authority at this podcast and that is our speak pipe became full and you didn't tell anybody didn't tell anybody i'm playing tell you what it is later exactly so i'm playing i'm telling you what it is later so we probably do have speak pipes but the speak pipe has been closed but we're going to rectify it you're telling me our dear listeners they went to the trouble of going to our website and they press the button to leave us a voicemail and they probably got some kind of like voice mailbox is full perhaps or maybe even worse it just said your message has been accepted but it wasn't and we don't have access to it anymore yeah yeah let me ask you a question yeah do you have a friend i have several friends

that a they never pick up their phone and then b their voice mailbox is always fulls you can't even leave a message yes that's like that's called trifling well no i think for me i always take the signal okay this is a text only person they don't want to speak on the phone They're done with it. Yeah. They left this in 1998 and we can leave that behind. Right. I'm just saying it, Peter, you should maybe just leave your voicemail.

Full disclosure. Look by my voicemail number. Oh, I'm in the hundreds. Oh, you're in the hundreds. Okay, I feel better than. Yeah, yeah. And that's with my voicemail being off for about 10 months, totally. You turn your voicemail on.

I turned it off. Good for you. Yeah. I got vibe. I had to put it back on. I got vibed. Yeah. I'm going to guess it was someone who birthed you.

Because that's usually who vibes me about. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But yeah. So we apologize for that, but by the time you hear this, the speak pipe should be back on. Okay. You know, our updated credit card number should be in, I think that's what happened.

I think a credit card might have expired that the speak pipe ain't free. You might think the speak pipe is free. The speak pipe calls that calls Benjamin, well, maybe not Benjamin. Yeah. It's a paid service. It's a big pipe. Yeah. But anyway, it should be back on.

So please leave us a message. And if for some reason you haven't heard your question answer, you may need to go back and leave it again. You can do that at any time at you'll hear it.com. That's right. No hyphens. No spaces. Okay. So what I thought, yeah, what are we going to do, though? Well, so I kind of had a question for you. I thought it might lead to something interesting. It's been something I've been thinking about, and I've been wanting to ask you anyway, so why not do it now?

So we'll consider this a little personal speak pipe. Okay. Okay. But I'm just going to say the answer is about 350 pounds on a good leg day. Okay. I mean, I'm just guessing you're asking my headlift. No? I was going to. That was my first question.

But since you ruined that one, we're going to go right to the next one. Okay. Okay. So I want to know. Capricorn. No? Wait. But tell you about to ask me a question, I'm going to give you the answer right before you ask it.

Okay. So Peter. Byron Lovelace. I was going to ask you, who's your all-time favorite you'll hear a listener? That's right. No. So what I thought we could just sort of talk about is equanimity. Ever heard of it?

Well, that's a roots album, right? Yeah. But also, yes, it is a concept that I know a little bit about. Yeah. Yeah. No, I thought that you did. So I thought it would be fun to just riff on that improv. You'll hear it's style because it's been coming up, you know, various facets in our lives.

But we've shared some different, you know, stories and just ways both with the students and with each other, whatever, about how we deal with this specifically as jazz players, right? Yeah. It's like, well, first of all, what is equanimity? How would you define that? So it's, it's an ability. or it's a behavior that when things are at the poles, at the extremes emotionally, that you are able to stay calm and centered.

So if there are, oh, yeah, right in the face. But look at watch, look at how I can equanimously. I did not. That was amazing. I just threw, what is that? I mean, you almost took my eye out. It's a little twist tie that he made into, it's pretty much a twist tie,

throwing star. A javelin twist. Yeah. And Peter threw it right at my face. I'm trying to like... I meant to film that at your shirt and I hit him on nose. Right by his eye. Right. Right. But let me describe this. Adam did not flinch. He did have a look of surprise and wonderment. I'm a daily meditator at this point so I can pretty much

and you throw any... Well, that's not mean. You because you will throw stuff. Yeah, exactly. No, but I, but this is it is equanimity. It doesn't mean that you don't flinch or that you don't feel pain or whatever, but it's You don't chase the emotions. Like, I'm not going to be like, damn it, they mispronounce my name, you know, and then get super mad about it for very long, right?

Actually, and I, you know, I'll just describe this again. I threw this little thing at Adam. And I'm right across from him, and it hit him at the worst possible place. But Adam did something that I think it's a great part of equanimity. Actually, you smiled. Yeah. Like you didn't, you kind of, you know, jolted a little bit,

but you smiled. And I think that's one way of like, you know, that's one manifestation of equanimity. It's like nothing's going to pull me out of my joy. I took inventory of all my organs just to make sure that I wasn't missing a major one. And then after that, there wasn't much to it. But yeah, so for me, that there's perfect demonstration here. I seem a little jittery, though.

Equanimity is, as I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted by this throwing star, equanimity is if you imagine the ocean and there might be currents happening that are very violent, even underneath the surface, but the surface is nice and calm. Or you can imagine that the flip side, that sometimes the surface of the ocean, there's storms and it's very, very rough, but just below, everything is just tranquil and calm under there. There's no rough seas under the sea, you know. And that's kind of what I think equanimity is to me anyway.

It's the ability to stay centered and not chase the high is too high or the low's too low, and at least not to cling to the high is too high or the low is too low. I think the idea is like you can feel anger, but once you are mindful of your feelings and you can recognize that anger is being felt, it's kind of up to you to decide how long you want to chase that. How much do you want to be angry today about being hit in the face with a twist eye? I could. If you head it back, we could see. There have been times where I, when you, if you, you, if you, you don't have that sort of, I mean, this is, we're talking about, like, you know, very mindfulness center of things here, but when you don't have mindfulness of your feelings,

you just feel angry, you don't know what you're, you don't realize you're angry, you're feeling angry. Yeah. Just maybe have like a pit in your, in the center of your sternum, and your blood pressure is high and your heart is racing a little bit faster. It doesn't have to be a lot faster. And you don't know why, but you're agitated and you just chase that until, I don't know, until you can somehow relieve that and whether, whether you use a number of healthy or unhealthy things to do that, you can. But if you can have some equanimity and develop that muscle, then you're just never chasing it.

Then you're like, oh, that's anger. I don't have to follow that. And this is so, like, we're not a mindfulness podcast, but this is so applicable to performance. It's not even funny because it can really help you not chase things like, I really mess that up and I suck. And now I'm going to spend the rest of the gig taking it out on. on this gig. Like, that's not what we want.

Because you'll be taking it out on the listener. You're taking out on the listener. You're also, you're just, you don't have to do that. You don't have to have a bad gig just because you had a bad moment or a bad tune even, or a bad set. Like, you don't have to make the whole night, you know, horrible. You can, with a little, with a developing this muscle of recognizing what you're feeling and then deciding to just kind of stay in the middle of it and observe it, then you don't,

you're not following that. You're not chasing your tail. Would you say it's, it's, It's like you can acknowledge anger or fear or, you know, your blood pressure rising or, you know, annoyance or any of the things that can throw you off your game of what you're trying to do. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging. It's not about ignoring those things. Yeah. And in fact, you don't want to ignore.

You don't want to push them away. And you can't necessarily. You don't want to say. And if you, if you notice them, like the first step is just recognizing what's happening, like taking an inventory, a stock of what you're feeling in any given moment, including. like joy and confidence or whatever. But once you take stock of, say, annoyance, right? You don't want to be like, okay, go away annoyance. You don't want to push it away and block it out because, what is it?

It's like what we neglect or what we resist persists, right? That's the old thing. What you resist persist. And so if you try to block it out and just say, no, I won't feel this annoying thing. That's not going to happen. All you have to do is add this element of awareness of it. to the mix. Yeah.

And it starts to lose its power. Because now you are, there's an observer in the room with it. Right now it's like, it's not just pulling you along by the shirt tails like, come on, you should be annoyed. Right. Now you're like, oh, there's that annoyance. Yeah, because it's like, I mean, you could up to a point ignore a lot of things. Yeah.

But there's, but I mean, the reality is, it's like how do you acknowledge it? But at the same time say, okay, the temple's really fast. You know, I'm not going to pretend. like it's not, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of still expressing myself. I'm not going to let the emotion of like, I can't keep up get in the way of me expressing because I think this is so important for improvisers for us jazz musicians because everything that we're doing is expressing something. So like we can't just shut our mouths or stop playing and things are going to come.

You know, the drummer's going to speed up. The singer's going to sing the wrong melody. You know, like the things are going to happen. And you're going to, like you said at the beginning, it's like, you know, we're potentially our worst enemy. Yeah. But like when we're willing to say, I'm going to stay in the moment, I'm going to keep trying to tell my story, do the best of my ability, whatever happens. Totally. You know, unless somebody's coming in with, you know, a machine gun into the club and start spraying bullets, then you got to, that's okay to get thrown off your game when that happens.

But be there with what's happening, really. Like, let yourself be there with whatever is happening. So it's funny you mentioned someone counts off the tempo. Like, I'm reminded of about. a year and a half ago, I played the opening set of the jam session across street at Cranthburg. Yeah. And this young trombonist was back from Juilliard, and he counted off Cherokee in the key of E at about 350. I mean, it was ridiculous. This kid was, he's amazing.

I love this kid. But he was just obviously like, he's 19 years old and trying to show everybody. He's all hyped up on New York. He can do it. And he can do it, you know. And so I think there was a time in my life where I'd be like, either mad or like, okay, challenge accepted. I'm going to start gritting my teeth and I'm really going to whatever.

I started what happened when you hit me with the twist eye. I just started smiling and laughing like, okay, I haven't practiced this tempo and I don't remember because I don't practice at 350 ever, you know, like, and I've never played Cherokee and E that I can recall, or at least it's been 20 years since I practiced it in E. Since you were in New York. It says, I was like, so I just started laughing and smiling and like, well, I'm going to do what I can do. And, you know, whatever happens happens here, like, I shouldn't expect that I'm going to just like,

just kill this tempo and eat. And what happens is I actually had a great soul, like I played a great soul. It felt good to me. I had a great time. The audience seemed to enjoy it. Like it was well received. And it's because I was just able to stay light

and had fun with it and kind of let everybody in, like who was in the room with me, including my fellow musicians on the States. Like this is kind of silly, right? Yeah. This could be fun. But like this kid is fun. Like this happened in here.

So and that might be different. Would you say you made lemonade out of lemons? I would say so. But that doesn't mean you have to smile and take everything light. That's just what I was feeling in the moment. And going with it was a lot better than being like, okay, okay, I can't believe this is happening to me. Right. And like putting all this thing like, oh, this is, I'm getting wronged here or I have to like really prove myself.

That's a way to sink the ship, you know. Right. Well, I think regardless, it's like this equanimity. It's that ability to be in control, actually, of your response, of how, you know, I mean, yeah, normally it's like everything's going along and where there's still water. but sometimes that has to be adjusted based upon conditions on the ground and conditions on the gig. If you're ignoring all the waves at the top and it's really rough waters, but you're just like, no, everything's fine. I can hack this. You know, maybe it's like, oh, okay, well, here's this rough waters.

Let's batten down the hatches or let's maybe turn east for two hours and see if we can get out of it. There's things you can do once you acknowledge that. If you don't acknowledge it, if you're just sort of like putting the blinders on and going through, you could get hurt. All right. So to end this, I think it's only fair. You got to throw that. Now Adam has the twist tie back. He's going to throw it and see what my response is.

I would play third base. You sure? I'm closed my eyes. Okay. Ah, right in the nose. Oh, I'm so happy. Yay! Let's do it.

Let's do Cherokee and E. Now, that I know if I tried to do Cherokee and E with you, you'd crush me. That's all good. I'm not going there. All good. All right. Well, this was fun. Super fun.

So we look forward to some real speakpipes coming. Please go to you'll hear it.com. Until next time. You'll hear it.