You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - What You Should Expect From Jazz in the First 30 Days - #49

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

Get out your planners! Peter and Adam layout what you should except from learning jazz within the first thirty days. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Oh, hey Peter. What's up? I'm feeling a little sick, man. Sick of? I'm doing this like 30-day jazz cleanse where all I listen to is jazz. I'm not feeling it. Wow. It made you physically ill, huh?

Am I yellow? I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily jazz advice coming at you. I feel recovered. I feel reinvigored. 20 seconds, and that cleanse worked, man.

You just had to wait it out, I guess. No, why are we doing that comical skit to open up our show here? Why do we do any of them? Why do you call them comical? No, because today we're talking about what should you expect from jazz in the first 30 days? Ooh, that's good. That's a mouthful. It doesn't totally make sense, and it's a little bit mystical.

Get that off BuzzFeed? Exactly. And look at these seven jazz grades, how fat they've gotten. Say it again? What should you expect from jazz in the first 30 days? Okay, so by expect from jazz, you mean like when you're learning jazz. Learning jazz. For beginners out there.

Yeah, exactly. First 30 days of learning jazz. What did you expect? This is great, because we do have a lot of beginners that listen. Every day we have someone new. We have a lot of like pros on here. We have a lot of like very talented players of all levels. The first 30 days, man, can we think back to that?

That would be fun. Yeah, we were both fairly young when we started playing this music. So that would be a lot. But I do think you and I both are Renaissance men, to say the least. We like to learn about new things. That's right. And we enjoy time travel. So that we should be set up to end.

answer this nicely. So let's think about it from like 30 days to somebody that's listening now. I mean, whether you're, you know, we probably don't have a lot of six-year-old listeners, but maybe some 12-year-olds from 12 to 112, you know, and you're playing music, you know, you can play the piano or the flute or the drums or whatever your instrument you sing and you're interested in jazz, but you're like, I really want to learn jazz now.

I want to jump in and during the first month, the first 30 days, how is this going to kind of look? And I think the biggest thing, the biggest kind of shock to the system, hopefully a fun, interesting and invigorating shock is the improvisation element. You know, like that's really just a big thing because it's so different from what most people have experienced in their musical career. I mean, you could play classical music, play and instrument and stuff,

and never even improvise one note. You can be very good classical. I mean, we have friends who are in a world-class orchestra. They turn bright red and get terrified when they have to improvise anything. Even if they heard the word improvisation, they turn bright red sometimes, you know. I've had like improvised section in charts for people and I've had them literally turned me and say, I'm not doing that. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

So, okay. So the first 30 days, I think some things that if you're doing this in a really productive and organic way, things that you can expect is like being free, having to get out of your comfort zone. But in a positive way. Like I always think jazz should not, like what you should not be having to worry about in the first 30 days, I believe is like what is a C7? what is a sharp nine, you know, the sort of science behind it, which is totally fun,

and we geek out on that. But at first, it should just be about getting a feel for the music, just learning to play a couple phrases by call and response. That's right. The first 30 days

actually should be the most fun 30 days, right? Because you have no expectations about any of it, and you hopefully don't, aren't geeking out about flat nines and sharp 13s and a silly thing like that

that we tend to obsess over. Yeah. But you're right. And I love that you always teach this way and you preach this when you teach when you teach is that this Can I get an amen? Amen, brother.

This music is all about how it feels. It's about playing with people. It's about communication. It's about love. It's about all these great things. Joy. Joy. And when it's played right, you can feel it.

You can literally feel it as you play. So hopefully if you've never played jazz and you're starting to swing and you're starting to play along with records, you're getting this feeling for probably the first time. Right, right. And I think that, you know, jazz is a language

and that's not just a kind of corny thing we say it's really so true it's still corny but yes it is corny but it is corny yeah but I mean it really is it's just like when you're learning a new language in 30 days

you can learn in a surprising amount if you might not need to you don't need to like learn the grammar rules and all that but you can learn a few you know don't de esta la bibliotech you know and just get the flow of the language imitate it say things back don't be afraid I mean really the first 30 days

of learning jazz in some ways should be your fastest development. Totally. You know, I mean, it gets more, it's like exponentially back, you know, in reverse in a way, as you learn more, because the gradient of how you can learn later on changes. But at this point, if you or I want to learn anything, it takes a year. Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, it's just like when you're young and you're learning a language, like your vocabulary is going quickly.

So, I mean, yeah, I love this idea of the first 30 days of there being, you know, a lot of joy, a lot of fun, a lot of imitation. This is not the time to be a. I mean, look, if you sound like crap and somebody hears, you can be like, I've only been playing for 30 days. That's right. I mean, just wait so you've been playing for 30 years and you don't sound good. Not a lot of excuses. I love what you said that you don't have to know, like, the grammatic rules and the, you know, all of the rules of the language to speak it.

Like, I can order pretty much any coffee that I want to in Italian, and any dessert, really. And I have no idea if the pronunciation is correct. But I know that when I say it, I get my coffee and my treat immediately. And then you get a whole sentence back in the time because you say it so well, you don't understand it, right? But it's very similar to jazz, actually. Like, it's pretty immediate. Like, you get to start speaking this language in those first 30 days, that first month. And, you know, at the end, you get your 30-day chip.

No, something else. Something else. Well, I think, too, you know, and this, you know, we're always in danger. I feel like the jazz police are circling our block sometimes, listening into these episodes because they come after us hard. Actually, they are, like, right across the house. That's true. The Jazz Police. But I think that a great thing to experience during those first 30 days and learn is that a dirty little secret that we have that jazz is not that hard actually.

It's pretty easy. You know, I mean, it shouldn't be hard. It's something that takes, you know, the more that you put into it, of course, the more you get back. But if you're learning it in an organic way, it shouldn't be difficult. I don't know, difficult hard. Are those two different things? It's challenging. Of course.

Anything good is challenging. Yeah. But if you go into it with this idea of like trying to learn it as a language, Learn by imitating. Be free. Don't be afraid about making mistakes. You cannot be like during those first 30 days you're going to make forever. You're going to make a lot of mistakes.

And that's when you develop. That's when you grow. So you cannot be afraid of sounding bad, making mistakes, that kind of thing. Absolutely true. This is fun. This is fun, man. I want to go back in time, man. I want to go back to little baby Adam, little baby Peter.

We could learn jazz again, man. Well, if only we had a time machine. Andrew, get on that. Come on. Andrew. So, yeah, I just wanted to say a big shot. out to our listeners. We're getting a lot of listeners. In fact, we're going to start tracking a little more accurately and maybe even, you know, maybe a little vanity metrics might show up

every now and now. I don't know. But I mean, we're, it's really, you know, it's flattering to us and I'm so appreciative that folks take time out of their day to spend, you know, eight to 12 to 15 minutes with us, whatever it is. And, you know, we really appreciate that. I mean, time is short for everybody now. And there's so much great stuff to consume. So thank you guys. Dude, are we blowing up? I'm blowing up up in here. I'm trying to stay home. That's all. Next week, if we hit the number, I think we're going to, I ain't can be thinking nobody ever be like, y'all better have listened. You're welcome.

Yeah, you're welcome for this jazz knowledge. All upon you. No, I mean, man, this podcast doesn't exist without the listeners. Half of our lessons come from questions from them and keep them coming. You can go to you'll hear.com. You can ask us a question. You can leave us a voicemail. Sorry, I have to check my email here as I do this speech.

Well, we got one minute left. We're getting the cue here. Oh, we got one minute on the video. Andrew's timing us. Who gave Andrew that kind of power all of a sudden? That's a powerful engineer over there. Man, all right. Well, until next week.

What? All right. Okay. You'll hear it? Yeah.