You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - What's A Groove Echo Chamber??

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

In this episode, Peter talks about one of his tunes from his latest album "Generation S". The tune is entitled "Groove Echo Chamber". Wondering what that means? Well you're not alone - find out the answer to that question and what it was like recording this track in this episode.Check out "Groove Echo Chamber".Want to buy the album? Look no further. Click HERE.Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

Hey Peter. Yo. What the hell is a groove echo chamber? This. Would that be something you might be interested? Yes. I'm Adam Annis. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Music advice and commentary. Coming at you. Coming at you today, sponsored. And sunlight. And lots of sunlight. We got that winter, that low winter sun. We're going to see, how do we look?

How does Peter and Adam look as we check ourselves out? You look good, dude. I like those glasses. in a lot of sun. These are blue blocking glasses. Do you know what that means? I have a pair, yeah, I have a pair of non-prescription blue light blockers as well. Yeah.

That I never wear because I feel kind of like a poser. I'll be honest. Really, but what am I blocking? I'm blocking the blue from the computer screen. I don't know what's going on. I think the sun, too. Blue blockers. Don't you remember those commercials from the 90s?

Those are beta blockers. Those are blue blockers. Beta blockers are what classical musicians used to audition. That's right. Tune in next week for a breakdown. Breakdown on how to audition. More pharmaceutical tips from. Yeah, so anyway, we are brought to you as always by Open Student.

We got a couple of exciting things. The thing that I've been so passionate about recently because of so much great response from our community is our mentor sessions, which have been happening. Well, they happen every Friday. Are you familiar with them? I am familiar again. Sorry, I asked you that last time. I do host them. So I am not totally zoned out. Rhetorical question.

But anyway, you know what I'm looking forward to is Taylor Eatsy. We've had him on the pod before. His music. Yeah, we've had his music on. He's a fire brand. He has done one mentor session. He's got a really nice technical setup. He is a brilliant pianist.

He's sub for a gig for me and did so well. I almost didn't get a call back from this individual. Yeah. It's going to happen with Taylor Agsty. Yeah, he's super talented. And he's coming through to teach. So if you want to join that member session with Grammy Award winner, Taylor Ixte, join, join Open Studio.

Yeah. And look, you can join. And there's no long-term. commitment. You can join and then go to the mentor session with Taylor, watch the Aaron Parks one we had last week. Check out the Fred Hirsch one. Adam Larson is coming in for some shapes. Adam Larson, some melodic shapes. You can do that. Check out all of Adam's courses, all of our other stuff. And then just quit. Adam Manis. Adam Manis. What did I say? Menace. Someone called me Adam Menace in the chat. I didn't like that. You liked it. Literally liked it. Oh, I did

like it on there. Sorry. But anyway, you can do that. And then you can just drop off. And there's no long term commitment. If you want to be that guy, open studio. But we think once you're in the community you're going to want to stay. We are prepared every week to give you value with our wonderful community. Also, Open Studio Pro, just to reiterate, you're going to want to go to Open StudioJazz.com and sign up there. You can't join right now because it got so popular, we had to gate it. We had to put up a veritable jazz gate, a swinging gate. Like Phil Collins, Tom's. These are gated. Gated A.F. Remember which Open Studio Pro is. Gated A.F. But we're going to open up at least one more time before the end of the year and you'll be able to get in on 2020.

$203 prices. Because 2024 prices, everything's going up, buddy. Have you noticed that? Yeah. I have. Yeah. Wait, how much is a gallon of soy milk right now?

A gallon of soy milk is north of $5. I can't tell you how far north. That's expensive. Yeah. How much is vitamin D milk, as we used to call it back in the day? It's around that too. Is it?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, what are we talking about today? We are asking what a groove echo chamber is. Yeah. Now we know what a liberal echo chamber is. A conservative echo chamber is.

My idea. So this is the first single from my new record that you produced. Oh, I did? So it's really our record. You know, if we get a Grammy, we both get the producer,

the artists, the engineer, I believe. Yeah. Academy, if you're listening, hook us up. That's right. Shout out Grammys. Keep on awarding.

But anyway, this is the first single, though. The entire record comes out on December 1st. I'm so excited about this. This is available now to stream and all that.

You can order the CD and the LP now. We'll have links to all that below. But we wanted to release this tune because we're just excited about it, and the sucker was done. So we thought it would be fun to kind of watch, and I could give you a little bit of a behind the scenes play by play. And Adam, you could give a little bit of a behind the scenes play by play as producer in the booth as we did this because we recorded it. Am I talking fast today? I feel like I'm talking very fast. I'm drinking my green smoothie, which has got me all hyped up.

Kail, do we have any details that we need him to read as far as like, open studio? Like legal disclaimers. I could do that. I could really nail that right now. No, but this is, the way we recorded this record, I am so excited about because I had the idea. You had some great ideas. We folded them together. The other musicians had some ideas.

And what it kind of became, now that I look back on it, it really had many different, as we say in the business, potential points of failure. It's like a bridge that you look at it and you see that it's a little bit. shoddy at some parts. Maybe there's some holes. Like you could make it across that bridge, but if you really look at that bridge, you're not going to want to cross it. Shout out modoc.

Shout out moda. Exactly. We have some bridges. The Forest Park Parkway over there, there's some shoddy bridgework. It's just old. But anyway, it's just to say that looking back on it now,

I'm glad that I didn't realize all the potential points of failure because the main thing is we recorded this in one take. And so what that means is, and we announced that we recorded it. That was dumb. It kind of was, though. Whose idea was that?

We got lucky, that was my idea. But I mean, the idea is that like, yeah, if you don't announce it, then you can sort of just do whatever it takes. Since we announced it and we live streamed it, we sort of boxed ourselves in. But it was really, I got to tell you, from a performance, performer standpoint, I mean, I composed the piece and all that and prepped all the parts or whatever. But once you get in the moment of recording it, it's just like a gig or recording session, except it's the combination of both of those. minus an audience. Yeah. Although we did have an audience online, but minus a physical audience.

So we were in the studio here at Open Studio, right in the next room. We'd rehearsed and we were ready to go on this. But it kind of requires you to put out of your mind all the things of like, okay, I want to try to play this. I want to try to do that. And what I tried to do was just really get in the moment of like, let's have fun on this. Let's play something. Yeah. Let's create something.

So I wasn't even really thinking as much as I could. Let's make an album because then you get into that thing of thinking like, okay, I'm going to try to nail on the first take. Well, if I get to the second take, it's going to, you know, it won't sound as fresh. And I don't want to be the one. Let me, let me lay back a little bit. Let me do this number of courses. All the sort of pre-planning that can be the enemy of what I think is an exciting, if not perfect. You know, and, you know, this performance, like recording like this, it's not going to be perfect in the way that sometimes we think of recordings.

but a lot of the great recordings studio or otherwise that I love have these beautiful imperfections. So I try to allow that for me and for the other musicians to be able to enter into this space of doing one take but saying, this is going to be it, and that's good enough. And there's nothing wrong with that, because that's our decision. And it's a good decision.

It was a great session, man. The vibes were right. I think the best thing you did, obviously the compositions are great, but your best decision was hiring the people that you hired. to do the playing because that's ultimately like the last line of defense

to bad vibes, right? It's like if you have someone... Lack of musical execution. Listen, we've all played with people that can throw a real wrench into a gig or a recording session. Right. They might throw a great party or a great soiree,

but when it comes to the recording session... You know, usually the people that throw a wrench into a recording session are not the people to throw a good party. I'll be honest. That's true. Those two things are usually similar. Right.

But you chose some great people, Gregory Hutchinson, and Rubin Rogers, Sarah Hanahan. And I was so honored to be just a fly on the wall and giving some suggestions when I heard stuff because we didn't have very much time for rehearsals and for working stuff out. And so I took a lot of pride in my role

as trying to hear things as an audience member and with your vision in mind. And I think not to be cocky, but I think we nailed it. No, I think so. And I think that your production in terms of, like, you had some really prescient additions and subtractions as we were rehearsing the two days before.

Yeah. The day of the show, you were very tight-lipped in terms of musical changes, which was smart because that could have thrown us some people off their game. It's too late. But I'm glad you mentioned to subtractions. That's mostly what I did is take things away because I know from my own projects, if I ever have regrets, which I try not to hang on to, but if I ever listen to something and I'd like to change something, it's never usually like I should have added something

here. It's usually like, I should have not done so much. You know what I mean? I could have taken away such something and it would have made the whole thing a little bit more impactful. So let's have a, why we have a have a gander as we say? Okay. Listen, look at that sunlight behind us, man. Man, it is bright. Look, we're going to cover up some of it at least with this. Boom. All right. So we have a gander. Yeah. And so before we get to the great Sarah playing the melody and stuff. So that obviously is the intro. First of all, shout out, um, Zach Brown, engineer and Caleb Kirby, really the whole team in terms of the sound and look and feeling everything. Andy, Stephen.

Andy Stevens for sure. The thing about this is like we were all in the same room. So just to give a little bit of like obviously you can see us. This is actually us playing and recording, which makes things more difficult for audio engineering and for streaming and for video even in a way. Well, it kind of helps the video because you can have cool shots like that, right? Yeah. With Greg in the background.

Yeah. But in terms of audio, it's a real challenge because we had no isolation. we're all facing towards each other. We did a bunch of things to make it easier for the musicians. So in terms of like the crew, the reit sound and video, big shout out for them,

you know, just a little behind the scenes to be able to be able to pull this off because I wanted to have, I gave them a challenge. I was like, I want studio audio quality sound, but we're going to record it live.

We want to be able to mix things afterwards. I knew we weren't really going to be able to edit because it's going to be bleeding, but I wanted to be able to really get, I mean, like you hear, check out the sound of when Rubin comes in. Like his bass. Now it's Ruben Rogers.

But, you know, just a great kind of, we haven't even seen him yet. Then it will kind of make more sense. But you know what it is with this kind of thing, Peter? So you have four jazz musicians in one room together. Yeah. I think engineering-wise, I'm no professional engineer, but I've been around it enough to know some things. And I think this is what Zach did is, you know,

just wear a simple tuxedo to the gala. Right. Like there's nothing more to do. Oh, Gala, we should mention that later. But you got it, if you have somewhere fancy to go and you're, you're, you want to dress in an appropriate way, just wear a nice fitting tuxedo. Go classic. Go with something that's going to work. So not jeans and a white beater. No. Wife pleaser is what they're calling those now, by the way. Don't. You want to know why they're calling it that. But you don't have to get too complicated with this. There's so many iconic sounding albums that have been, that have bleed. You have instruments in the same room that aren't isolated. And so the way I think Zach went about setting this up is, is like a beautiful tuxedo. It's well cut. He's getting every, every thing on all the instruments that you'd want.

Right. And the bleed is minimal. Speaking of well cut, that jacket I'm wearing is not well cut. That was good. I love all this. All this film, like the fills that Greg plays really, like what he did there, just, talking about getting the right people. he plays in a way that inspires me to come up with something that works

to go in between the cracks, right? That was directly related to what he just did. Ruben knows when to lay it down. Ruben Rogers is a vibe too. You know, a lot of the stuff, not just Greg, but what Sarah's doing, what I'm doing, certainly with Ruben, it's like we, what I'm really proud of on this, too, like we were going for some stuff.

So, like, there's a way to play, because this melody's kind of hard. I mean, I wrote it and I was like having to read. We made some changes, too. But like Sarah is like willing to like not only nail the part, but to play some stuff to react to take some chances. That's the thing. Like it's one thing to take chances when you know you have unlimited takes. But the reality from being on a lot of records recording sessions over the years is like in a way you only have the one take anyway, a real first take to get that kind of a vibe. Yeah.

And so that was what my vision for this. It was like, well, yeah, we're going to cut out any chances of fixing things and doing additional takes. But what we're going to ensure at least is avoiding that whole. whole thing of like you do four takes and when you go back and listen and you're like well the first take was a little bit sloppier but it had that vibe the fourth take we got it perfect but we started we were reacting to what we played in earlier takes you know we've all been there and then you end up using the first take and trying to clean it up and all that I'm like forget that we're going to go right to the right take such a great idea man it sorry no that it what it does is it really

it causes everybody to really be on it I mean there's always these these these players are pros and every time they play they're really on it but it really everybody knows that this is it yeah but I mean it's like we all do that on the gig yeah and so I wanted to get away from this thing of like why does it have to be so different on a recording session now that requires you know like setting things up in a way that it can work having them you know a little more rehearsal than we'd normally do that Greg had all the music memorized pretty much so just to explain this

kababi biak So just to add another layer of complexity, but really a layer of inspiration for- Beauty, a layer of beauty. Yeah. So Kababi Bayak, who's an amazing painter, visual artist here in St. Louis, but it's just an international artist, truly. I asked him to make the album cover. And he was like, absolutely, I'd love to do that.

And then I said, and please paint it while we're making the record. And he was like, are you crazy? No, he was like, okay, let's do it. and which was really awesome and it added such an immediacy to it, but also it was so fun to be able to look over. And luckily, I couldn't really see it from my vantage point, his actual canvas, I could just see him working. And like really being part of that creative process with us.

So it just gave me the inspiration without the distraction. If I had seen it, I would be like, oh my gosh, that's so cool what you're able to put together. And this is the cover for the album. And a beautiful... Some really nice lens flare happening here. Fire Sarah Hanahan. Exactly. For the fire.

You bring on Sarah for the absolute fire. She brought the fire and big shout out Sarah. And I mean, because, you know, this, she hasn't done that. She's done some recording sessions. She's young. She's very well seasoned for her age. But she doesn't have the number of sets and reps together. She made her own album coming out with Tane and Mark.

Jeff Tyn Watts, Nat Reeves, Mark Kerry. Mark Kerry, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, but in terms of like Ruben, Greg and I have played together so. much that this was still a challenge. I couldn't imagine for her. But I mean, you see, she's not only hanging. She's like thriving.

She's thriving. She's thriving. And thriving and leading through it. So shout out. I got to say, just real quick, we've been talking a lot last several weeks about like some really young musicians. Yes. About like Jihari Stampley.

We're just getting older. They're not even that young. No, I know. They're not really that young. We're just old. But it's really making me feel like. Inspired? Inspired and also hopeful for the, like, for the future of humanity.

I think I'm kind of messed up right now. I thought you're going to be like, it's really made me feel bitter. Of all the messed up stuff in the world, I'm like, man, music's. Oh, I know. When people like, is jazz and live, is loud, you're going to say? I'm like, oh, boy, relax. Music's okay. Music's in good hands.

It's all good. It's all good. I love this groove that Greg's. I don't think he'd ever done this. No, and all the times. All the times reversed it. He just went into this because he heard it on the piano. And I have to say, as the producer here, I think this is one that I had the least amount of, like,

I don't think I said anything about this. one because this kind of plays itself. This is one of those tunes that you wrote. It's pretty obvious what can happen. It needs to be. Yeah. This kind of burning is a killing solo too by the way Pete. All those roots down there. Are you sure about that? Oh. How do you do that, Peter? Can we stop the video and you just explain how you do that? Yeah, well, no, but full transcription available to open studio members. Hey, open studio members. I haven't even seen it yet.

I haven't seen it either. I have that. I trust Max made it look beautiful. I couldn't. I couldn't transcribe this. I wouldn't. You could. I would not though. You wouldn't. Oh yeah. We were having a little bit of fun. That's a fun week. The whole week was fun. Energy was there. Okay, so before we go to the drum solo, which is just incredible, I just want to say one thing, and this might be helpful for somebody watching this, is like... Help them. You know, go for something. Hey. Like, especially when you're playing on a tune like this. Yeah, there's some... There was a time when I would have listened and, like, heard all those little cack notes and little mistakes that I made. That stuff is not that clean. And look, we're putting it out there. You can slow this thing down and you can see that I'm not hitting everything exactly. But you have some leeway. First of all, nobody really cares.

Actually, nobody wants to hear you try to be perfect. People want to hear you go for shit. I was going to play this perfect, but then I realized no one wanted to hear me. Nobody wants to hear that. So I purposely messed up. You know what's boring? Listening to someone trying to play perfectly. Go for some stuff. You know what else is boring? And drop in the comments if you know what this television show this reference is from. Don't answer it. You know what's really boring? What? Three hours. of solo bass playing boring jazz. Oh. What is that a saucer?

What does he got on there? He's got like a... What is that a podlet? Or is that a Tom? Dude is crazy. Oh, man, look at that. Kabobi's like, I got to add another symbol on my picture. Hutch, man.

Damn. Kind of risky way that he's playing through all of it. So it's like... And still champion. I know. I mean, it's kind of a risky, like he's playing the form so well. Dude. But he's floating above it at times, you know, as he crafts the solo.

I do remember there's places like this in every tune where normally I'd just be like, cool, you know, but I remember thinking like, damn, this is such a killing solo. Sarah played a killing solo. Like, we don't come together at the right place. And so what I try to do in those moments is just be like, get into the music even more. Because I figure, well, you know what, if I'm feeling it the way the rhythm section is feeling it, like, you know, Rubin and Greg, the way that they're playing and I use my instincts is not guarantee, but there's. a higher percentage average that I'm going to come in at the right place, you know? And then I'll go with those bet, those kind of averages. I've only had a chance to play music with Hutch, I think once or twice maybe.

But I've been watching him play for 30 years, probably. 10 year old. I'm old. And I don't, you know, it's not, I think, out of bounds to say that he really is, like, has taken the torch from people like Max Roach and Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones in that he has some of the most creative, beautiful drum solos. On record, I think, in the past 30 years. Yeah, for sure.

And every time I see him play live or I hear him on a recording, I always feel so like taken care of. Like you never feel lost in the form. You don't feel like he's trying to mess with you. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, in a good way. Like in a, it's not boring. It's like it's it's it's it's he's carried like it's like a Philly Joe solo like it's just so it feels like it's it's already been in the universe for a thousand years or something.

You know what I mean? And like he's just letting it come through and it's just so beautiful man. Yeah. I mean it's just I mean there's a combination of exuberance and confidence as he goes through it that if you're willing to kind of get swept up in it, good things will happen totally. Ah. The breakdown. A bar. That's a solo man.

Brilliant. Check out what Ruben's doing. You know, he's just adding, adding creativity. Echo Chamber, Peter Martin, and Generation S. Congrats, Peter. That's a great track, man. You should be proud. I'm very proud, very proud.

Available now streaming everywhere. Yeah, go check it out. The album's coming out December 1st. We're going to do one more single, I think, before that. Yeah, what are you going to do? You got anything in mind? Generation S, I think. Isn't that the name of the band?

That is the name of the band. Gratitude and motion. Okay. I think is the name of the track. Great tune. Yeah. Until next time, you'll hear it.