You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Why Jazz Musicians Are So Cool - #118

Episode Date: May 27, 2018

In this episode, Peter and Adam discuss what makes jazz musicians cool. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today we're going to tell you why jazz musicians are so cool. Now normally Adam would be saying something witty right now, but he's actually not here. He's taking a little break and I don't know if he's coming back. So this might be our first solo, you'll hear it. So I'm going to jump right in.

My name's Peter Martin. I guess you figure that out. Hope everyone's doing well today. So the topic of why jazz musicians are so cool It's a little bit self-congratulatory as I'm a jazz musician, so I don't know how cool I am. But we're going to go through some things I see in some other jazz musicians. We're going to start out very surface level and say clothing. Now, jazz musicians might have fallen off a little bit the last few years I've noticed with some of the musicians in their wardrobe being a little bit less trend setting.

but over the years jazz musicians have been some of the sharpest dressers dressers you talk about Roy Haynes who's an amazing you know for years I mean he was in G-Cube Q magazine in like the 50s and in the 2000s oh I think Adam's joining us after after all you're coming to join the podcast today we started already yeah we're starting why don't you have a seat here we started I thought this was going to be a solo one because you left yeah Adam Manus, everybody. This is my podcast, too, man. What are you talking about?

I've just got to start. You want what the subject is today? That would be helpful. Why jazz musicians are so cool. That's what we're going to be talking about? Yeah, all right. And I've already given one, which is about clothing. Cool, bro.

I mentioned Roy Haynes. He's been in GQ in five different decades. Miles Davis, you know, great fashion icon. And, you know, a lot of the great photographers used to photograph and still do jazz musicians because of, you know, we look cool. Yeah, it's because of our clothes. I think GQ actually just did a whole thing this year on some,

some of like the older generation that are still like, Sonny Rollins still dresses to the nines. Yep. You know, and it looks amazing and still has an amazing sense of style. They all do, so, yeah. The next thing I was thinking, I think, because you got here late, I feel like I'm going to be leading this one, which is fine, no problem.

I love that you just started without me. It was great to know that this can happen. All right, I'll see you, man. I'm shooting off. So next, I was thinking, we have an improvisatory attitude towards life that I think emanates from our time as improvisers, which is such a big part of what we do as jazz musicians. So we're kind of cool because we can go with the flow, we can improvise, we can make things up. I don't want to brag, but we're kind of known as the life of the

party because, you know, we'll just come up with some stuff. We're kind of witty and funny. We improvise. We improvise our way through life. We improvise on our tax returns. We improvise in a lot of places, you know. Sometimes we improvise at the start of the podcast. Exactly. I think I called an audible improvisation, whatever you want to call it. What do you think? Well, I think one of the reasons that judges are so cool is that they invented the word cool as an adjective. I think we did.

Yeah, I mean, it's hot, it's cool. We got everybody confused. We're so cool. You know, you're bad means you're actually good. Our vernacular is amazing. That's true. Actually, that is part of it. You know, the whole, like, hip, cool.

Cat. You know, all this stuff. Yeah, yeah. There's a great Christian McBride video on the jazz vernacular. Did you see that? Oh, that's awesome, yeah. Yeah, check it out. It's pretty cool.

It's pretty hip, man. It's bad. The great Christian McBride. The great Christian McBride. So some other ones. Oh, yeah. So honesty in music, we try to be, you have to be honest in our music. Like, there's nothing to hide behind.

It's yourself. It's our solos. It's our music. It's our compositions. Our improvisation. So that leads to a certain level of honesty in life. certain level. That sounds like I'm hedging. It leads to a lot of honesty in terms of who you are. And I think there's nothing cooler than being yourself. You know, and jazz musicians and really just

artists in general, let's face it, are known for being comfortable in their own skin. If you hit a certain level of greatness, you kind of have to be in order to be effective. Yeah, I think any great performer, you know, audiences can sniff out when you're being fake like in two seconds. So if you make any kind of name for yourself as a performer, there's a certain amount of openness and honesty that has to happen. And that does translate over a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I see that.

And then I think that also leads to, you know, confidence. Like, once you know you can play in this music, you, well, really, in order to be able to play, you have to have confidence in the music. And that goes over into how you are. You look so meek sitting there. Is that because you showed up late today? I'm just not feeling very confident today. You know, it's cool to be confident, you know.

I mean, strong and wrong is one, you know, kind of. kind of permutation of that. But I think that, you know, the confidence that you have to have in order to be an effective jazz musician, just like the honesty, it can't be faked. You know, it can be sniffed out from the audience. And the audiences want to come see improvisers take chances and be fearless, and you have to be confident to do that. You don't have to be flawless.

You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be arrogant either. No. Yeah, that's a whole level of a whole level of... That's another thing that makes us cool. We're arrogant, confident, and honest. No, but the confidence, like you said, being an improviser, it requires so much confidence. Yes.

Or else you're just going to sound meek and like you don't have anything behind what you're playing, what you're saying. So, yeah, totally. Yeah, and I think as, you know, no matter what you play in the jazz world, you're going to be soloing at sometimes. So that's what sort of, you know, sets it apart from other music where you can just be part of a section, which is fine, but you don't necessarily have to be that confident to be in a section. You're going to solo. even if you're a bass player or whatever, there's going to be a time when you have to step up and have that confidence and be able to have that honesty

in your music and be able to say something. And there's nothing cooler than being able to get up. I mean, it's like public speaking or something. You don't have to be the greatest public speaker, but you have to be able to do it within the music. This is a great episode, man. I'm glad you started this. Well, it's not over yet.

We hadn't gone for that long. You probably thought we were going for a while. I have no idea. I just got here. Yeah. Why else are we cool? Why else are we cool? Well, you know, I do think all of the things that we've just talked about, confidence and honesty, I go back to the improvisation thing.

And I do it because we talk about how it's simple, you know, to play jazz, but it is hard to do. And so I think it does take a certain amount of determination, a certain amount of grit to be a good jazz musician. And I do think that that is cool, like to have that kind of work ethic. There's nobody who's at the top of their game on the jazz scene who is not an insanely hardworking person. Right. You know what I mean? And I also think it's a cool, I just thought of this one, it's, I think anything is cool that stays the same on sort of a basic level for many years and it's not afraid to like change with the times. Now jazz music does change, of course, and it evolves, but sort of the basic tenets, some of the basic tenets of it.

And I don't want to call it the jazz police or the anti-jazz police. I want to be right in the middle because I'm cool. It's not a fad. It's not a fad, exactly. And it's not afraid to, like, dip in the poll numbers and the listenership or whatever. We kind of keep chugging along doing our thing. Let the people come to us because we're cool, man. Sitting back with my cigarette playing jazz.

All right. Now you're kind of losing me on this one. No, I don't feel so cool anymore. I was giving you examples of how to be cool and how to not be cool. Well, this is great, man. Well, if you show up to the beginning of the episode next time, maybe I'll hear. It. Sorry. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello.

Wait, you can do that. Absolutely. All right, and if you like what you heard, please leave a review and a rating below. Thanks.