First things first - grab your transcription here:
How I Finally Made a Lesson about The Movie - Subscribers Only
If this week’s lesson is clickbait, it’s not very good clickbait.
Years ago, when a certain “jazz movie” came out, I vowed never to mention it by name, save in private conversation.
It’s not that I disliked The Movie, even though it’s hard to watch with suspended-disbelief as a “real” musician…
…but more that everybody was talking about it, and plenty of YouTubers were getting well-deserved view-count bumps by talking about it.
So I never wanted to make “just another W@#*&^$# lesson”.
I’d always secretly harbored a dream, however, of showing a new/casual jazz fan the gap between what The Movie depicts as “modern jazz”, and the music I’ve spent my life studying.
Because - c’mon.
Bright young 17-year-olds in 2001 would not decide to throw away money, status, and probably the opportunity for a big house with a 2-car garage just for rehashed Buddy Rich Band palaver.
It’s not like I was in a “jazz bubble” in high school, either. I also liked Led Zeppelin, and all the best music of the time, including (I was a grunge kid) Nirvana and Soundgarden. Not to mention some of the best hip hop of the era, from Tribe and Pharcyde to Illmatic and Jay.
Was I going to forgo playing that stuff to play a niche music with a much smaller audience to play…stuff like they play in The Movie?
Hell no.
This “jazz music” would have to be life-changingly awesome for so many of us to decide to study it.
So I wanted to make a video introducing a new fan to the jazz music I knew…
…but I also knew it had to work on two levels.
Because longtime followers of the channel weren’t going to sit through a dull video intended only for “outsiders”.
Soooo - hopefully I’ve split the atom.
See if you agree;)
Why I Whistled Jazz Solos on Instagram - Subscribers Only
As I say in the lesson, it started as a gag...
This spring, I've been putting more time into the channel, trying to tell some deeper stories.
That's meant more time in the studio, with cameras and mics floating around.
Around the same time, my friends Ben and Dan - brothers - have been training jiujitsu with me.
Ben's got a dry irreverence that manifests itself in some amazing Instagram comedy moments, and that was probably top-of-mind when I proposed my "just a lark" idea to his brother Dan:
"What if I start the 'bad whistle solos' YouTube channel?"
...which both brothers shot down, quickly, and repeatedly.
Almost to spite them, I pulled out the phone one afternoon while listening to Spotify.
It was then that I made the realization that kickstarted this whole silly detour in my life:
It's actually way funnier if I try to whistle a good solo.
So it was with tune-after-tune on my playlist.
Then, while listening to an Avishai Cohen (trumpet) solo, I realized how to "next level" things: "I need to start whistling jazz solos."
So began the multi-hour "accelerated learning" odysseys that had me sweating bullets, whistling along with tiny loops of jazz solos so I could get them accurate enough to get a laugh on Instagram.
It was all part of a big joke.
But the entire experiment turned out to be the perfect case study in accelerated learning, and caused me to crack open Dan Coyle's The Talent Code, and revisit the concept of Myelination.
The rest is history.
The beat that's taking over my playlist - Subscriber Only
I had an interesting comment already on this week's lesson...
I'll paraphrase, since I'm waaaay too lazy to ask permission to use the quotation;)
"All this Dilla stuff that's taking over music today is just the 'latest fad'. When are we going to get back to what made music good back 'in the day'?"
I mostly feel the opposite way.
I think most contemporary beats are wack...
...and that the resurgence of interest in Dilla's canon is one of the bright spots.
For context, this all began with my Spotify library.
I don't like to brag, but there are only two things I feel I'm truly great at. (Drumming, though I'm aspiring to it, isn't even one of them.)
The first is parallel parking - I'm like Parallel Park Rain Man. Most people will look at a small spot on a crowded street with a line of cars behind them and panic. I think "meh, no hill, no inclement weather, no kids playing - that's only a 4.5."
To paraphrase Tom Cruise as Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men, "unfortunately for Dawson and Downey, I don't do anything better than I parallel park."
The second is culling a walled-garden-of-awesomeness from the general mediocrity and palaver that populates Spotify.
Everybody thinks his playlist is the best, and, with a single exception, they're all wrong. That single exception is me. ("Is I"?)
What I started noticing in my tune library was that the "intentionally-off-kilter" beats we've come to shorthand as "Dilla beats" (unless Dilla's estate starts sending cease-and-desist letters - nothing would surprise me anymore;) - were well represented.
It's gone beyond the classics like Slum Village, The Pharcyde, and Tribe.
It's Hiatus Kaiyote, and a bunch of people I'd never even heard of.
Here's the thing, though - this is a highly curated playlist. Of all (objectively, of course) great contemporary music. (If you don't believe me, you'll have a sampling from the clips in the lesson).
There's definitely some "selection bias".
Which is why I say Dilla's taking over my playlist. Where's it's less-widely-represented is in contemporary music in general.
I have to wonder about the influence of Robert Glasper in putting Dilla back on the map, but I tend to think it's huge.
Black Radio wasn't an accident, either. In several places on the record, Glasper drops conversations with his bandmates in which he's expressing essentially the same sentiment as my YouTube commenter: "most contemporary music is wack. We have to change that."
The artists using the "off kilter" beats in their music are the very folks likely to be either listening to Glasper's work, and/or the original Dilla catalogue.
But I digress. Today, I bring you a "tasting flight" of four such tunes, selected from my playlist.