Hey, Peter. Yes. Merry Christmas, bud.

Merry Christmas. Yeah. What are you doing today?

Yeah, I'm spending with family with the kids. Oh, that's beautiful. Watching their little rosy-cheeked faces light up when we get them whatever crappy presents. We got them. Yeah, what did you get them? Oh, we can't even say yet. They might not have opened them yet. They might be listening to the podcast. They don't listen to this. Oh, they don't listen to it. Um, so today we have,

this is our week of best ofs, or as we like to call it, we don't know what they was. But no, I think we have some good episodes. We've been getting some good feedback. Well, I'm really projecting it to the future now. You have no idea. I have no idea, but we're having fun with it. We have a suggestion for folks did you know that i did know that that's

why we're doing these do you know what the timing of how the timing of this works though uh i think so

you think so you open your presence you watch your loved one open the presence that you gave them perhaps

uh-huh and then it's time to take care of papa or mama that's right now it's time for you so now we So now we're going to be, we want you thinking, we know you're thinking about 2020. And the whole thing is, do you want to play better next year or do you want to continue to suck? I don't want to be so crass on Christmas Day, but isn't that the question? That is the question. And to answer that question, you can go to Open StudioJazz.com. You can get whatever course or subscription you want to get, and you could enter the code play better at the checkout, and you could say 40% on all of it. Yes, and this is our, we can't say it's our biggest savings of the year because we had a little bigger on Black Friday, but this is going to be the biggest for the next 10 months. So this is the time to jump in on it. Consider the piano access pass annual access to all of our piano courses at that same great discount annual plan gets you the... The boot camp in January, which we're going to sort of kick your butt through January so that when you come out the other side... Soldier get that wrist up right now! You heard me! But by the end, you're going to be playing better.

And then, you know, if you get the annual... Come on, maggot, play jazz better.

I promise he's not going to actually say that.

But if you get the annual, then you get any of the piano courses that we release throughout

the year, which are substantial.

They are substantial. It starts out substantially. It gets substantialer.

So, Merry Christmas, everybody.

And enjoy today's mystery episode.

So why don't you kick it off with number one?

So number one is from great trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater,

and he once told me,

play half of what you hear. Now, I might have been overplaying a little bit, but I think this was his philosophy in general that you don't have to play every single thing that you're hearing because, you know, with jazz and decisions, we have pretty overactive imaginations in minds, and you can just spurt and spurt, you know, language all day long. That doesn't mean you should. Yeah. You know, this was very much when I was a young man, him sort of like guiding you into artistry, which I think is a very solid point. I love it too. And it's like, I love it. It's like play half of what you hear because it's like so specific. It's not like play less than you hear, which makes sense also and falls into that. Or it's not even like play one, it's like, play half of what you're, because what else I love, then maybe you do that, and then he might say to you, you know what, do another half. So now you're at one fourth, and it's working out pretty good. That's exactly right. It has infinite possibility. Here's the thing.

I just want to add one more thing, the tale to this, is even if you play half of what you're here, you're still going to play a lot. It's human nature. We just kind of tend to overplay overtaught. Well, and when you play half, I mean, if you actually do this, um, and get conscious about doing this, especially in your practice or like on a gig, you will be forced to do more listening because you're not playing as many notes. And then you'll start to hear like better how much should you go another half or should you go up to three fours or whatever? Yeah, yeah. But when you're playing everything that you're hearing,

there's no room for listening.

No.

You know, it's just like if you say,

...