I'm Adam Manus, and I'm Peter Martin, and you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast.

Today we're going to take a topic that was given to us by a user at our jazz piano studio Facebook group, Elia, who is a great user on this group, and he's always participating in discussions, and he gave

us some great ideas for topics. We'll probably do some more of his because they're so good.

And this is, he wanted to know, how do you stay calm and focused in big moments? And this is

an important thing, because, you know, you can practice and you can sound good in your bedroom,

but, you know, when the pressure's on, when the bright lights are on you, I mean, you know better than anybody because you play some of the biggest stages in the world. I have stadiums pretty much at this point. No, no, no, no, but I mean, in our field, in jazz, you are definitely playing the biggest venues, you know, in some high pressure situations and have

for many, many years. So I think this would be a great one for you to kind of take the lead on

how to, how do you not get nervous? How do you avoid stage fight? Or if you're dealing with it,

how do you still play? Right. Well, so I would say the first thing for this is, you know, the preparation before you get, you know, to the big moments, to the big stage. And, you know, when I think about the big stage and the big moments, it's, to me, looking back, it's been as much as, like, playing with amazing players. Like, that's the thing that could potentially intimidate you. Certainly playing in a prestigious venue to and in front of, you know, important people or whatever, but mainly, I mean, the people on the musicians on the stage are right there. I was going to say, I could be nervous in a small club if there's a really burning musician next to me. Or like a recording session where there's no audience, but you've got, you know, great players. But I would say,

you know, the biggest part to even put yourself in a, with, with the possibility of being

calm and focused in those situations is prepare, prepare, preparation, you know, practice,

you know, everything from the very nitty-gritty of like scales and, you know, hand position,

all the technical things all the way up to kind of focus things like where you're imagining

yourself in situations. I mean, I used to do that all the time before I'd have different gigs

and different situations. I would try to visualize myself in that situation. And this was actually

usually before I even knew I was

going to be in those situations. But I remember, you know, listening to Live at the Village

Vanguard records that I would, you know, daydream about like what it would be like playing

in those situations. So that actually kind of helped when I finally got to the, to that venue.

It was almost like I'd done it before because in my mind, maybe it was a fantasy, but then it became a reality. But I think that a certain amount of visualization is important. I'm by no means an expert on it because there's books and podcasts and concepts on it, and there's a whole science behind it that I just kind of luckily did it because I was bored a lot and so I was thinking about stuff I wanted to do

but I think you know there's the nitty gritty preparing but then there's the mental preparation

so that when you get in those situations you have you've put yourself in the best possible

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