This is Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast.

Daily jazz advice coming at you.

Today we're going to talk about how to teach jazz.

Now, I've always heard that this isn't possible that you just have to hear it. In fact, I've heard there's a whole podcast based around the You'll Hear It philosophy. Is that not right? That's right. And I mean, obviously this is going to be difficult question for us to tackle because it's taking us about 12 takes just to get started for some reason. These always become the best episodes when it takes us this long to get started.

Hey, hey, don't put that pressure on me.

Okay, I'm just saying I'm looking forward to where this goes.

So this is from one of our listeners, Darren, and he just flat out asked, how do you teach jazz?

So this is, it's an interesting concept because I think that both of us may have grown up in that era

when it was prevalent thinking that you can't teach jazz, that it was this esoteric thing,

that there was some secret scrolls hidden under, you know, Charlie Parker's woodshed in Kansas

City, maybe, but if you didn't have access to those, you were out of luck.

You have to look inside Lester Young's hat to find the scene.

Yeah.

But having said that, I had some wonderful teachers of myself, and not just in jazz, just in music in general.

So I've always felt like it was something that you can be taught.

And I was taught jazz. So my career in terms of teaching has always been more based upon sort of passing along the information, maybe a few things that I picked up as well. Yeah, you know, I think what it is is you can't teach people how to be great musicians, great communicators of emotion through music. That's something that's really hard to teach.

It's kind of one of those things either you hear it and you get it or you don't. But as far as like,

you know, the structure of jazz, the rhythms, the language of it itself, I mean, it's like any other

language, very teachable. Yeah. And what I like to do is really concentrate on the specific

skill set that will put you in a position to be a successful improviser and jazz musician

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