I'm Peter Martin, and I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast.

Today we're going to talk about jazz improvisational tips we would give our younger selves.

Wait, are we going to build a time machine and go back in time or something?

We are going to go back into time. We're going to go see little Adam and little Peter back in the day.

So we're going to build a time machine and this is what we're going to do with it. We're going to give ourselves tips on jazz. Come on, man. Yeah, that's like the most worthless thing for building the time machine.

No, so we're just going to, you know, hopefully these will be things if some of you are at this juncture in your, you know, improv and musical development, maybe some pitfalls or some knowledge that we've accumulated over the years that can help you in your stage of development.

I love it. Well, I'll kick it off. Okay. The first thing I would tell my younger self is absolutely to relax. This took me longer than it probably should have to learn that when I want to increase the intensity when I'm playing, that I actually

need to be more relaxed than I think I do. You know, we tend to tighten up, we shrug our

shoulders, we forget to breathe, you know, we do everything we can to try to coax the music out in a way that we think is, is like, you know, I don't know, cool or soulful or something or whatever, but it just makes you tired. I think I heard that somewhere. Right. So I would definitely tell little 16-year-old Adam, who wasn't actually very little at all, I was a large person even back

then, I would say, yo, just chill out, just relax.

Right, right.

Okay, that's cool.

So one thing I would definitely tell myself and even tell some interesting players that I know now,

probably tell their younger selves as well well is don't try to play everything

you know in every solo or in any one solo right that's good yeah I mean we you

know it's it's such a skill to be able to develop but I'm like why did it take me so long

to finally get to this point there's going going to be another tune. You know,

it's very rare that you're only going to have a chance to play one solo for any particular audience, you know, and even if you do, if you try to shove too much in, they're never going to want to hear you play again anyway. They're like, oh, we caught everything that he knows how to do. So, you know, although we want to impress people and we want to put our best foot forwards, we have to think about playing what the moment needs, and that's very rarely everything that you know, unless you don't know much, you know. That's the category I found out. Well, you know, I mean, I think I didn't really know much younger, Peter, but I had a certain facility to play a bunch of stuff,

even that I didn't know, and I felt the need to always put that into all my solo.

So what I would do is tell myself, say, look, just take one thing that you know you can do well.

One little nugget maybe?

One little nugget of melodic information or whatever for your improv, and just develop that

...