Playing for the Audience (And Not Yourself)

You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians

Peter Martin

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4.9 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Peter and Adam talk about why it's important to play for the audience, as well as whether new tunes can become standards.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike has a good question here, but don't you have to play for the audience in the end?
0:20.2	And the answer is yes. And so, and this kind of goes back to a
0:25.6	question that Noriko had posed about like, how do you, how do you change your performance or what
0:30.9	changes about your performance when you're in front of an audience? Can you discuss how the existence
0:36.5	of an audience affects musicians' performance how the existence of an audience affects
0:38.0	musicians' performance? Yeah. And so, and that I think dovetails nicely with Micah's comment
0:43.3	here about, don't you have to play for the audience? So the idea is not to ignore the audience.
0:48.0	Right. Or to purposefully try to go against the audience. The idea is to be in full acceptance of whatever's happening,
0:56.8	wherever you are. So if that's at a rehearsal and Chris Potter walks in and you're, you were
1:03.2	feeling pretty badass right before Chris Potter walked. What's up? CP? Yeah. And then you're like,
1:08.0	oh, okay. Well, okay, there's a heavyweight in the room. And so now I have to whatever. Like just being accepting of all that. If you're in front of 50 people and maybe that's enough to like affect your concentration or you being present with the music, that's bad news. If maybe that threshold is like 500 people, you know, and you can't be present or comfortable.
1:31.2	Yeah. You can't be with the music. And when you are able to be present and comfortable and be with the music, you actually are then with the audience.
1:39.3	Like your job is to translate the music to the people that are in front of you. So you have to be able to be
1:46.3	present with that music and with the audience. You have to be able to be with whatever is with
1:50.2	you at the time. That is the goal. So it's not a matter of shutting out the audience and just
1:55.4	focusing on whatever it is you want to do or playing things that are difficult because
2:00.4	it's for you.
2:01.5	That's not what we mean, Micah.
2:03.7	We actually, you can craft a whole performance that's very, you know, very schmaltzy and
2:09.0	clickbaited to an audience and still be present and mindful as you're doing that.
2:13.4	In fact, there are whole performers in Branson, Missouri that make their entire living doing just that, you know.
2:19.2	But they're amazing performers who are totally present.
	...

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