Dallas Vietty - Developing Musical Fluency

Judy Minot: There's a Dizzy Gillespie quote where he says, you know, people ask me what I'm thinking in my head and they always speculate. Hey Dizzy, what are you hearing in your head? It's like, booba dooba bop, you know, whatever, like scatting jazz or whatever. He's like, no, what I'm hearing in my head is, babadoo da babee babadoo da da, you know. So he's, the joke is that he's hearing it incredibly loud and incredibly clearly. But my thing is I can hear lots of babadoo da babadoo da, but I can't do it. Welcome to the podcast, Best Practice for Musicians, where we discuss how to practice more efficiently and play with more joy. I'm Judy Minot, author of Best Practice, Inspiration and Ideas for Traditional Musicians. Today I'm talking to Dallas Vietti. Dallas is a world recognized accordionist and bandleader, most well known for playing American jazz and European swing, like the music of Django Reinhardt and also French accordion styles. But the reason that I really wanted to talk to Dallas today is he's also a teacher and a teacher who gives a lot of thought and attention to helping his students grow. And I actually know this from personal experience because I took lessons from Dallas for a short time anyway. I'm sorry about my voice today, but I lost it. I don't know where it went. How are you Dallas? Great to see you. doing good. If you're watching the video, it looks like I'm bundled up. just thought I'd put on some a nice fit for you today, although it's supposed to get down to negative 10. which is quite cold for this area. you're not in New Orleans, obviously you're in Pennsylvania. No, wish I was. Yeah. No, I'm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Cold and snowy. So can you bring me up to speed on what's been going on for you lately? What's the most fun stuff that you're working on? I just launched two weeks ago. I launched an online group class for accordion players, and this is a course that I have. I've been thinking of for two years and I've got like over 40 people and there are some people that are not from the United States, which is really fun and a couple of expats. But we're working on ⁓ jazz chords and it's essentially the language of the great American songbook is what I'm calling it. Although it involves, you know, other tunes from around the world. But ⁓ my big thing around that is that music is a language. ⁓ And I thought about the system of A1, A2, B1, B2, the European language learning models or whatever they're called. I was like, I think I want to do that with my accordion teaching. ⁓ you're talking about like the way they measure like your level of French proficiency and your level of, know, are you a violinist? Are you A2? Are you B2? Yes. So fluency in the language. Fluency. So to be fluent in a language, if I go to another country and I'm like, ⁓ I got this trip to Brazil and I got to work on my Portuguese. And, you know, depending on my study, I might have a couple of things memorized that I could say. then because I've memorized those and I can speak them, I can probably hear them a lot of the time when they're spoken to me. And if I don't prepare at all, like a really terrible tourist, then I have my book or my iPhone or something. And I'm like trying to read off of that and so drag. that is not fluency. That's how I play jazz. Yeah. So to be only able to read it, you know, so we want to. I'm teaching everybody to sing the roots. I'm one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, two, five, two, five, a long two and a long five and a one, one, two, five, one. Bridge is one dominant, one dominant to the four, two dominant, two dominant to the five. And then repeat, that's Honeysuckle Rose. I scrunched it together a little bit. But we learn to say that. That's the thing we say and that's our musical memory holds that. I think for you as folk, what do you, let's see, I have your book right here. For traditional musicians, I think it's a very, very normal thing. Much more normal. Oh yeah, totally. I find myself singing, oh singing, even as I'm playing a melody, I can hear the four, I can hear the five. But then we don't have much besides four, five, and one. So when you go to jazz and you're right, like you say. You get into the bridge and it's gone into the dominant, it's gone into the five and it's now the whole thing's in the five. Or you're doing these two, five, two, fives, sorry for this. We can get very nerdy on my program very quickly and I don't make any apologies for I think the ideal is to keep our ears, to keep our fluency of hearing and speaking up along with our fluency of our nervous system. Okay, I'm signing up tomorrow. That is. That is such a great idea. For years, I read the chords from the Great American Songbook and I kept thinking, there's got to be some, there's got to be some kind of all encompassing, as you say, language. But it's actually not one language. It's a whole bunch of different languages. So the music for the Great American Songbook is different than the language for traditional Celtic, you know, tunes and that culture. Or like Rhythm and Blues or any of Maybe we would say like the Roman language, Romanesque language. What is it called? Romance. Romance languages all have a lot of similarities, but nonetheless, they're each their own unique language and have these idiomatic things. And the idea is just to treat it as a language and to elevate the other parts of it so that ⁓ when we are spoken to by another musician, we can understand what they said to us. The medium of music is sound. The medium is not paper. It's not a visual medium, you know. But I have discovered and I'm not afraid to say that, you know, some people, you know, you learn by watching, you learn by doing, you learn by da-da-da-da-da. I have discovered that I learn by teaching. No, we all have to kind of get our act together when we teach. If you can explain it, then you really understand it. A lot of people just, they shut down when you start to say, well, you know, it's kind of helpful to know. what the chords might be behind these tones of the melody. And they'll sometimes even kind of push back on it. Do you think that that's a question of, they're speaking a different language and so that is not as important in that language? I have only compassion for the musician that each person sees themselves as being, right? And I know you do too. So that's my disclaimer. But yeah, I think ⁓ as in all things, you know, the more thoroughly we can investigate and study the person in charge of my money, I want to be you know, all expert in every single way and be really obsessed with this thing. Cause they'll probably, that probably means they'll do the best job, you know? So same with my idea of being a musician. We all have a musical intuition. If we only do with the mechanics or a thought, you know, it's disconnected from the sound. And I think that like, one of the things that I like to talk about with my teaching and think about is imagination and intuition. And so if we just say, I'm listening to this sound happening. What else do I imagine here? know, like, it's kind of like I see a blank wall. Okay, imagine a window. What do you see out that window? It's very much the same. And it's a muscle or a regular thing, just like everything else. It's a habit, I guess. ⁓ And so the more we work on turning on our imagination, and so I would assert this for traditional musicians who might see themselves exactly represented, their archetype of player in your book is like, it's exactly the same for all of us, you know? because you're making up your part, you're embellishing it, you're trying it a different way, whatever you're doing, melody, harmony, et cetera. And to imagine what is missing here, what could I do differently? I think that's the key. then that gets us playing, which I think is the biggest ethos is we wanna sound like ourselves. And that's the only measure. We're always just trying to sound like ourselves, like our intended thing. And doing this, focusing on ideas in our head is us. We, regardless of our history, we're all alive as many years as we are. And we've had life's toils and joys and the wisdom we have and the friendships we have and our perspective on the world, which inherently is gorgeous. It's like all of us, regardless of very beginner or master musician, are part of a flower bed, a beautiful mix of different flowers. That's the easiest way to get there is to imagine. and cultivate that imagination and then bring up the other skills that allow you to get that out of your nervous system, which I'm miming an accordion. Do you run into people who say, yeah, but I don't have any imagination or a lot of times people spend so much time trying to imitate others, they almost can't remember what they sound like. The magic ingredient is being around somebody to show you it, you know. ⁓ And if we're thinking of this as a language, we Everybody knows the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it to drop yourself in a place that only speaks that language and not your native language ⁓ and and go, you know, and like you gotta your your doggy paddling just to stay alive, so to speak. It's socially, you know, and you are forced to learn it. You know, you can move to New Orleans. I would say it's about that's about as immersive a city where you will hear and meet musicians every single place you go. Your neighbors or Dublin. OK. ⁓ like been like that for me. And then the next thing is just find people to play with. You know, even if they're very different ⁓ levels of experience than you. And then lastly would be if you can't get that judge from these people, you know, sort of informally, then pay somebody, find an expert that can kind of and it's a great teacher is a lot like a great coach, I think, you know, it's you got to have a lot of different skills. You have to understand where the student is. how that what they're comfortable with, where they wanna go, understand that there's their own self. You have to understand where you're at and how to break your teaching process down into as many steps as you can get them the next step to go there. And then you need to inspire them and zhizh them up and show them and enforce upon them, they can do this. You're beautiful, you want to do it. That's really the only necessary thing. You. are spending your money on this hour of accordion lesson with me, that means you care about this instrument enough to do this. That's all I like getting momentum going, but it can absolutely be gotten from the outside in those sort of three examples I just gave. Do you ever have students come to you, they take the lessons, they love you, they think you're a great teacher, something happens when they get home and they just can't get what they got out of the lesson, like they can't get started. It's very important to cultivate a can do. I can do this and I feel excited because I'm so excited to have an hour tomorrow with my instrument because I know I am doing it and it's bringing me pleasure. It's like this positive circuit. So we have to get there. And if we've gotten there in the lesson, then something is happening outside the lesson. So then we just need to find out like what it is. Are you trying to like do your whole day of work and life or whatever you do? And then at 10 PM, like try to go to the accordion. It's probably a bad idea. ⁓ That's one example I might see. ⁓ There are self-esteem issues that we all have too, which I definitely... can be brought up and that I think ties in with stage fright and other things like that, performance anxiety. There's an awful lot of emotions present. So it could be that as well. Yeah, I think that music for some reason, it just brings up a lot of that. I don't know why. mean, probably because we're faced with so many amazing musicians in our lives. Like we don't live, we don't live far out in the woods in a little cabin with no radio. We live in these environments where we can hear all this stuff all the time. And so it's very easy for us to compare ourselves to other people. ⁓ it's almost like it's great to have those examples, but it's really awful for self-esteem sometimes. This is my new thing sort of since the new year and a little bit before is positive self-talk. And so every Monday I run a group class. In that class, we start with breathing in and out and relaxing tension and just trying to get ourselves to a place where ⁓ we're playing the accordion and punctuating these wonderful fundamentals exercises with relaxation of tension. Just say, okay, effort builds tension, positive effort. I'm really trying. And then we develop this tension that's not needed there. In music, we tend to always accumulate tension and not release it as much. That's my opinion. ⁓ And so then we actively cultivate dropping all the tension, completely relax your hands. bring them back up to the accordion with no preconceived tension there, and then find the amount of strength, which on accordion is quite a bit, ⁓ especially the left side. It's a very physical instrument. Yeah, especially the big ones. But at the end of it, I say, ⁓ OK, let's all just appreciate the time that we spent here. The critical side of all of us, no matter if we're brand new to an instrument or not, is strong enough. I don't need to bolster that critical voice inside of my students. It's loud and strong and it's going to tell you everything. And I don't want to try to like make that quieter. I don't even think that can work. ⁓ But I do try to say, hey, let's actively cultivate appreciation. Just take this moment, put yourself in this mind frame and try to say some nice things to yourself. The magic ingredient is feeling like you're able to do a thing. Am I able to do this? That's the number one thing. And it's like depression. like if you've ever experienced, if a person has ever experienced depression. that glimmer of like that seems to be the most horrible thing about life if you are if a person is clinically depressed is like I don't feel like it can do anything you know or the most important thing so I don't know just to kind of give a continuum but ⁓ I try I actively try to cultivate that and for myself and for my students we can do this let's feel like we can let's find teachers and music that makes us feel inspired and relationships our relationships with other musicians I was thinking back about what you said about the effort, and I love the way that you described finding the right amount of effort, because I do a similar thing in my workshops. It's different, but it ends up the same idea. And it comes back to something we used to do in martial arts when I you know, I used to be an Aikido teacher for a long time. And the idea of minimum effort for maximum effect is a thing that we talked about all the time. And in that case, you're not just playing an accordion, you're actually being attacked by someone who is often bigger than you and you're actually defeating them. And sometimes you're a person with gray hair and kind of small like me and you can do it. But it's the same requirement is that you have to really go within yourself to find what is the minimum effort that I need to spend here. Because when someone is jumping on you, trying to choke you, obviously there's tension. So you have to find ways to release that tension and only use exact muscles that are necessary. In music you have a different kind of thing going on which is that you're doing this for a long time. You're doing it for hours, you know, over a week, and you're doing it for years and years and years. So you have a similar issue which is that you really need to use the minimum amount of effort possible and also you want to be able to be flexible. idea of staying relaxed and approaching the ⁓ accordion very relaxed is something that I learned hands on from studying with a couple amazing accordion teachers in France ⁓ named Jacques Morne and Natalie Bouchex at the school called Cinema. And Natalie is the one who talks about relaxation, like drop the tension. And then Jacques going, make the emotional tension and relax the emotional tension here. To me it always comes back to this, I want to make music that other people want to hear. For me that's about expressing something so I want to become better at expressing myself. And so that tension and release is kind of what it's all about. It's like storytelling. You're creating a moment and you don't know where it's going and we might go here but we end up going there and ⁓ wow, wow, was, whew, incredible, and then it starts again, you know? And so... If you want to be able to do that, you have to be able to give everything to that. It can't be all bound up in your hips or your feet or something like that. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, in working out, they'll talk about recruiting muscle groups like, ⁓ you're doing the bench press, but you're recruiting something else and you shouldn't and, you know, relax. But like, if we've got all this extra stuff working, I can't express love if my body is making all of this like strength or gentle and subtle. Subtleness and very assertiveness is a words that I will use a lot because they can both of those can contain a number of very opposite emotions, you know, the subtle and assertive but but just that to be able to have like the repose and then to get wherever we need to go and then let it go again. It's kind like a kinked straw is what I find. You know, you put your finger at end of the hose to make the the water shoot further and stronger, you know, but it's You know, and then you want to relax. But you want to be the person who's directing that at your own will rather than it being something you have no, not, only no control over, you don't even realize. Yes, you don't even realize. Yeah. It's kind of like the question of what does, what makes up our technique or was it, what is sort of our resting technique that we're at? You know, it's kind of invisible or can be. Well, so let's talk about technique a little bit on the accordion, kind of like the piano, which was my first instrument. You know, you have to learn to coordinate both hands. How do you help people to practice that kind of thing? I think at the end of the day, it all comes down to the idea that we are building reflexes. And when we have two hands, there's more reflex in something than there is in the other thing. So maybe more reflex in my left hand playing um-pow um-pow than there is in my right hand playing some more complex melody. Because the conscious effort that we have is limited. And so ideally, everything that's coming out of our hands, everything that our hands is touching is thoroughly myelinated in our brain. So the fat is wrapping the nerves that are creating the nervous system movements and it's automatic and it's happening. You can look up myelination if you don't know what he's talking about, but it's a cool thing. So you want certain things to happen. Like we're pattern making, our brains like patterns. So we want certain things to be patternized kind of. But yet not too much, right? Because if you decide, ⁓ no, I don't want to do that. I'm going to do a chromatic progression here. You want to be able to do that. Well, it's just accessing another pattern. So I would say that that's deliberate. So like what I do a lot with jazz, which is exactly what I would do if I were learning any other instrument in another language where I'm expected to compose my part, make, make decisions in the moment based on my creativity. The only way to practice that or that I know that works is to take two different things and to deliberately switch. So I'm saying this thing and now I'm saying this thing and in music it's a lot more complex because you are moving in time. you have this very, you know, things need to happen in the moment and then there's expressive qualities. So there's a lot of stuff happening much more than just changing between two words or phrases. Essentially when you're practicing something that is what we think of as improvised is you're just practicing possibilities. So have I... Mylinated my nerves enough to play on the end of one here. And if I haven't, then I'm going to trip and fall or make some errors some of the time. am I able to start on the nine instead of on the tonic? Am I able to start an octave up? But also, I mean, you could translate this into kind of, you know, more more folky, simple stuff. have a friend who teaches his students from the very get go. You know, you've got a simple tune, you've got a polka or whatever. Play two measures of the polka and then play two measures of whatever you want and play two measures of the polka. And you can do that with anything. I love that idea. I love that idea. To me, it's a shame that that doesn't happen more ⁓ for young musicians today of all kinds in all styles of music because there's no reason you have to stick to the tune. And there's no reason you have to, what's the word, atrophy your creative brain until such perfect time as the practice fairy comes and bops you on the head and says, you're now ready to improvise. Like, no, you got to be doing that from day one. It could be. You could be. Why not? Why not? Can I make a diversion, which is something that I wanted to share with you that's really exciting? Sure. So this idea of, you know, an ideal student or ideal pathway that involves creativity and creation and how, you know, that's relegated to maybe traditional musics, know, vernacular musics. I've heard it called for those musics, but not for classical music is true, but only for the like most recent. couple hundred years and there's this whole new study just in the last 20 years. This is all extremely new research. They've kind of figured out through these pieces called partimenti that are little musical puzzles to be realized. So you get a bass line and then the student, it's a keyboard exercise, the student has to create the harmony appropriate for the style and the rules of the style and then a melody and they start very simple and they get incredibly hard and so they've figured out that these, and this is told so beautifully, the main scholar is this guy, Robert Jerdingen, but he named all of these chord progressions. And he went through like thousands of Baroque composition. He's like, okay, here's Paco Bell's Canon in D. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. That is known as the Romanesco. And so, and then there are many others. I mean, there are like millions of them, but he's- Is this kind of like the rhythm changes of the Baroque era? And it all was that. it all was that. And the musicians were orphans and foundlings. And they had a bunch of these different orphanages that were dedicated to the idea of how can we help these destitute people with no parents, no, you know, let's teach them a trade. And it just so happened that these four schools had incredible pedagogy and they taught it as licks and chord progressions. And the kids were all singing and doing embellishments and they all had this vocabulary, it's exactly like jazz. And they could all, hey, we need an alto part. Okay, I got this, I'll improvise it on my instrument. And they could turn around, the best of them could compose overnight for the mass that happened the next day. Music, that kind of music, like Bach, that stuff was improvised too. And that is chord progressions. And that is rules of harmonizing and not very different than traditional Irish music or traditional jazz music or any of that kind of stuff. This music that we think of as being very written and you have to play, look, there's a ⁓ mark here that tells you how loud it should be. You gotta do exactly what it says when it's written down. It was not taught that way. It was not taught that way. It was taught as you're creating, you're writing, you're improvising. I've heard it attributed to Beethoven actually, that in some of the manuscripts of Beethoven, he says written in there, the equivalent of don't make up your own cadenza. Play the one I wrote here. Obviously because people did. Because people did, yeah. And Mozart. All the stories about Mozart are about him doing exactly that. And people thought, ⁓ he had such a gift, but I think it was also part of his training. It was de rigueur, yeah, absolutely. A lot of people who come from outside the Celtic traditions think, ⁓ but everybody's just playing the melody. But actually the improvisation is is within a smaller kind of box, but there's lots of improvisation within the melody line for every musician. Some sort of inventiveness or creativity with what you're given is possible and, yeah, fun. Should be part of your daily playing. Totally. I have a thing I like to do. I call it free play, but I don't know, somebody probably else patented that already, I don't know. But I just sit down with the instrument and I don't, I don't... have any preconceived idea. I'm not going to play a jig. I'm not going to play anything I know. I just kind of mess around. I might even let the bow bounce on the strings or goof around. And every time I see myself falling into something I know, I try to get out of it and do something different. It's really amazing for your brain, but I've done this with a lot of workshops. And my students have a really hard time not falling into sort of a melody that they know, a melody that they're comfortable with. How do you kind of keep yourself fresh creatively? Well, I just have to say I find what you just, that process incredibly inspiring. It's like, shoot, why am I not telling my students to that? That's so cool. And so I'm gonna steal all this stuff like a good teacher I'm gonna steal all your stuff, so you go ahead and steal mine. Cool, I love it. You must have times though, like especially when you're on the stage or you know, you're in a performing situation or I find this when I'm improvising on the piano that, ⁓ yeah, I've gone through the, I've gone through the head, you know, I've done about four or five choruses, six, seven, and I'm done. I can't, I can't come up with anything else. So what do you do to kind of jostle yourself into something new? That's something that we do in jazz improvisation anyways, like think about the different, you know, you you actively try to cycle through a whole bunch of different ideas. I played it this way, I played it that way, I played it, I'm gonna use pentatonic language and try to sound like McCoy Tyner. I'm gonna try to play really bebop kind of stuff and use tons of enclosures or I'm gonna not do any of that, I'm gonna try to sound more swing or in Octave melodies, anything, yeah. Exactly. the most simple things, yeah. And there are intellectual contravences in the sense that like it's not my... you know, the creativity God spirit thing, whatever that wherever the things come out of us from, right? That magic thing. That didn't make me think of that idea was, you know, it was like a more of a concrete, not necessarily connected to my soul. But, but then that gives that can, you know, fan the flames, I suppose, you know, I think that's the most important thing is to ask to cultivate to ask oneself, what do I hear here? What, what should there be? What, what is not here that could be here? And To go through sort of a linear list because we have we have the idea of an accompaniment which could be present or not. We have the idea of harmonizing a melody or an embellishing a melody. We have the idea of counter melodies, know, polyphony. We have the idea of all manner of rhythmic structures, know, like infinite possibilities. If you can have in the back of your mind a list of things, well, what could I do here? Maybe on the fiddle I can come up with a few. Like, what if I made these bows as long as I could? Okay, now what if I boat everything separately? Okay, what if I try to find harmony notes? What if I tried to do a couple of triplets in here? Change all the triplets to five note rolls? Anything that just kind of jogs you out, and you're still playing the melody. You're still playing the same melody. What if I try to change the dynamics? What if I play the whole next time through as quietly as I can? Play like you're two different personalities. Yeah. There's a great thing that I like to do, ⁓ I don't do it enough, which is to listen to somebody that you really like that has a certain defined style. Just listen to it. Usually when you're doing that, you're trying to, ⁓ I'm trying to play the tune like that and I want to play their solo if you're a jazz player. But instead, just listen to it for style and just let it sort of absorb and then go play something completely different on the instrument. And then come back and listen to somebody else's style who's different. and then try to play that thing on your instrument. Just not playing the same tune so that you're not trying to imitate them per se. I love it. I love it. That's really fun. It makes me think of a couple things. One, like my intuitive reaction to this situation of like a person that's like, I'm not, I just, I don't have the mojo I used to or right now, right now I'm in a lull, you know, whatever. That's like me rephrasing. Is like, okay, well let's find it. Like, let's find the ember. that's in you, like what do you love? What kind of accordion music do you listen to? And like, let's go with that and like, okay, well, listen to the music that you love, you know? let's find the things that fan that flame inside of you, because it's there, you know? I can't do it, you I can't get to where I want because da-da-da-da-da-da. I don't have the time, I didn't start early enough, I don't know what to do, all these things. I'm not from a musical family. I didn't start when I was six years old. Exactly. Yeah. That's the thing that we need to work on as much as we need to work on, you know, the actual music properties. What's the best practice tip you ever learned yourself? I guess the best practice tip that I ever learned is that what we are doing when we're learning to move the instrument is we are building nervous system to be automatic. And understanding that gave me so many better answers and a pathway to go down. And with that, idea that like the agent of change is conscious effort. it's like, a conscious effort for most of us mortal human beings is extremely small. I'm a little weary of this sort of finger memory kind of, cause it makes it all sound unconscious. But what I love was that what you put on the top of it is that you do it by conscious effort. The practice, yes. Yeah, the practice. In other words, you're trying to create a pattern and you're doing it by focusing. It's not like when I was a kid, it wasn't me, but my friend told this story where her mother would say, are you practicing the cello? And she'd say, yes, mom. And she was down in the basement reading a book and doing all the etudes. That's not how you do it. You don't do it by paying attention to something else. You got to be really super focused. Yes. Yeah. And there are other properties of music, you know, like there's the creativity that we talked a lot about, there's the ear training, you know, all that kind of stuff. There's the fluency in a language, which is a lot of other things. But just when we say we're practicing, usually it means with an instrument trying to get our body to move the instrument to make the sound we want. And that is nervous system. And that is that's training the nervous system with reflexes and creating the neural pathways. you were talking about just listening to somebody do play some music and then go play after that. So my version of this, which I kind of stumbled onto and it's incredibly helpful is to try to sing along with what you're hearing. ⁓ and just set a timer, you know, put 10 or 15 minutes on it and just try to, and you're going to be late and you probably most of the notes that you're singing are not going to be there. But what it's going to do is it's very activated and fun. And this is not on your instrument. You're just going ba ba dee da da ba beep bo bo hey whatever you're hearing and let your mind go to whatever attracts it. So if you hear a fill or you're hearing a counter melody or like, know, let it go wherever and just go until the song's over and then just start another song and just jump right in. And so you're not trying to do the whole Charlie Parker solo. I need to do every note. I have to wait. Let me go back. I got to do it in. You're just singing along. You're just as well as you can. Yes. Yes. and you're practicing honing your concentration to stay focused and not zone out to anything. You're you're constantly in the moment, in the moment, in the moment, in the moment, in the moment. Learning something by ear and getting it perfect is, you know, we know that that's like, I'm not suggesting you don't do that. This is just something else. But what happens at the end of it is you have spent with whatever musicians you've listened to in that time, you get this very deep. understanding because you've experienced it of their phrasing and their timing, their unique feel. And that is enormously helpful as it is also training your ear because you're trying to pitch match on the fly immediately. ⁓ But more so you get this incredible association and attachment of just being with this musician in this hyper focused way. It's really amazing. ⁓ wow. And you don't have to do it with jazz. You can do it with any kind of music. Everything. It requires nothing, you know? It's like... You could do it when you're going for a walk. Doing the dishes. It might be hard to do the dishes, but yeah. And for the teaching, I could tell you about the teaching. Yeah, tell me. Yeah. The majority of my students are online and it's been that way for a long time. ⁓ But I found that the best thing to do with my students is to ask them to commit to three months at a time. They could take as few as one lesson a month or as many as three lessons a month. And that helps us. sit down. I send an email. They do some writing over a cup of coffee or whatever about goals and do a big just everything that's in your head. Genres, pieces of information, tunes, whatever. ⁓ And then we go, OK, let's make a few performance projects out of this because performing, having a goal of a performance is the thing. You know, that's the thing that we do. We make we perform tunes. So that could be as small as just making a recording that only I will hear, you know. or it could be a public performance or it can be make a recording for a friend as a gift. And then we take the things that they want to learn and we say, okay, well, based on this tune or this performance project that you said, well, I'm going to record this song. Okay. Well, of all these other things that you have, which ones feel the most exciting for you to work on right now? So we're motivated by what feels fun and exciting and what feels also urgent. So urgency interpreted in the definition of if I learn this right now, my musical life is going to be a lot easier. Or if I don't learn this right now, I'm really making my musical life a lot more challenging. I try to find the intersection of ideas from that page of Brain Dump that have a lot of both of those. So we find those and then we say, well, okay, of these that you're right, you feel excited to work about on, you know, like I can dig into this and it feels important. Which of these could we associate with this tune? So it could be working on scales or working on arrangement or learning this tune or, whatever. I want to be more expressive. I want to fix my posture. I want to make my left hand better. And so then we have like a vehicle and a raison d'etre and like then you have this deadline in this milestone. So we say I reached the deadline. I did the performance. I evaluate the performance with appreciation and kindness. And I say, you know what? I could do better. So I decide I want to keep working on it or that's enough time with that. And I start something fresh. And so this whole thing really, this little ecosystem of three months really helps me. be the best teacher that I can and I think that I help the people that I'm working with figure out what they want inside themselves. That's a lot of what I'm doing too, is helping people understand themselves better. You I think that's what a good teacher does. And I think reaching a milestone is super important when you're music, like setting them up and making them achievable. Once you've gotten there, you always will look back. I mean, I can look back at several of those and say, yeah, I recorded that. It's out there. It's on the internet. It's there. Exactly, yes. So when you want to practice for your own pleasure right now these days, what is the thing that you're looking at? Practicing my singing and listening to Frank Morocco and like working up my set. That's kind of a thing that I'm doing lately. Finding the jazz standards that have lyrics, which is when that... John was popular as a popular music and they're wonderful and you improvise on them anyways. I'm finding that just delightful and really fun and I'm addicted to it and like singing the ear training stuff too. just like, I'm in a moment where I'm really inspired to get my ears a lot better, which is something my whole life I've had to work on. was not born with a naturally good ear to hear things and I didn't even know that I should. It was like, I can't even believe it. It's embarrassing, but it's true. Like I went even into college. playing jazz and with not using my ears. And this is like, that's insane. I can't even think how I did that, but I didn't know, it never clicked. So then my later adult life has been to kind of get that together. And I've done it, which is cool. Cause then now, cause I learned how to do it. I can teach people a method. like, no, you don't believe me. I couldn't hear anything and you can do it. And here's the things that work. And here's all the things that don't work. Like people. Don't do intervals. Don't think, ⁓ and B, C or whatever. Don't think here comes a bride. That is useless. You were talking before about that thing with singing, like being able to sing what you hear. I think of that as a two part thing to being able to play a tune that you heard, right? It goes from something you heard to something you're playing. And it starts with you be able to sing those notes. And then the second part is taking what you're hearing and putting it on your instrument. And that's a sort of an ear training, right? It's a kind of a, hear this lovely melody. And then can I do that on my instrument? It's the inner voice, you the inner music that we hear. There's a Dizzy Gillespie quote where he says, you know, people ask me what I'm thinking in my head and they always speculate. Hey, Dizzy, what are you hearing in your head? It's like, booba dooba, you know, whatever, like scatting jazz or whatever. And he goes, no, he's like, no, what I'm hearing in my head is, babadoo da babee babadoo da da. So he's the joke is that he's hearing it incredibly loud and incredibly clearly. I hear everything. can hear lots of babadadipdaps, but I can't do it. You know, right. So that's the practice you have to have is kind of have a little make it a little break it up a little bit, kind of go babadadipdap and then play that. And that's sort of what I'm what I'm trying to give people is sort of ways to break it down, ways to, you know, ways to make it a little bit more digestible, I guess. Yeah, your book is phenomenal. I mean, it's so great. And I told you that in France, they know about this. Well, I'm having it translated into French, so maybe a few more people will hear about it in France at some point. So well, Dallas, thanks so much. This is wonderful. Thanks for letting me talk. I certainly can talk and talk and talk as you see. Maybe I can have you back. can talk and talk and talk some more. Cool. All right. Well, I can't read. I'm going to say goodbye and then I'm to go sign up for your online courses. All right. Thanks so much. Take care. Okay, bye Judy. Thanks for listening to Best Practice for Musicians, where we hope to provide inspiration for musicians who want to practice more effectively and play with more joy. I'm Judy Minot, author of the book Best Practice, Inspiration, and Ideas for Traditional Musicians. For links to anything that was discussed in the podcast, to sign up for the newsletter, or to find my blog, you can find all of that in the podcast notes. And if you have friends who are musicians, why not let them know about this podcast? A special thanks to all my Patreon supporters. You helped make this possible. ⁓