Saxophone icon Walter Smith III joins me for an extended hotel lesson on zombies, instagram, germs, learning tunes, getting the most out of education, and embarrassing ourselves in front of our heroes.
The funny thing to me with improvisation and composition is you learn more and more complicated things and you continue to get more knowledge, but in the end when you play and when you write in order to make that complex stuff work you need to be thinking about it in a very simple way.
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Actionable Advice
- There’s no reason for us to touch to say hello… that’s why we have a language. You heard it here first, the handshake is officially canceled.
- If you’re going through everybody’s stuff and it’s like “come to this concert, buy this, I’m selling this equipment, here’s this new album, here’s this, here’s this, wait… now there’s on things that’s not selling me something what is this?” It doesn’t have to be funny, but something that is interesting and not a direct call to action. And it’s super low production; I’m doing these on my phone in like 10 minutes tops.
- If I’m there, or one of your teachers is there, it should be a moment where you’re using your knowledge beyond what the baseline is for school.
- If they weren’t great tunes people wouldn’t play them.
- You could have one record and play gigs, and have one record and learn from it forever because the more you play and the more experience you have if you re-listen to that record you should be able to uncover different things you didn’t hear before and then look for those things you you’re playing again and see the reactions. It’s not necessarily about having 5,000,000 albums on Spotify at your disposal in order to feel inspired.
- Answer questions with questions. It’s not that you don’t want to give any information or support to the student but you don’t want to try and get them into a mode where they can figure stuff out for themselves. There’s a finite amount of time you’re working with them, and the mission of any school is to prepare people for afterwords.
- Don’t bring other people into your stuff unless you know them personally and know that it’s going to be something they’ll be on board with.
More From Walter
Am absolutely stunning recording.
Walter passing the BAM torch along to Joel Ross. This is what we mean by “Jazz is an oral tradition.”
Walter’s Instagram magic. ^^^
In This Episode
- Featured track: Bandcamp
- YoungArts
- Branford Marsalis’s Random Abstract
- Wayne Shorter’s JuJu
- Rasand Roland Kirk’s Serenade To a Cuckoo