LJS 111: Learning Songs on the Bandstand and Other Lessons From My Gig

Welcome to episode 111 of the LJS Podcast where today Brent changes up the format for today's show to talk about some lessons from a recent gig. He shares the good, the bad, and the ugly. Find out what he learned and how he used certain tools he has built up for himself. Listen in!
Listen to episode 111







This week I wanted to spend some time sharing with you my experiences at a recent gig. I'll be honest. It wasn't my best performance, not in the sense that I played bad, but that I felt like the odd guy out.
This is a gig I've been playing every month for around 5 years at a club in New York City called Fat Cat. It's a great band and I'm honored to play with all of the guys.
But this particular gig had me working overtime. A lot of songs were being called that I didn't know and I had to rely on my ears to get me through it.
I share with you some lessons I learned from this particular gig. What went well, and what I need to work on. I think by listening to my experience you can take away something for yourself too!
One thing I will say: listening and ear training is important. Being exposed to lots of jazz music really helped me, and also having those fundamentals of ear training down gave me a firm foundation.
If you need to work on some of those fundamentals I would suggest checking out my ear training course How to Play What You Hear. I'll leave a link below. Enjoy the episode!
Important Links
Fat Cat NYC
How to Play What You Hear







Read the Transcript
Brent: All right, so today's episodes a little bit different. I'm going to change up the format a little bit than what I normally would do because today I just felt like I wanted to talk about my gig last night.
I wanted to share some of my experiences that I had and some of my thoughts about what went down. This is a regular gig that I play every single month in New York City at Fat Cat. If you've never heard of Fat Cat it's a great little jazz lounge, it's a noisy place, smells like booze and it's loud. But there's some amazing jazz that happens there every single night and I'm really honored that I get to spend some time playing there every single month.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience at my gig, some lessons that I learned and just some general thoughts that I think can help you too just by me expressing them. But first, let's cue the intro music.
Just in case you've never listened to this podcast before my name is Brent, I am the jazz musician behind the website learnjazzstandards.com which is a blog, a podcast and videos all geared towards helping you become a better jazz musician and I'm honored every single week to come here and do my best to serve you with the best jazz educational content that I possibly can. Make sure if you aren't subscribe to this podcast, subscribe on iTunes. If you're not subscribed on our YouTube channel I also post the podcast as well as other videos on our YouTube channel. That's youtube.com/learnjazzstandards. Of course make sure that you're involved in our community. Go to learnjazzstandards.com/join, get on to our newsletter.
I do this every single week. If you're new to this podcast, that's who I am, this is what I'm all about. It's a little bit of a different episode today like I said. So bear with me. But I'd love to talk to you a little bit about my gig at Fat Cat last night. At the time of this recording, we had a big snowstorm here in New York City and so I was trudging out into the snow, I live out in Queens. Fat Cat it is in the West Village, the historic Greenwich Village. So I took the 40,