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

Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://openstudiojazz.com/yhi Adam and Peter break down Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain, the 1984 soundtrack that turned him into a global superstar. They go track by track, from "Let's Go Crazy" to the title song. With keyboards in hand, they break down the sophisticated music theory underneath this pop hit to reveal the hidden qualiti...

Our Top Picks of new jazz and jazz-adjacent releases from June 2026!

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Weather Report's Heavy Weather became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. But there's so much more to it than "Birdland", Heavy Weather's radio hit. In fact, Peter makes the case that it might just be the weakest moment of the entire record. Jazz pianists Adam Maness and Peter Mart...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ With her 1974 masterpiece Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell transforms from folk singer into something harder to define. Her piano playing matures. Her songwriting blossoms into one of the richest harmonic and melodic color palettes we've ever heard up to this point. Not to mention her incredible...

Jazz musicians Adam Maness and Peter Martin review their three favorite songs from Michael Jackson's most iconic albums: Bad, Thriller and Off the Wall. And their choices aren't what you might expect.  Plus - Adam, Peter and the Open Studio band play their jazzy interpretation of Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal.  ------------------------------- Start your free Open Studio trial for ALLLLL your j...

Adam Maness brings you the freshest releases of May 2026! 0:00 Intro 0:50 Jeff Parker https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/happy-today 3:45 Greg Hutchinson https://www.allmusic.com/album/kind-of-now-mw0004778588  6:15 Chris Potter https://chrispotterjazz.bandcamp.com/album/alive-with-ghosts-today 9:09 New Jazz Underground https://www.allmusic.com/album/hoodies-mw0004791891 11:04 Virginia MacDonal...

Sonny Rollins passed away this week at 95. Jazz pianists Peter and Adam are listening through the recordings that defined his career and made him one of the most influential musicians in jazz history.  From his earliest bebop tunes to Saxophone Colossus to A Night at the Village Vanguard, they trace the arc of a player who kept raising the bar on himself even when the rest of the world thought he'...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Miles Davis's Kind of Blue is one of the greatest albums of all time - possibly THE greatest. But it's not perfect.  In this special episode of You'll Hear It, jazz pianists Peter Martin and Adam Maness break down this classic record, track-by-track, to uncover why it has become so legendary. T...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Herbie Hancock's Thrust (1974) is one of the most influential jazz-funk records ever made. Peter Martin and Adam Maness break down the full album, track-by-track: Mike Clark's displaced backbeats, why Paul Jackson is such an unusual bass player and possibly the greatest Rhodes solo of all time....

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Could Parliament be the most important band of the 1970s? Jazz pianists Adam Maness and Peter Martin break down Parliament's 1975 masterpiece Mothership Connection track-by-track: Bootsy Collins bass lines that launched a thousand samples, grooves that lock you in and won't let go, and the New...

Join Adam Maness as he delves into the best new music released in April 2026 (ish). This month we're featuring the incredible microtonal Angine de Poitrine and many more!

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ YHI + McBride = Ray Charles?! Christian McBride - bassist, Grammy winner and one of the greatest musical minds working today - joins Adam and Peter on You'll Hear It to share his desert island album. If you know Christian, you know that his musical hero is James Brown. But Christian isn't bring...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Check out Adam’s course for more on Kid A and the harmony of Radiohead: https://osjazz.link/radiohead You've never heard Kid A like THIS. Jazz musicians Adam Maness and Peter Martin break down Radiohead's 2000 art rock MASTERPIECE track-by-track to uncover what's really happening in the music t...

Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin' capture Miles Davis on one of music history's most remarkable upswings. He had recently become clean after a years-long heroin addiction that led to his exclusion from major record labels and clubs. And now, in 1956, he had a deal with Columbia - the Cadillac of record labels - and a band he loved: Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums, Paul Chamb...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Marvin Gaye's I Want You could be one of his greatest albums, and he didn't even write it. Producer Leon Ware wrote most of the songs for himself. Marvin Gaye was only supposed to record the title track. But he heard Leon playing a demo of the album one night and stayed up listening until morni...

Buena Vista Social Club: The album so good it's life-affirming. And it almost didn't happen. In 1996, an American musician landed in Cuba to record a music project with Malian musicians. But when they didn't show up, Ry Cooder and his producer, Juan de Marcos González, went looking for replacements. That's when they found Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González, who had seen their musica...

What happens when you put three of jazz's biggest personalities in a studio for a day? You get Money Jungle: Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Can it work? Miles Davis hated it. Others revere it. And the story behind this album is WILD. It's perhaps the most tense album we've ever listened to. And this episode of You'll Hear It is possibly the most we have ever disagreed about an album...

We're looking at the best jazz releases of March 2026! Listen with pianist Adam Maness as he breaks down and reacts to these great tracks. Start your free Open Studio trial for ALLLLL your jazz lesson needs: https://osjazz.link/yhi

Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington: The musicians on this album were already legends when it came out in 1955. Each of them completely reinvented how people play their instruments. Drummer Kenny Clarke: the originator of so much of modern drumming language. Bass player Oscar Pettiford: possibly the greatest bass soloist in the history of the instrument. And then there's Monk, one of the singular...

D'Angelo's Brown Sugar sounded like nothing else in 1995. R&B was slick, polished, and built for clubs. D'Angelo later said the "deeper consciousness" had gone out of contemporary music. Questlove later wrote that contemporary R&B had become "trite" and "soulless" ... and then there was Brown Sugar, D'Angelo's debut album. It sounded more like the '70s than the '90s. More like church than...

Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) may be the most controversial album in jazz history, and one of the most important. In 1959, a broke musician from Fort Worth, Texas arrived in New York City with a plastic saxophone and a band that didn't play by the rules. And EVERYONE had an opinion about it. Jazz legends hated it. Miles Davis said Ornette was "all screwed up inside." Max Roach...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Jazz pianists Adam Maness and Peter Martin dive into Music of My Mind, track-by-track, listening to isolated stems and breaking down the music theory behind the songs. Plus - we talk about TONTO, the one-ton synthesizer Stevie used to create this record. And we dig into the innovative ways Stev...

We're looking at the best jazz releases of February 2026! Listen with pianist Adam Maness as he breaks down and reacts to these great tracks. Start your free Open Studio trial for ALLLLL your jazz lesson needs: https://osjazz.link/yhi 00:00 - Intro 00:26 - In On It - Pat Metheny 02:20 - Circlesz - GENA 04:13 - Will You Walk A Little Faster - Holland, Stone, London Vocal Project 06:31 - La Sentenci...

Charlie Parker was punk rock before there was punk rock. His bebop was underground music: subversive, intellectual, and a major departure from popular music of the day (think: Nat King Cole, The Andrews Sisters, Perry Como). He was an intellectual heavyweight, nearly untouchable in his technical ability and pushing music to places no one else was daring to go. So where did Charlie Parker with Stri...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Is Steely Dan's Gaucho more perfect than Aja? Maybe even ... too perfect? Two years in the studio. The greatest session musicians alive asked to play take after take after take until it was exactly right. And sometimes that STILL wasn't enough for Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. On today's epis...