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

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...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ The Impossible follow-up: Michael Jackson's 1987 album Bad. Five years after Thriller changed everything, Michael returned with a record that would become one of the best-selling of all time, win two Grammys, feature some of the greatest musicians in the world (hey, Stevie Wonder!) ... and some...

Carole King’s Tapestry is so cozy, you'll want to hug it; sit with it. It sounds simple, warm, and totally unassuming. But it’s way more impressive than it seems at first. Adam and Peter break down what’s actually going on beneath the surface of Tapestry ... and what most people miss. Carole King was already an elite songwriter long before this album. You know Aretha Franklin's “(You Make Me Feel...

We're looking at the best jazz releases of January 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 00:50 - Why Don't You - Sam Fribush, Corey Fonville, Charlie Hunter 03:09 - Talking Drum - Julian Lage 04:58 - Flim - Winderman, Colman, Kimock 06:5...

New episode drops February 2, 2026! Keep your eyes on the feed for episodes on artists like Carole King, Michael Jackson, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, D'Angelo and so much more!

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ We're looking back at the best jazz releases of 2025. Listen with pianist Adam Maness as he breaks down and reacts to these great tracks. This is a new segment from the team behind You'll Hear It, and we're looking to continue this music discovery pod as a weekly series in 2026. Help us shape t...

What does it really mean to live a musical life? As we look ahead to 2026, Adam and Peter talk about music as a way of being. Not a checklist, or a finish line, or something reserved for “professionals.” They share why they believe everyone is a musician, and why taste and curiosity matter more than optimization. Whether you're a musician, or a lover of music, anyone can lead a musical life. Start...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ Prince's Sign O' the Times is one of our most requested albums at You'll Hear It. But, there is a certain window of millennial that doesn't really "get" Prince. If that’s you, this episode is your on ramp into his music.  We start with Prince's earliest albums, tracing his incredible run from 1...

Could this be peak Frank? Sinatra at the Sands captures the energy, the cool, and the incredible voice that made this crooner so iconic. Backed by the Count Basie Orchestra with arrangements by a young Quincy Jones, this live album still swings 60 years later! Sinatra at the Sands was recorded at a moment when Sinatra was emerging from a slump. Rock and roll dominated the airwaves, the Beatles wer...

How much do you know about Peter Martin? In this conversation with Kirk Hamilton of the Strong Songs podcast, Peter shares his musical influences and trajectory as a young jazz pianist. He brings us right back to the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s with stories of meeting Wynton Marsalis, and playing with jazz legends like Betty Carter, Roy Hargrove and Joshua Redman. Plus, he shares his take on jazz educati...

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was one of the BIGGEST records of the 90s. When you sell 20 million records, like Lauryn Hill did, you're into mass market territory; you're selling records all over the world and reaching across genres. With Miseducation , Lauryn Hill struck a nerve with humanity.  How did she do it? As you'll hear in this episode, the album sounded unlike other chart-topping hits...

Keith Jarrett's "The Köln Concert" is the best selling solo piano album of all time. But why this album? Possibly because it sounded like nothing else in popular music at the time of its release in 1975. It is cinematic, genre-fluid and masterful – in many ways ahead of its time. Jazz musicians Adam Maness and Peter Martin listen to one of the most popular albums in the history of jazz, pulling ap...

Songs in the Key of Life stands apart, even next to the other four albums in Stevie Wonder's classic period. It resulted in the most hit singles: "I Wish", "Sir Duke", "As" and "Another Star".  Chris Molanphy of the Hit Parade podcast leads us through this album's incredible charts story. Not only did it produce FOUR singles, but it inspired two other chart-topping hits: Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradi...

1959 gave us Kind of Blue, Time Out ... and Mingus Ah Um. Adam and Peter dig into Charles Mingus’s most adventurous, soulful record: gospel, bebop, and pure Mingus genius. You’ve never heard it quite like this. Charles Mingus was one of jazz's greatest bass players AND composers. Listen with us as we break down the genius in every track of his best-selling record, and share stories of the brillian...

At Town Hall captures a pivotal moment in Nina Simone's story, when she left behind her dream of being a concert pianist and embraced her identity as an indefinable and remarkable talent. At Town Hall shows off Nina’s classical chops, infused with the jazz influences from working in nightclubs and mixed with the folk and gospel sounds of her youth. Adam and Peter pull apart the tracks to highlight...

🔥 Don’t Miss Our Best Price of the Year! (Ending Soon) https://www.openstudiojazz.com/summer-sale-2026/ In 1981, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones set out on one of the most ambitious projects in pop music history: an album where every song was a hit. The result was Thriller. The record-breaking, chart-topping masterpiece produced six top-ten hits, became the best-selling album of all time, and pr...