With ‘You’ll Hear It,’ Peter Martin and Adam Maness grow an online jazz empire

On a warm and sunny June afternoon in Midtown St. Louis, a quartet of local jazz musicians are arrayed in a loose circle, working out the finer points of a tune. It’s not a jazz standard or a Great American Songbook composition, but an instrumental pass at D’Angelo’s “Spanish Joint,” a neo-soul cut from his genre-defining Voodoo album. 

After three takes, the band breaks for lunch, not quite satisfied with how it has navigated the tricky syncopation and tilted axis of the song. The hiccups are barely perceptible to the mortal ear, but for these players—Adam Maness and Peter Martin on piano, Bob DeBoo on bass, and Kaleb Kirby on drums—the little details and hairpin changes matter.

This mid-day recording session is not for a forthcoming album, but as bumper music for You’ll Hear It, the podcast that Martin and Maness host each week. When the pair started the podcast seven years ago, they used their experience as top-flight jazz pianists to discuss the nuts and bolts of the genre, largely from a player’s perspective. But after more than 1,000 episodes, the show took on a new focus and a broader footprint; now, Martin and Maness choose a classic (or should-be classic) album to dissect each week. Some are easily classifiable as jazz music, but many reflect the diaspora of what Grammy-winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton calls Black American Music, the blend of folk, gospel, soul, funk, and beyond. Recent episodes on works by Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Steely Dan, and Marvin Gaye speak to this expanded approach.

The show’s new season doubles down on the classic album approach, as Maness and Martin will tackle such heavyweight LPs as Thriller, Abbey Road, Blue, and more.

You’ll Hear It serves, among other things, as a promotional tool for Open Studio, the online instructional jazz community that Martin co-founded. Maness serves as managing director; Kirby and DeBoo have production and instructional roles as well. The service has grown over the past decade and boasts more than 50,000 members; jazz superstars including bassist Christian McBride and organist Larry Goldings have recorded lessons for the site. The weekly podcast offers very little instruction these days but serves as the public face of Open Studio.

And like many popular podcasts, You’ll Hear It posts a complementary YouTube video of each episode, using the Open Studio space in Midtown as a vibey, well-curated backdrop. Andy Stephen, himself an excellent jazz and groove pianist, operates the camera and helps create the look of those interstitial songs like “Spanish Joint.” Sam Maul, on loan from his main gig as chief audio engineer at Shock City Studios, makes sure everything comes out sounding correct.

On that Tuesday in June, the crew goes on to record podcasts and songs centering on Voodoo, as well as John Coltrane’s Giant Steps album. Each effort requires the hosts to research the album’s songs, players, and origin story; it also requires them to bust out interpretations of the album’s key tracks—and in the case of Giant Steps, that means tackling the titanic title track, a shifting, swerving burst of exuberance that has humbled countless players. There may be plenty of podcasts where a couple of so-called experts riff on music, but you would be hard-pressed to find another where the hosts can play about that which they speak.

For Martin and Maness, both the online courses and the podcast have served as a progression from their careers in jazz. A native of University City, Martin came of age studying classical music but swerved hard into jazz in his teenage years; he was playing in Joshua Redman’s quartet in his early twenties and has worked with Dianne Reeves, Wynton Marsalis, and more since then. 

Maness grew up in House Springs and began studying jazz piano in high school. After a stint in New York, he has served as a sideman and bandleader for both his own trio (with Kirby and DeBoo) and his classical/jazz hybrid outfit The 442s, which features a quartet of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra players. 

Both pianists have largely retired from the road and regular gigging, but the propulsive nature of both Open Studio and You’ll Hear It have required a different type of inspiration and performance. “I’ve probably done more creative music-making in terms of composition, playing, improvising, and collaborating over the last few years, and really under the Open Studio umbrella that I have, even from when I was touring a lot and recording in New York,” Martin says.

For the casual listeners who couldn’t find their way around a jazz chart, You’ll Hear It succeeds in making the hosts’ enthusiasm for the music as magnetic as their knowledge of the forms. For their discussion of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Martin reflected on his relationship with the late Roy Hargrove, whose trumpet punctuates many of the songs. Maness reminisced about his time in New York City at the time of the album’s 2000 release, working as a young jazz pianist but learning that the lines between genres were becoming blurry. 

“It’s a perfect album for us to talk about,” Maness says. “So it could bring in people that maybe don’t listen to a lot of straight-ahead jazz, but it’s going to be in the wheelhouse of a lot of straight-ahead jazz musicians to enjoy.” 

Martin concurs, noting that the podcast’s recent shift away from a purely jazz-rooted focus can serve the larger interest of Open Studio—building community through music.

“We all have a connection with the music that’s on at a very human level, you know?” Martin says. “And so that’s really what our service is. We’re trying to learn better how to use these platforms, how to use our skills to come together to create something that serves people.”

In an information age where most art and expression gets flattened into “content,” the You’ll Hear It crew has a difficult task in engaging an audience amid a flurry of other distractions; when the topic involves close, careful listening, that challenge is only amplified. Martin takes a more poetic view of attracting an audience while still honoring the source material.

“I think the most arresting ways to have somebody engage with your content is either through fear, outrage, or beauty, and fear and outrage are kind of the easiest,” Martin says. “They can be triggered a lot easier than when you’re trying to do something of beauty.” 

For Maness, working across several platforms and services—podcasts, YouTube videos, and TikTok—has been a fun problem to solve rather than a frustration. Having to trim down a jazz-piano maneuver or a harmonic theory into a pithy minute of instruction is “incredibly creative.”

“You get 60 seconds to try to explain something,” Maness says. “We’re really trying to present something special for people who are scrolling on their phones.” 

And despite the solid numbers that the podcast garners, very little revenue comes from the weekly show, largely due to the use of the copyrighted music that anchors each episode. So why spend hours each week researching, writing, hosting, and editing a podcast with such a large production footprint? For Maness, the show’s intangible benefits outweigh the effort it takes to produce.

“The podcast is really special, and while there’s no way to track financially if it’s helping Open Studio, it 1000 percent is and has been worth revenue. Because if you’re thinking about signing up for Open Studio, you have literally 1100 episodes to see, Are these guys legit? Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they just here to scam me?” Maness says. “And it becomes very obvious that we are literally two jazz piano nerds who will talk about this whether there’s a camera on or not, and that has really helped us to form a relationship with people.”

Martin sees the appeal of the show—and the pair’s continuing commitment—in simple terms, harkening back to the podcast’s genesis: two friends talking about something they love in an educational, enthusiastic, and invitational manner. The title itself serves as an open door: Listen along and you’ll hear it, too. 

“I think it’s a music exploration from the lens of two jazz pianists, and what we’ve learned—and it took me a long time to understand this—is that there’s a lot of people that are interested in hearing a jazz perspective on things beyond jazz,” Martin says.