Neely, 33, has garnered 1.25 million subscribers with his music theory-drenched video content. It’s all highly polished, cleverly edited and consistently funny. Some of his videos are simple Q&As or tongue-in-cheek deep dives into viral moments like the TikTok sea shanty fad, but Adam really shines in his on-camera essays. The wit and editing is still there and it’s accompanied by lush original backing tracks composed by Adam and his colleagues.
I asked his friend and collaborator, Ben Levin, what he thought had garnered Adam such a big following. “I think the key to Adam’s work, and it’s something maybe he takes for granted and can’t put his finger on, but he loves music in a very special way. I don’t think he realizes how contagious that is. Everything he does comes off as incredibly genuine, and I think it makes people realize, ‘dang, music is just so much bigger than I thought it was.’” (...)
Student becomes the teacher
Neely grew up with music. His mother is a singer who performed avant-garde contemporary classical music and taught students in her house. Yet, it wasn’t until high school that Adam became enthralled with it.
He soon found it wasn’t the short straw he thought it was. His mother brought him to a performance by the late Dave Brubeck and jazz bassist Christian McBride at the Library of Congress. “I knew about jazz. I thought it was fun, but this was the first time I realized that it was really fun. Just watching these two masters going back and forth laughing like there was some sort of inside joke I wasn’t a part of. I didn’t realize until then how life affirming music could be.”(...)
“The plan was to play ‘cool’ jazz music, whatever that is, and teach,” he says. And for Adam, that was teaching at a university. “I was very much ready to be in academia. I knew what it meant to be a working musician from my family, it’s a grind, and they were able to support themselves through teaching, so I had my plan set. Stuff turned out a little differently, but I am teaching jazz and playing it.”
After a stint of playing gigs ranging from weddings to musical theater, Adam was beginning to burn out, and then suddenly a big portion of his paying work fell through. He was unsure what to do with all of his newly found free time, or where he’d find the next check to pay his rent. YouTube didn’t occur to him until a friend recommended it to him.
Neely knew a bit of the video editing program Final Cut, bought himself a DSLR camera, and in the same way, he threw himself into bass, he began producing videos. “I would categorize it as edutainment, or curiosity content, letting people discover things they don’t know,” he says, being sure to distinguish himself from other musical education channels that teach theory fundamentals like keys, notation, or the circle of fifths. Neely is too modest to make this comparison, but as Neil DeGrasse Tyson is to astrophysics, Neely is to music theory. He’s a communicator. (...)
This quality of production is consistent throughout much of Neely’s content. It’s all supremely edited and cohesively plotted for a one-man army. “There are very few music YouTubers that work with editors because you want someone who’s adept at editing, but also has an understanding of music theory. There is a very specific timing to how the edit should reflect the music that is in the video.”
You can feel that in his video on “The Girl From Ipanema” where he needs to cut between multiple arrangements of the storied bossa nova track. “Editing is very musical, working in Final Cut reminds me of working in Ableton Live (a digital audio workstation popular with electronic music producers) — it’s about creating a rhythmic flow. One cut of video should flow into the next just as one section of music should lead into the next.” Instead of bleeping curses, Neely plays a characteristic clip of a man yelling “bass,” which feels much like a little flair that an improvising trumpist might play over a jazz arrangement.
In this video Neely again shares a narrative that isn’t taught in music school. He points out in the beginning of the video that the version of “The Girl from Ipanema” that’s taught in The Real Book, the veritable jazz standards Bible, is a watered-down and white-washed version of the song. Through an in-depth dive into the context and history of bossa nova and the song itself, Neely shows that the original track from Brazil is actually more ambiguous and interesting than the Americanized version that would later be adopted into textbooks.
When asked about these videos, Neely says with a smirk, “I’ve always had kind of a shit-stirrer persona. I’m just doing my best to use that for good.”
by Lukas Harnisch, Spin | Read more:
Image:Liz Maney
