Drumming

I don’t daydream any less than I did when I was younger, but I do so differently.  At this point, I tend to work out solutions or resolutions to concrete situations in my life mentally.  Of all my recent daydreams, this one has gotten the most laughs: having won the lottery, I do not quit my job immediately, as I had thought I would in my early thirties.  Rather, I wait until the next faculty meeting.  At the end of the meeting, the Principal opens the floor to any additions, comments, or random notes.  I stand, walk toward the podium at the front of the room but not to it, say “f**k you,” hurl my keys, and gracefully walk out the door.  That’s a daydream, but one which reflect a concrete resolution to a concrete problem.

In my teens and twenties I indulged in fantasy.  Above all, I fantasized about a musical world which did not exist: one in which my aesthetic choices were widely shared.  I wrote a paper, in the ninth or tenth grade if I remember correctly, a what do you want to be when you grow up paper.  I combined a few of my musical heroes’ lives: like Fela Kuti, I owned my own club in which I hosted musicians as I pleased and made my own music when I wanted.  Like Kraftwerk, it was in Dusseldorf, which at the time to me seemed to be the center of musical experimentation in the world at that time.  I was young, obviously, with limited information.  Interestingly, I wrote in the paper that I had a partner in the venture, a good friend and brilliant drummer with whom I had gone to elementary school and with whom I had often set up my drum kit, to play improvisational duets.  I did a lot of that kind of thing in the eighth and ninth grades.  The key is that I imagined a life in which my music was widely-enough appreciated to fund my existence, a common fantasy among young musicians.  Obviously, real life has not turned out at all like that paper, in the one critical variable I had imagined.  I make my money in a day job, and make music when I can for whomever will listen.

Young people fantasize about a point in life where whatever it is they are doing ends.  Young musicians fantasize about “making it.”  This making it is more or less analagous to the (popular) Christian concept of Heaven.  You have no more problems, you feel no pain, and your whole existence such as it is is characterized by what is not there, as opposed to what is present: no negative things in Heaven.  So it is with the imaginary making it.  You don’t have to keep struggling to get people to show up to the gigs.  You have buzz.  This is a first level of making it.  Then, you don’t have to print up your own CDs (it was cassettes when I started doing it): some label asks, or even begs, you to sign on the dotted line so they can handle all the practical things involved with making and promoting your CD.  Better than the offer to sign is the “bidding war.”  Here, you’re the belle of the ball, and everyone wants to dance with you.  There’s a psychological trope in which the neurotic (or psychotic—I reject both concepts but the point here is useful) seeks some symbolic return to the womb.  The adolescent notion of making it is precisely this.  One imagines a future in which one is totally passive.  When one has made it in music, as it would be, there’s everyone else who has something to do.  The musician just sucks on an umbilical cord.

The problem with this fantasy is that it’s fantasy.  It’s entirely true that certain musicians’ careers take on a life of their own, so to speak.  We know that Bruce Springsteen does not have to work at his job, musician, anymore, if he doesn’t want to, from a financial perspective.  He does not have to call up his friends to get a sufficient number of people at the gig to avoid a nasty glare from the club or café owner.  It sounds great to me, but I’m not sure that this situation makes for great music-making.  It came up in our reading group last night—we are in a Marx reading group and are currently on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—that one of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that it removes any sense of process from people’s consciousness.  He elucidated this idea best in the justly famous section on commodity fetishism in Capital, v. 1, but it can be seen as a developing line of thought even in his early writings.  It’s the process, of production of any sort, of imprinting ourselves through our labor onto the world, that makes things human.  The more we dissociate ourselves from process the more we dissociate ourselves from ourselves.  Indeed, I can’t think of any big-name musician whose work got better after she or he truly and finally “made it” to the point that never again would the musician have to sully hands with organizational details of production.  Those of us who haven’t made it in this sense tend to imagine that if only we could rid ourselves of the crap that goes along with making music in the industry, we could get down to making masterpiece after masterpiece, but in reality it shuts a musician out of precisely that process.

All of this said, every musician I know who does not have a career in music, that is, whose income derives from some other source, has done some sort of auto-autopsy to discover why he or she did not make it—so to speak—when others did.  Of course I have myself, and I’ve alluded to my train of thought on this blog.  The big reason that I don’t have a musical career is that I never worked at getting one.  I will confess that after I cut my first demo, still respectable after 20 years in its way, I couldn’t imagine that record execs would fail to see the quality of the tunes even if the performances were a little rough and the singing not ready for prime time.  That said, not once did I even send it off to a record label, as if that would have had some positive effect in any event.  Hence, no career.

The other reason I don’t have a career is my drumming.  Drums were my first instrument and even though I can’t play drums in my current home I still am more technically accomplished as a drummer than as a guitarist.  I have been told by more than one professional musician that I’m the best drummer they’ve ever played with.

I do not lack confidence in my drumming.  As soon as I started playing, in the seventh grade, I knew I had a unique, if by no means unprecedented, approach to the instrument.  When I started playing, Bill Bruford was my hero, obviously for good reason.  I listened to the second side of King Crimson’s Beat yesterday on my walk home from the station and was reminded again why I fell so in love with his playing.

From the start, I approached the kit not in terms of this or that beat or pattern, but as a musical instrument.  I would, as I noted above, often get together with other musicians and improvise in those first years I played drums.  I did so in the seventh grade with a flautist named Dion, who would run his flute through an amplifier.  In the eighth grade it was with a pianist named Jeff.  Playing in a duo, rather than a band, gave me the opportunity or perhaps responsibility to provide musical color in addition to timekeeping.  To this day, I feel like I color music with my drums as well as anyone.

Much of the credit for my playing goes to my drum teacher, Will.  He quickly realized that as a student I would have strengths and weaknesses, and to be sure as a drummer I have some serious liabilities.  What I did well was to approach the kit musically and without any sense of limitations about what should and should not be played except what I felt to be right.  My faults were that I refused to deal with reading except minimally, and that I rarely practiced rudiments.  He told me once, and told my mother, that I would have a very difficult time making a living as a drummer unless I took care of these problems.  I didn’t want to, and he didn’t insist that I did, for which I’m grateful.

Once I started playing jazz, I found players that were better than Bruford.  I was quickly drawn to Elvin Jones, possibly because the type of playing he did with Coltrane appealed to the wound-up eighth grader that I was.  I can actually approximate a lot of Elvin’s playing, up to I might say about 85% of it.  The thing is, and I found this out fairly quickly, it’s that last 15% that separates the truly phenomenal from people like me, at least in jazz.  I might be able to develop my chops close to the level of an Elvin, but doing so would require that I copy Elvin.  That was never my purpose.

I read an interview with Jack DeJohnette in the 10th or 11th grade–something like that–that really made an impression on me and set me free in a way.  He commented on Billy Higgins’ playing.  The interviewer if I recall had asked DeJohnette to name-check some of his favorite players and he mentioned Higgins.  It was as if the interviewer was a bit surprised.  Jack DeJohnette is among other things quite a technician and Billy Higgins most certainly was not, at least by jazz standards.  DeJohnette made a very, very deep point in response: Billy Higgins, he said, had absolutely enough technique to play what he heard.  That became my goal as a drummer, and once I developed enough technique to play what I hear–I was about 22 when I did–I stopped learning new technical tricks, with absolutely no regrets.  I can play what I hear.

Where I thought and still think I have something to contribute as a drummer is applying the musicality I have, developed in jazz combos, to rock music.  I say this, and it sounds much more cliched than it actually is with my playing.  What I’ve never wanted to do was play jazz licks in a rock context.  Much more interesting, to me, is

• using the drum kit for its musical color rather than just to keep time
• having a light touch on the kit, like drummers used to have
• listening to other players and responding to their cues in the moment
• playing a feel rather than a predetermined beat

All of these things endear me to other musicians when we play.  I tend to make the making of music exciting.  The music is less stiff when I’m on the kit.  We don’t repeat ourselves as musicians, even if we maintain consistency.

All this, and I’ve been dropped in the past few years from two separate bands as a drummer.  In the more distant past, I’ve been pointed out as simultaneously a fantastic player and a liability by industry types–a situation in which I was vigorously defended by the band leader (to my everlasting gratitude).  I have been called “too good,” though I reject the label to this day, given my very real limitations as a player and how good even a second-rate working jazz drummer actually is.

The problem is that I play like it’s 1967, or maybe 1968.  Even though Mitch Mitchell was never my favorite player, I suppose he’s the closest analogue to my own playing, which I’m absolutely happy about.  Terrible things happened–godawful, as far as I’m concerned–when people started close-miking drum kits.  The best miked kits by far can be heard on Rudy Van Gelder recordings.  Interestingly, I have been asked by any number of people how I get my drum sound, even before I had a ProTools setup.  I would tell them–this is for all my recordings, up through (not to) Chevy w/Balding Tires–”one SM57, placed above a well-tuned drum kit.”  Overhead miking means that the dynamics come not from volume knobs but from the drummer’s touch.  It’s vastly more effective than electronics.

Once people started relying on a mixing board to balance out the different parts of a drum kit, drummers started hitting everything harder, in the mistaken belief that a drum hit hard sounds better.  I don’t play this way.  I use light drumsticks, Regal or Regal Tip 7A’s, and I rarely break sticks because I don’t hit the drum too hard.  I leave some room to raise the volume should I need to emphasize it.  This is totally out of step with how people expect a drummer to sound today.

I play like an older drummer, which above all means I do not hit the kit on the mathematical center of a beat.  This is a huge problem in the era of drum machines and quantization.  There is an expectation that “one” will fall precisely on the center of “one” rather than a little before or after, to push or pull things, for feel’s sake.  As a result, the drumming one hears on record these days–and live, generally, because this is the expectation–is all beat and no feel.  A drummer with a lot of feel sounds foreign at this point, if wonderful to those who will listen.  I’ve always liked players with a lot of feel, and in rock this has meant that I’ve come to prefer a lot of less technically proficient players to technicians.  I’ll take Ringo and especially Charlie Watts over Neal Peart any day of the week.

What this has meant–and I blame no-one at all for it–is that I’m commercial poison as a drummer.  I know it, I’ve considered changing it, and I’ve decided to keep it.  I write this because in the past month for various reasons I’ve decided that my next project will have me drumming on it, and drumming in my usual way.

Claremont, CA – 06/11/10

By its Very Nature Fleeting

“By its Very Nature Fleeting,” from Begging Bowl (2007).

In a cold, concrete cave
In the mists of the city
In the skeletal form of a dorm room
Lit by shooting, blue electricity
There’s a sharp, tearing wail
Like a wounded ass braying
Hello Nancy!—she’s sweet, but she’s antsy
And this is what she’s saying:

“Gone, gone away.
I’m a wild wind retreating
And the blueness of the firmament
Is by its very nature fleeting.
When my mind will finally fade
There won’t be a pause for grieving
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through this vacuous vicinity
Through a mind of raving lunacy.”

Now a bursting voice chimes.
It’s the young convert, Felix.
“There’s a place out in space where the towers climb
Like the spiraling double-helix.
In the wide, distant sky,
See the flaming sign shining.
Without it, our lives would be bestial,
Our words, a hollow whining.

Gone, gone away.
Your whole life is time retreating.
And there’s no-one beneath the terrestrial sun
Who’ll hear your heart stop beating.
When this mundane shell decays,
You better know what you’re believing
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
On a crash-course with the trinity.
It’s en route to Judgement City.”

A new voice softly breathes.
It’s the usually silent Valerie
With her words wafting down from the top bunk
Like a sweet breeze from the peanut gallery.
“You can hear what I say.
You can just as well ignore me.
But the thoughts jetting out from your synapses
Are as real as your body before me.

Gone, gone away.
You see the shining sky retreating
While some unnamed, unknown part of the globe
Feels the burning dawn light heating.
Though your shifting form will fade,
It’s no real cause for grieving
Because the entire, spinning planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through our molecular vicinity
Through the streets of New York City
Through a tiny probability
Through the grossly disfigured and the pretty
Through a mind of bright simplicity
Through a mind of shining simplicity

I’ve always had a soft spot for this tune, since I first wrote it in 1997, right before I began the stretch of tunes that would become The Duck Hunter.  I had been toying with the riff, in which I play a D minor chord in a D major tune for two or three years by the time I really sat down to write the thing, and I felt at the time that I was writing the poppiest thing I’d written in a while.  Certainly, it was the pop-rockiest thing I’d done since the Little Band.  I wrote it moderately quickly, but well, and it shows.  It feels fresh, even after all these years, and the words do not seem labored in the least.

I imagined, for some reason, a friend’s suite at Pitzer, in Mead Dorm, as the setting.  I can’t for the life of me remember the guy’s name now, though I imagine it will come back to me at some point.  I remember, distinctly, getting together and playing some tunes informally one evening, including Bob Dylan‘s “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” which was at the time brand new and certainly the best tune on Oh Mercy, correctly considered a return to form.  My friend wasn’t the best player in the world but he was great company.  For some reason, when imagining where this tune takes place, I see the same room, with, of course, different people in it.  I would add that nearly everything I’ve ever written takes place in a very specific place I’ve been, most often with no connection whatsoever with the subject matter of the tune.

I won’t spend too much time on the lyrics, because I’ve commented on them before, but I will note that the basic form, in three parts, is more or less my most common organizational scheme and certainly one of my most effective.  It is very easy to write a compelling lyric if one takes whatever one is imagining and views it from three perspectives.  You can’t go wrong.  In this case, it’s death, but it could be absolutely anything.

This tune popped into my mind as something to write about–getting to the recording of it–because I was driving last week and it came on my radio, with my iPod on shuffle.  I was immediately struck with how much I missed my Rhodes.  I got the thing for a birthday present, cheap, right after college in the Summer of 1991 and I sold it, cheap, in 2005 before leaving for Senegal.  There was no real way I could keep it, and we don’t have space in our current digs–pretty spacious for San Francisco, to be sure–for a Rhodes.  I got a lot of mileage out of it and while I’m not much of a pianist I can’t recall a recording on which I used it to better effect than this one.

I used a trick I’ve used a couple times, which only works as a trick when it’s not planned.  I cut two tracks for the solo sections, one with electric guitar and one with Rhodes.  I played both on both solo sections, and figured I’d keep the one and keep the other, in whichever order had the better solos.  On playback, I played both initially, and found that having both simultaneously was far and away more compelling than either one by itself.  I’m a very limited soloist, most of the time, but I can arrange things pretty well.  At least, I can spot a good arrangement when it lands in my lap.

Bira Almeida, Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form

At the start of this school year I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to buy any more books.  Rather, I would use the library or would borrow books from other people.  I have in the past spent a fair amount of money on books, though never that much compared to what I have spent on restaurants.  It’s more a question of space to store books—we don’t have a ton of it—and the fact that I haven’t re-read a book in I don’t know how many years.  I get it in my head that I’m going to re-read The Master and Margarita one of these days, but then some new book I haven’t read before steps up and I read it instead.

I’ve read things, then, for which I would not have put down money but which I’ve appreciated.  In the case of Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form, my path to it began with comic book I’ve been reading, Daytripper.  It’s top notch.  Not to give too much away, but the basic conceit of the series is that the main character dies at the end of every issue.  That is, the same person dies, over and over, in differing circumstances.  The writer and artist are Brazilian and the whole thing takes place in Brazil.  In one issue, the main character and a friend holiday in Bahia.  They meet a beautiful woman and the main character strikes up a flirting relationship with her, thinking he will get lucky.  Turns out that she is Yemanja, the orixa associated with the sea.  He follows her out into the ocean and drowns.

I don’t want to make anything seem more spiritual than it is, but the thought of Yemanja stuck with me, knowing nothing about her, or about candomble generally.  What I can say for certain is that I grew up going to the beach, and spent a lot of time in the ocean as a kid.  I miss it terribly on occasion, one of two things I ever get nostalgic about.  (The other are ice cream trucks.)  In any event, I popped on to Wikipedia one day and looked her up.  A novel was mentioned in the article: Sea of Death by Jorge Amado, which the article read dealt extensively with Yemanja.  I put a hold on the book at the library, and never got a response that it was on hold, despite the fact that the computer showed a copy on the shelf at the Mission branch of the SF Public Library.  Frustrated, I popped down to the Mission to get it off the shelf myself.

This is why actually going to the library beats ordering books either from an online retailer or even having holds put on things over the computer.  They had at the Mission branch a shelf entitled “Latino Interest” or something like it–a wall actually, quite extensive–and I couldn’t immediately figure out how it was organized.  There were clearly like books with like, so it was subdivided somehow, but I couldn’t figure out the logic, and it wasn’t clearly marked.  So I ended up going through each subsection and following the alphabet, looking for Sea of Death.  One stumbles across all kinds of great things one would never find if one approached things intentionally.

I chose the capoeira book rather than a number of other things partially because it was something I knew absolutely nothing about and partially because the book was relatively short and had pictures.  Also, I have as I indicated earlier been reading about the black diaspora for a while and capoeira is an essential part of that process.  The book absolutely did not disappoint.  One thing that was particularly nice was that it’s clear that Almeida is not a professional writer.  The writing was absolutely clear, but at the same time totally without literary conceit.  His intent was to put various ideas about capoeira on paper, not write something that made himself look artsy.  Each chapter tackles a different aspect of the art, from technique to history to the spiritual dimension of it.  Well worth the read.