The Musician's Lifeline is the larger and more broadly focused of the two, and is more interesting to me. It's packed with advice from a whole lot of famous players, relating to every aspect of doing music as a job, career, and art form, largely in one-liner format. It's a little values sketch of a particular community* of musicians— many top jazz and studio professionals, performers, educators, and the tier under them— what they think about, how they generally look at things. It will be most valuable to jazz studies majors— this is the field your education is for.
* - And it's my same community, though in terms of career accomplishment I'm in the category scrappers below the least-biggest person here. Everyone in the book is doing big gigs, or more likely is the big gig. But I know a few of these people, been in workshops with many of them in school, and/or there's one degree of separation with many more of them, via my peers.
The Drummer's Lifeline is shorter, with a lot of duplicate materials, but with more that is narrowly of interest to drummers, mostly from Erskine and Black. The unique materials are largely minutia, mostly related to gear— I don't sense a larger philosophical center to it as with the other book.
Much of what the books cover will be familiar to professionals, and to many serious students. There are some choice bits that were new to me. And it's good to have obvious things restated and reinforced. There's a lot that will be good for people to hear early in their playing life, before they learn it the hard way.
On the other hand, we live in a neurotic age. If you're prone to general anxiety over ever doing anything wrong... or prone to focusing on minutia at the expense of actually playing your instrument... or to preparation neurosis, where you're permanently in a state of feeling a need to do more to be ready to play with people... maybe you don't need more voices in your head issuing dire instructions. Musician's Lifeline in particular gets a little overbearing just from the sheer volume of wonderful advice.
At least the sources are unimpeachable— these are not just a bunch of chattering youtubers. You can readily dismiss any contrary advice you've been worrying about. And there is some helpful advice dismissing some areas of worry— like where Erskine realistically assesses the variety and difficulty of most of the reading he has had to do in his career (that is, basically never any Zappa level stuff).
They're worthwhile, and you should be buying books. Get them from Steve Weiss Music:
The Drummer's Lifeline by Peter Erskine & Dave Black - Alfred - 191 pages
The Musician's Lifeline by Peter Erskine & Dave Black - Alfred - 126 pages
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