15th anniversary at Revival Drum Shop

I had a nice time hanging out at Portland's Revival Drum Shop last night— an excellent, unique drum shop featuring mostly vintage gear, with a lot of interesting new percussion instruments, and new and vintage cymbals. They helped Cymbal & Gong get going early on, and still have their proprietary Revival line of cymbals with them. It's a great store and I send all my students there. 

It's owned by José Medeles of the band The Breeders, and it has become a real Portland institution. Last night they had a running party with friends of the shop playing, including: Dave King (Bad Plus, Rational Funk), Dave Elitch[!!!] (Mars Volta, Miley Cyrus), Spit Stix (Fear), Stephen Hodges (Tom Waits), Janet Weiss (Sleater Kinney) and others. I had to leave before the great Mel Brown played— naturally, he was playing a regular gig somewhere, and had to go last.   

Dave King, if you know of his Rational Funk series of videos, was completely hilarious, and of course played brilliantly. 

Dave Elitch played great, hitting some real LA style backbeats that had me plugging one ear, because I was ~ five feet away. His recent mini-to-do involving a rash comment on the value of rudiments was mentioned, and he got a thank you from the audience for being relieved of the task of having to learn to play them. 

Spit Stix (aka Tim Leitch) did a mini-clinic on the 3:2 polyrhythm and on orchestrating rudiments on the drums— which he has worked out in a really effective way. He said the polyrhythm was really the primary beat he plays off of, which is a really central concept for me. As a drumming concept it's a big deal, it's the central thing in most jazz drumming since Elvin Jones. 

Stephen Hodges played a brief solo, then played duo with José, which was really lovely, getting into some quite amazing sounds within an atmospheric swamp groove, including Hodges dragging chains on the drums— missed getting video of that part, I was too transfixed— and José playing I think a 26" Wuhan cymbal.

I got a little video: 

It was cool and interesting to see how much of the old rock & roll thing is still happening with people, like it hasn't gone anywhere. You could have gone to a clinic with the guy from Paul Revere & The Raiders and he would have been playing much of the same stuff, and it's great. It's a thing. 

Everyone was winging it, with several admitting (or claiming) to feeling nervous about it, and it was loose, rough, and good. You can't help but notice that not everyone's real job is to be amazing playing a solo in a clinic. Like watching Stephen Hodges you think well I could basically do that, that must mean I'm a happening guy, except: he's the guy on Rain Dogs, Swordfishtrombone, and Mule Variations. He's the person who got in a position to be asked to make those records, and then made them what they are. That's a whole different thing. That's a whole different kind of artistic life than just getting ready to sound amazing in a drum shop. 

Or, I can listen to Dave King play his stuff solo, and it's on a very high level, but it's on a continuum with what a lot of other good drummers do, including myself. So just taking it in terms of playing solo, you could get a little cocky, like hey I'm not that different from him, I'm a happening guy! Except his job is to be headlining jazz festivals, and blowing the audience away after they've been listening to other world class acts for three days. To be good at that you have to be really comfortable doing hard music, and have a couple of gears above normal good players for generating intensity within music. So no. That's not the only way to do music, but no. 

And it's funny— even at his level, he's worrying about the parts that felt off to him, afterwards he was thanking the audience for listening to “the bad along with the good”— “the bad” being virtually undetectable to anyone listening. 

Ultimately you come away from the event feeling like there's room for everything— that obvious, explosive kind of talent, along with more traditionally simple and direct heavy playing, and some more mysterious creativity, reaching into a deeper living history with Mel Brown. A very cool scene. 

Nothing to do with drumming?

Dave Elitch (L) with Rational Funk's Dave King

There was a fascinating exchange on Instagram, starting with the drummer Dave Elitch (formerly of the band Mars Volta, done a bunch of big gigs), who gave a rather provocative reaction to a quote from Stanley Spector— which we talked about here before, you can read here. 

Elitch comments on it: 

I had a student send me some quotes by Stanley Spector who was a drum teacher that’d I’d previously never heard of before. He sounded like an interesting character and I still can’t decide if he was nuts or not because it’s hard to find a lot of information about him other than secondhand blurbs here and there.

I did however, come across this quote circa 1980 from him in regard to his opinion about rudiments and I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve always thought that there has been far too much emphasis on rudiments as a topic of study and how they are fundamentally out dated and largely irrelevant in regards to playing the drum set in a contemporary music setting in the 20th, let alone 21st century. You want to play drum corps or pipe band? Go for it, just don’t fool yourself into thinking it has anything to do with playing the drums. It doesn’t.

It’s imperative that we make smart choices when it comes to what we choose to practice. So many times when I’m working with someone, they are working on things simply because they can’t do them and that’s not a good enough reason in my book.

Emphasis is mine all the way here. The drummer Dan Weiss, who is a hot item in New York, comments: 

Love you and I think what you say has some value. But I also think that the rudimental vernacular is one of the defining elements of drummers such as Cozy Cole, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones , Elvin Jones, Frankie Dunlop, Alan Dawson Tony Williams, etc. If I am teaching someone how to swing and play in this style I most certainly teach rudiments ( see my new course :) because it is part of the language. If I teach someone who is interested in something else I might not teach rudiments at all. Context is everything. There’s no one way, there’s no right way.

(I don't agree with him that rudiments are strictly for learning a vernacular style, though they are necessary for understanding those players.)  

Elitch then responds: 

This is more geared towards someone who wants to play contemporary drum set and contemporary music. If we’re talking about jazz and a certain approach to jazz that harkens back to when military drumming was a direct influence on it as an art form, then sure, absolutely. I’m just saying that someone thinking (or being taught to) play a triple ratamcue as if that will help them or have any relation to feel/pocket/time - that’s where it all falls apart for me

Digesting all of that, I have a number of comments. 

Looking at the key portion again:

 [Rudiments are] out dated and largely irrelevant in regards to playing the drum set in a contemporary music setting in the 20th, let alone 21st century. You want to play drum corps or pipe band? Go for it, just don’t fool yourself into thinking it has anything to do with playing the drums. It doesn’t.

I don't know what they have to do with if not playing the drums. I play them on a drum. And obviously the idea that rudiments were irrelevant to contemporary music of even the 20th century is ridiculous. As is the idea that 21st century drumming is some revolutionary new animal totally unconnected from what was done in the past. It is not. 

About the rudiments themselves, their packaging is old fashioned, but there aren't many of them you can just throw away, and still be a competent drummer. A lot of them are simply articulations, or ways of making a long tone, or they're standard short rolls, or forms of paradiddles— all of which are heavily exploited on the drum set, in this century even, even by unprecedentedly modern players like Dave Elitch. Some of them, if they are of no other use to someone, are good for conditioning the hands for playing layered rhythms. 

About his response to Weiss's list of players as harkening to military drummers, I have to wonder has he ever heard a Tony Williams record? I'm not sure he has. How deep into Elvin Jones can someone be to say that? We assume that everybody has studied everybody, but show me you actually know something about them, to be making a comment like that. [Since writing this I've learned he knows them very well, it's still a strange comment.] 

Some of the other comments there are fascinating. I wish there were more constructive conversation involving Mr. Elitch. Mainly there are a lot of people thanking him for freeing them from having to learn to play some elementary stuff on a snare drum. A few people helpfully point out that pursuing the rudiments in a monomaniacally monofocused way that no one actually advocates doing, will not make you groove. True that! 

It's weird to me. It's a strange form of communication that I'm not used to, from people involved in teaching. Ultimately, great teachers— e.g. Ed Soph, Ralph Humphrey, John Beck, John Riley, Peter Erskine— want to make people understand. They work hard to communicate openly. They write a lot and give everything up. They generally don't denigrate entire, widely used, bodies of drumming literature.

Postscript: Oh, and I'm totally with him on the ratamacues, screw those things.

[h/t to Thomas at DW for sharing the quote]