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. 

Transcription: Dave King - Rational Funk / Trading 8s

Here's something I don't normally do: transcribe stuff from solo/demo/“lesson” videos online. But this is a) cool, b) illustrative of something I talk about a lot here, which is UNDERLYING SIMPLICITY.

The video is “Memes / Trading 8s”—  Episode 41 of Dave King's YouTube series Rational Funk. If you like my site you've probably already heard of King and the series, and are following him. I'm just always amazed that any Joe-Ray Dickstein's blast beat video will get 1,000,000 hits, and most of these videos are languishing between 10-20k views. If you want to be a musician, this is the real content. And if you're going to take free content, you've got to help people monetize— follow, share, tweet, retweet, buy product.

So I've written out three four-measure solos (alternating with a funk groove) which are hip, interesting, and fancy-sounding, and I thought people might like to know what's going on. The transcription starts at 2:55 in the video:

The straight groove portion is something not unlike what we've seen in my recent FUNK CONTROL series of posts: a hand pattern of RLRR-LRRL plus accents and bass drum.

If you analyze the page a little bit, you can see there are a lot of alternating 16th notes happening, moving around between the snare drum, hihat, and crash cymbal; there's syncopated accenting, occasional tied notes or rests, drags, and a few doubles. There's a little bass drum added, and the occasional hihat played with the foot, either in unison with the hands, or punched in a gap. He alludes to a five note pattern in measure 6, and a three note pattern in measure 25.

The one squirrelly lick is the 5-let thing near the end— the rhythm may be approximate, but that appears to be the sequence of notes played. Good to remember that a lot of weird-looking stuff you see in these transcriptions is not necessarily written the way it was conceived by the player.

I should note that my articulations for the hihat are all over the place on this one— usually where there's an accent, the cymbals are half-open; I also use a tenuto mark to indicate a half-open note, and I've got a few standard 'o's in there to indicate an open sound, which are also kind of half-open. It doesn't matter. And there are a couple of minor typos in the jpeg above, which are corrected in the pdf, so download the pdf.

Get the pdf

More Rational Funk

It's testimony to the lameness of the Internet— not my readers, who are awesome, but all the rest of that rabble— that the videos in Bad Plus drummer Dave King's Rational Funk series mostly get around eight to ten thousand views— occasionally commanding as much attention as this joker's worst video, but never, in anyone's most cocaine-induced fit of megalomania, achieving more than a fraction of the views of this video by some guy called Turdadactyl. Let's see, how are we doing today, still worse than Turdadactyl? Yep. Wonderful, let's all commit suicide.

If you're a follower of this blog, you're going to love Rational Funk, so get in there and subscribe to the series on YouTube, follow him on Twitter, and all that jive. Show some support for good drumming stuff on the web.

Here are a couple of good recent videos— extended techniques, and dealing with children:


Commentary on Whiplash:

Rational Funk with Dave King

Bad Plus drummer Dave King's Rational Funk series of videos are pretty genius, and hilarious:



They brought me to mind of the old Book of the SubGenius, a blurb on the back of which goes something like “Genuine wisdom in the guise of pure bullshit.” ...Ken Kesey or somebody wrote that.

Anyway, Jon McCaslin has posted several of the videos— hop on over there, or to King's YouTube page, and check them out. It's kind of a sad commentary that these get a few percent of the views of your average Drumeo video...

A couple of more of my favorites after the break: