Here's some nice Christmas morning listening, which I've certainly shared before— Before We Were Born, by Bill Frisell. This was my first exposure to Joey Baron's drumming, around 1990-91. I used to play these gigs in Bend, Oregon, which is on the other side of the Cascade mountains from Eugene, where I lived, and I would put this on on the drive home— about 2 1/2 hours through heavy mountains and forest, leaving around midnight.
I also made a practice loop from the tune The Lone Ranger— it's not stated real clearly, but it is in 3/4 time, tempo is 79 bpm:
Joey Baron's solo over a 7/4 vamp on Goldfish, from Dave Douglas's 1997 album Stargazer, to which I'm listening a lot this week.
There's not a ton of drumistic content to it, it's more of an attitude— it's a power solo, playing off the structure, for impact. Mostly pretty simple syncopated melodic things on the snare and toms, with big accents on the crash cymbal, with the bass drum or snare drum. You can play this way, solos don't have to be technical.
Actually the vamp is three bars of 7/4 plus one bar of 9/4.
Here we go, tempo is 142 bpm:
He plays quarter notes on the hihat with his foot part of the time, but it's not really central to what he's playing, so I left it out. Play it if it helps you, especially setting up the syncopated rhythms he's playing on the rest of the set.
He's two crash cymbals along with the ride cymbal— one of them is pretty trashy, almost a China sound. The ride cymbal is not the usual taped up thing he was using at the time, every other aspect of his sound is familiar, from that period— punchy toms, very fat snare drum (I still copy that sound, to some extent), he wails on a 16" crash pretty often, 20 or 22" bass drum tuned for a full sound.
There aren't a lot of internal dynamics happening— things are mostly pretty strong, at a pretty even volume. It's a different thing, playing bam-bam style, vs. playing with a lot of soft things mixed in with your loud things.
He does play big dynamics on that single stroke roll at the beginning. That takes a lot of ability.
Here's a record I almost forgot about, that had a big impact on the way I play the drums. From 1988-90, David Sanborn was the leading guy getting new and eclectic music to a (reasonably) mass audience, through his syndicated TV show Night Music. His record Another Hand came out on the heels of that in 1991, doing some different stuff than his usual New York R&B thing, and featuring some people who were on the show, like Bill Frisell, Joey Baron, Mark Ribot, Charlie Haden, the group NRBQ.
Here's Monica Jane, a Bill Frisell tune. Now it sounds like “Americana”, at the time it had a distinctly Pacific Northwest vibe. Frisell had moved to Seattle a couple of years earlier, and Nirvana was just hitting, and the northwest was having a big cultural moment in music. I had just moved to Portland from Los Angeles, and I was really feeling it, anyway.
Joey Baron is on drums here, doing something very fresh then, with a new sound, making a big statement with single notes.
Here is Joey Baron playing on Don Byron's solo on Resistor, from the Bill Frisell album This Land— Baron's playing on this record is one of the major blowing performances of the 90s. The tune is a mutant blues, and has become canon after a fashion— I'm not aware of a good published lead sheet, but I know a lot of us have been making our own charts for it over the last 30 years. Also check out the earlier version with Paul Motian on drums if you're going to learn the tune. The melody and the tuba riff on the original are the main things on which to hang your playing on it.
Here Baron is playing it with a sort of hybrid New Orleans/Songo groove— obviously those are not the style of the tune, but that's where his drumming vocabulary is coming from. Studying something like this strictly from a drumming perspective, I'm checking out the scope of the vocabulary he's using, how repetitive he is, how he outlines phrases, how much he moves his hands around— right hand moving from the cymbals, left hand moving from the snare drum. Also the nature and level of independence he's using, and how he uses his left foot.
The transcription begins at 1:17 in the track.
The 8th notes are lightly swinging. The dynamic markings can get a little dense here— most of them apply to the snare drum, or the crash cymbal; some apply to the bass drum. Usually parentheses indicate ghost notes, except in the cowbell part they indicate notes played on the shoulder of the bell. Dynamics are extreme— house top accents are very strong rim shots, and notes in parentheses are very soft.
A great extended interview with Joey Baron by Cologne pianist Pablo Held. Part three has the most drumming and performance related conversation in it, but follow the link and watch the other two videos, too:
Here's a loop to practice my hip uptempo rock practice method along with— sampled from the fast portion of Bill Frisell's Child At Heart, from his album Where In The World, which is one of my favorite records ever, anywhere. If you listen to the entire track, and check out my transcription of it, the practice method will make a lot more sense— there are a lot of similar displacements in both things. The tempo is quarter note = 159 bpm.
The picture in the video, by the way, is of my mom in Coos county, Oregon, sometime in the 1930s. We found a pretty remarkable cache of negatives of family photos from the 1910s-30s last year...
Another of my all time favorite records, Is That You? by Bill Frisell, with Joey Baron on drums. It's lightly flawed with an in-your-face overprocessed drum sound, produced by Wayne Horvitz, but whatever. It's not the first messed up drum sound in jazz. It's a dated sound, but it just makes me think of the movies Akira, and Robocop, and Terminator 2. Cyberpunk. It's technoid in that ruthless late 80s sort of way. It's an angular collection of tunes, but that works with the aesthetic I was describing above. The record still hooks you.
A little transcription of Joey Baron playing in Bill Frisell/Americana mode on Cattle Drive, from Frisell's original music for the Buster Keaton film Go West. It's sort of a beginner's version of the ricky-ticky thing he does on tunes like Pip Squeak. like I've written it in 6/4, but you can just think of it as a waltz. The theme and solo form is 9 bars (of 6/4) long.
Baron uses more sounds than normal on this— including cowbell, woodblock, and an unidentified sheet metal sound— check out the key at the end. Virtually the entire cymbal part is played on the crash cymbal. He generally plays a lot of different articulations— rim shots, buzzes, and a lot of things that are difficult or impossible to transcribe, but here he's pretty straightforward.
Long day yesterday driving to the Oregon coast for a recording session, and home again. I did bring along one of my favorite things ever, Before We Were Born, by Bill Frisell. We used to listen to this driving through the Cascades in the middle of the night, driving home after gigs, from Bend to Eugene. Frisell moved to Seattle around this time, and the music is a perfect backdrop to the landscapes out here:
Also had with me Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth / Interstellar Low Ways— two records on one CD, both of which are pretty straightforward swing, and a lot of fun:
Just sharing a little piece of my own development here. From the early 90's, until I finally submitted to the too-soft, you-don't-really-want-drums-on-this-gig-do-you craze of the mid-oughts, I played a 20" Gretsch bass drum with Remo Ambassadors on both sides, tuned wide open. In the 80's I had seen Art Blakey play with an obviously unmuffled drum, and Steve Smith came to the University of Oregon, with his shockingly wide-open 24" Sonor drums— he was still with Journey at the time, and had them tuned that way with them. But it was these two recordings that really got me using that as my thing all the time.
First, Roy Haynes playing with McCoy Tyner on an almost-lost tribute to Coltrane album from the late 80's— I used to listen to this track on cassette over and over walking from the practice annex on Figueroa to my apartment on Adams, when I was at USC:
And then the opening track on Where In The World?, a masterpiece Bill Frisell album from 1991. Coming at the end of the fusion era, Joey Baron's sound here, produced by Wayne Horvitz, was pretty extreme. Frisell had just moved to Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest was forming up in my mind as actually being a place, and as having some kind of regional aesthetic, and I gave up on LA, and moved to Portland:
For those of you too young to remember, there was a live music show on US television at the end of the 80's,called Night Music. Hosted by saxophonist David Sanborn, it was some of the most adventurous music ever to make it onto network TV, and truly eclectic, featuring artists as divergent as Sun Ra, Squeeze, Gladys Night, Sonic Youth, Wayne Shorter, Slim Gaillard, and John Zorn. Here are two of my favorite bands from the period playing on the show, both featuring Joey Baron. First, Bill Frisell's quartet with Kermit Driscoll and Hank Roberts:
... and then Tim Berne's Fractured Fairy Tales:
Another nice clip of Baron, with the sans-Roberts Bill Frisell trio after the break:
It should be tedious if it's really worthwhile. Much of practicing is not fun. It takes discipline. I personally don't have a problem with people practicing while they watch TV! If you are doing maintenance exercises, or warm ups, or something like that, I think that watching TV might make the "medicine easier to swallow, " if you know what I mean.
And:
What is really important to you? Is it more important to go to the coast on the weekend and hang out with your friends? Or is spending some time on your instrument more important? Maybe you could do both. Still, you might find that spending quality time on your instrument means there are other things.
This is one of my favorite pieces of Joey Baron's playing, from Bill Frisell's Where In The World, playing some of the more prodigious snare drum backbeats in jazz. The “hip”, backwards, rhythmically-displaced part during the drum break at measure 41 was always the hokiest part of it to me, but I learned to love it by listening to the record again and again. Somehow it makes more sense to me when he does the same sort of thing again at measure 65.
Bill Frisell - guitar
Hank Roberts - cello
Kermit Driscoll - bass
Joey Baron - drums
I and a lot of other drummers of my generation immediately took all of the muffling out of my bass drum after hearing the opening track, Unsung Heroes. Baron's incredible playing is a little more subdued and supportive of the mood than on some of his wilder blowing albums. Covers a lot of ground stylistically, but plays like episodes in a movie. One of the things that kept me sane in L.A. in the riot year.
ELVIN JONES:
I worked a gig at the Vanguard with Red Rodney and Ira Sullivan, it was like a bebop thing, and Elvin Jones was in the house, and I didn't know it- and I thought I was having a horrible night, and at the end of the night, I'm walking over and he's talking to Red Rodney, he and Red were old friends, and I saw him I was just really like [scared] and I just wanted to hide in the sewer; and he came over to me and he said "it's you and me tonight" [...] and I didn't know what he was talking about but I just went with it and we ended up hanging out all night, just kind of went across the street to the coffee shop, ate and just walked around Chelsea until, I don't know, until about five in the morning. And this whole time I was bambambambam- what about this, what about-- you know, and um, you know...
PRACTICING:
[W]hen I started to practice, I would like put my ear- since I didn't have people to sit and watch close up, I would do it to a record, or the radio, or the television. I would listen- does anyone know a show called "The Wild, Wild West"? The background music to it was a guy playing brushes on a snare drum, and I always loved that, so every week when it would come on, I'd this close to the TV just listening, every week, and week after week I would just start to get the melody in my head, you kind of already know what the melody was, and just kinda whistle along with it or something and play along with it. Basically, that's it. That's really how I learned to play.
HOW DO YOU MAKE THE BAND LISTEN?
Um, drown them out? No, well, you can't make somebody listen. You can try to hint, you can do things like with the dynamics- seriously, you could drown them out- you could lay out, you could do something with the time, like take it into a different feel, you could jump up and down and make funny noises- I've kind of tried all of those and they all work. It just depends on the context, who you're playing with. But you can't make someone else do something, but you can try, and those are ways. If you're playing in a funk groove and it's a constant backbeat going on, and the soloist is going on and on and on and on and on and just you feel like, wait a minute it's like this is turning into like, they should get a rhythm machine or a sequencer, instead of...
Part 2 of the 1994 Joey Baron New School master class, via rec.music.bluenote:
PLAYING WITH JOHN ZORN:
The challenges for working with a guy like Zorn- it depends. He's got so many different kinds of music- [he] writes pieces that if you heard it, you'd probably think, "Jesus Christ, it's like nothing but complete feedback and noise"- and it is! But that's what he heard and that's what he worked on. Sometimes I find myself extremely physically challenged. I'm a little guy, I don't lift sides of buildings for fun or anything like that, so I'm not like exactly a power-oriented type of player. But for some of his music, I had to train a little bit to have the stamina just to keep up with the volume. Because when you're working as a drummer, you're working with people who put their stuff through an amp; if they want to get loud, they can just go like that [twirls knob] or get closer into the mic, and as that gets louder, as a drummer, I wanna accompany that, I don't want to get buried by it, totally. So, that was the first one big challenge, the physical challenge. And when somebody looks at you and tells you, "blow as hard and as fast and as long as you can right now, and don't stop until I cut you off", that's hard! That's really hard! You can tell when you start giving up, and when that happens you look and you see a glare. That's challenging, to give a composer what he wants or she wants.
This is part one of a transcript of a master class Joey Baron gave at the New School in 1994. I originally found this in '98 on the rec.music.bluenote news group, and was just able to dig it up again. I've edited it substantially for clarity- the original transcript is by a student who left in all the 'likes' and 'I means', and fragmented sentences. It's long, and editing it is a giant pain, so here is part one:
MUSIC SCHOOL VS. MUSIC WORLD:
It's difficult. Most of my experience is like out in the field... maybe i should give you a little bit of background. I'm 38 years old. I've been playing since i was 9 and travelling, starting on weekends when I was a kid travelling since i was about 10 and a half. So my expertise is kind of like out there in the field, so any questions you have about that kind of stuff- I'll do my best to answer and... to answer your point: it is really hard, to get out of school and out of the academic world. It's a whole other thing, surviving, and paying your rent... if your can pay your rent, that's being a success, forget about Downbeat awards and all that stuff, paying your rent, that's like high art.
It's difficult and everybody has their own way of making things work. I have some really good friends who came into music through a different angle than i did. Most of my experience has been as a player, doing apprenticeships, and as sideman with a lot of different kinds of musicians. I have friends like John Zorn, who's mainly a composer- that's his main thing he's been doing since he was a child. And he had his own way of making music and he just stuck to that and in terms of surviving, he did day jobs, worked at record stores, he helped assist people in the theater, you know, and he kept his overhead low. He didn't live in a big fancy place or anything like that. A lot of people do that, other people do a lot of commercial work, they end up doing club dates or if they're lucky enough to do recording work or jingles. It's as many different people as there are that's as many different stories as there are, as to how people pull it together.
