Best books: The Drummer's/Musician's Lifeline

Looking at two little books co-authored by Peter Erskine and Dave Black— The Drummer's Lifeline, and The Musician's Lifeline, subtitled, respectively, as Quick Fixes, Hacks, And Tips Of The Trade, and Advice For All Musicians, Student to Professional.

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

Transcription: Peter Erskine - Duo - 03

And here's the next 30 seconds of Duo, played by Peter Erskine and Bob Mintzer, from Mintzer's record Hymn. This begins at 0:59 in the recordings. The last line is solo drums, next entry they'll be trading fours all the way. 

We're getting into some denser stuff here, with layered 8th notes between the cymbal, snare, and bass drum, it's worth looking at those parts. Note that he plays the 8ths a little straighter there, too. 

Get the pdf

Blogger is not letting me embed the video directly, click through to hear the track on YouTube. 

Transcription: Peter Erskine - Duo

I don't know what younger drummers' current perception of Peter Erskine is, but when I was a student he was one of the top guys, always thought of as being exceedingly musical, with a great sound. And slamming, at times, like here— later on I got the feeling that he regarded overtly exciting playing as a kind of obligation to keep the punters happy. 

...I'm still a little annoyed that I didn't get to study with him when I was at USC. He was teaching a couple of the other drummers there, and later became regular faculty. I did get to drive him around and hang a little bit when he came to the U. of Oregon later. A bassist I knew at SC, Jesse Murphy, got to play with him a little bit, and his comment about his time always stuck with me: Where else could it be?  

This is from Bob Mintzer's 1992 record Hymn, and is titled Duo, with Mintzer and Erskine playing duo. I had a bunch of records with this group: Erskine, John Abercrombie, Marc Johnson. I missed this one— when it came out I was buying all the Joey Baron records I could afford. 

This is the head, the first 30 seconds of the recording. I'm going to try to do the whole thing, in installments. Tempo is 258— getting into the top end of the range where you'd swing the 8ths, and play many triplets.  

It's funny, this is all baseline modern vocabulary, but there's a specific thing happening here. I don't recognize it much in my own playing any more, I hear it a lot in my brother's playing— I need to think about it, I'll give whatever kind of analysis I can manage another time... 

Get the pdf

Blogger is not letting me embed the video directly, click through to hear the tune on YouTube. 

Hours

The true struggle comes in the practice room, facing those drums everyday for 10 hours.
— Famoudou Don Moye

When I was in college I decided that, at some point in their career, everyone who can play practiced 4-8 hours a day, for a period of years at least. I just got that impression from my teachers, from going to clinics, and from reading Modern Drummer magazine.  Today I finally decided to check; I got into my MD archives and pull as many actual quotes as I could about the number of hours people practiced.  

These quotes are all out of context, and spoken in the '70s and '80s— within the first decade of many of the players' professional careers— so don't draw too many ironclad conclusions about anyone's practice habits over their lifetime. David Garibaldi and Steve Smith, for example, were touring heavily at this time. John Guerin was probably doing recording dates 350 days a year. Most of them also talked about spending an equal amount of time listening to music, and playing with people— often practicing less when they were playing more. 

I know teachers who tell their students to practice four hours a day, eight hours a day. If you can't accomplish what you want in an hour, you're not gonna get it in four days.
— Buddy Rich


I practiced my ass off! I practiced eight hours a day. I would get up in the morning - grab a towel, put on a tee shirt and swimming trunks and go down in the basement and practice until everyone came home. I was sixteen years old[.] I would practice EVERYTHING! I practiced with records and without records. I practiced straight time, with a metronome and without a metronome. I practiced soloing with everything - sticks, brushes, mallets and fingers, and I practiced 4/4, 3/4 and 5/4 time, Latin beats... everything. I practiced everything I felt like - but I had to feel it.

There was a point when I was practicing 6 to 8 hours a day, 4 to 5 days per week. I just had all these things I wanted to work on.
— Butch Miles


Working on the road doesn't really give you that much of an opportunity to practice, but I still like to work out for at least three or four hours.
— David Garibaldi


I haven't practiced in ten or fifteen years. I'm just about to start again. When I was 19, I practiced six hours a day for about three months. I feel a need to do three months of practice; the next three months it does me good.
— John Guerin

You can play all day on the drum set if you want to, but you can accomplish more in ten minutes of good practice as opposed to two hours of wasteful practice. The amount of time isn't necessarily important.
— Peter Erskine


I used to practice seven and eight hours per day.
— Gene Krupa


A  minimum  of two hours a day, mostly on muffled drums. I normally practice an hour at home, and an hour or so at the studio.

I used to practice eight hours a day.
— Ed Shaughnessy


When I say practice I don't mean just for my hands either. I mean creative practicing, working on an idea. One idea for like two hours.

Some drummers have more natural ability than others. Some drummers need a half hour, others need four hours. It's an individual thing,

There's no such thing as you must practice 6 hours a day. You practice until it happens. Until whatever you want to happen, happens.
— Joe Cocuzzo

I would practice for four or five hours every day, and if I didn't practice that many hours in a day, at least I would practice something every day. I really noticed that, if I practiced every day, it made a difference.
— Steve Smith


[W]hen I was a kid, I'd come home from school and I would get on that practice pad for at least a couple of hours. Until I was about 17, that's all my life was. I didn't have girl friends or anything. That was it.
— Eddie Marshall


Sometimes an hour and a half, sometimes six or seven hours a day. It all depends. I go in cycles. Sometimes I can practice a whole lot every day; other times I'll be gigging a lot and won't practice at all.
— Casey Scheurell


Holy shit, I've been sitting here and practicing the Barimbau six hours a day.
— Mickey Hart


From 3:00 in the afternoon until 6:00. Three hours a day, seven days a week, forever!
— James Black


I don't think I could do anything for eight hours. I would get too bored doing one thing that long. Now, I could maybe play with a group for that period of time. But doing something like that for eight

hours in a room by myself—I don't have that kind of attention span. For two or three hours? Yes. But, eight hours? No. I know a lot of people who do that. If somebody practices for eight hours a day, they should be a monster.
— Terri Lyne Carrington


I practiced. I practiced timpani for five hours a day when I studied with Vic Firth, and I practiced five or six hours a day when I was getting mallets together with George Gaber. That's the only way you're going to get good at something. 

I was practicing six, seven, eight hours a day, learning to play like a rock'n'roll drummer.
— Kenny Aronoff


When I sit at the drums for four or six hours—whether I'm playing one rhythm for a long period of time, or playing with a rhythm machine or something like that—it creates a real trance-like quality. That's what I love best about drumming. That trance. It's the happiest place for me. It's the deepest place inside and it makes me understand "why" I play the drums.
— Michael Shrieve


 During the school term, I would practice several hours a day—all on drums.
— Kenny Washington


I would be practicing every day for like ten hours.
— Marvin “Smitty” Smith


For three months, I diligently did two or three hours a day of just Accents and Rebounds at a very slow tempo.
— Andy Newmark


Each student is an individual. One person may be able to handle a half hour tops. That individual might not be able to handle more. I had a student once who would practice eight to 11 hours a day. If

I were to practice half of that time, it would drive me crazy. The most I ever practiced myself was three hours a day for one year, and I almost ended up bananas. So you have to be realistic; you have to deal with your own particular situation.
— Chuck Flores


My most productive time was during my first year at college. I had the whole summer off, I didn't know anybody, and I was up at school alone. So I made up a practice schedule, and hit it ten to 15 hours a day for about three months. I went through two summers of that, and it never got under six or seven hours, even when school was in session.
— Dave Weckl


You've got to practice five to seven hours a day.
— Louis Hayes

There was nobody twisting my arm to practice six to eight hours a day.
— Terry Bozzio


Play at least ten minutes a day on the drum set.
— Paul Motian

Erskine on practicing

An exchange about general practice topics, from Peter Erskine's 1978 Modern Drummer interview with Gary Farmer.

GF:  [W]hat would an ideal practice routine consist of?

PE:  When I work on the snare drum, I try to get my hands in good shape. When I was working on the matched grip I concentrated on stick height, angle and feel. When I'm practicing on the set, I try to practice basic timekeeping. Every so often I'll play around the drums.

GF:  Would you suggest practicing on the pads, or a set?

PE:  Both. I think practicing on a pad is good because you can work on wrists and hands. You're not driving everybody nuts with the loud, distracting sound of the drum. On a pad, you can get a very objective look at how you sound and how you're playing. But I like practicing on a drum set, getting a cymbal feel going. Part of playing on a drum set is getting a sound out of it.

GF:  Have you ever tried a practice pad set?

PE:  Yes. They're pretty good, but I like to see a drummer practice as much as he can on a drum set. I never had a practice set, but I've always meant to buy one. I think they'd be good for working on independence. What's more important is the sound you get out of your instrument. The music you make. The feeling, the groove that happens. The mere technical end of drumming doesn't interest me that much.

GF:  You're more into the sound aspect?

PE:  I'm technically oriented to some degree. I've got a fair amount of speed, but that's just like a trumpet player trying to play high, or a drummer trying to play fast. Buddy can play more than just fast — and swing. Maynard can do more than just play high. It's something they're noted for, but it doesn't nearly do them justice as musicians. Young musicians get seduced by the extravagance available on an instrument.

Daily best music in the world: Weather Report

Lots of other action right now, so light posting is going to continue this week, so enjoy 8:30, by Weather Report. Peter Erskine is on drums. I used to set my turntable to repeat, and have this going all night. You have to listen to albums— and listen to them again and again— this Spotify paradigm, foisted upon us by tech people for their own ends, is OK for casual listeners, but is not for serious musicians. Professionals listen to albums, again and again.

Daily best music in the world: two drummers

The Modern Drummer website has a decent little list of great double-drumming tracks. I was ready to come down on them for not including the Butthole Surfers, but no, there they are— a bold choice for a drumming magazine. It'd have been nice if they'd got some Motown in there, because a lot of those recordings had two drummers on them. Also glad they didn't go for the easy Ornette Coleman choice, Free Jazz— they went deeper into his catalog for their selection.

Here's one they missed: Peter Erskine and Steve Jordan playing on Don Grolnick's solo album, from about 1987(?):



A couple of more, after the break:

Erskine on Whiplash!

If you don't know your subject well enough
to convey the real emotion of it, there's always this. 

This is fun— they've interviewed Peter Erskine in re: the new smash sensation amazingly great jazz drumming education movie which is sweeping the nation, Whiplash:

Have you ever encountered an educator like JK Simmons's band director character before?

I've played under the baton of stern and demanding conductors, as well as the critical ears of some pretty tough bandleaders. I've always experienced equal amounts of praise and criticism from the toughest of them.

That's been my experience as well, more or less— the toughness is often balanced with something else, not necessarily praise. This comment from Erskine is very significant:

I'm disappointed that any viewer of the film will not see the joy of music-making that's almost always a part of large-ensemble rehearsals and performances. Musicians make music because they LOVE music. None of that is really apparent in the film, in my opinion.

He has some similar complaints to the ones I made about the movies early promo stuff:

What did you think of Teller's performance as a drummer?

It's a movie, and the actor did a good job. The drummer(s) who did the pre-record did a very fine job. Teller is a good actor. He's a so-so drummer: his hands are a mess in terms of technique, holding the sticks, etc., and no true fan of Buddy Rich would ever set up his or her drums in the manner that Teller's character does in the film. A 10" tom? Highly-angled? With a crash cymbal at that angle? Nope, doesn't wash. Besides, that "winning" drum solo performance at the end of the film is a very passé sort of thing. If the film takes place "now," any drummer playing like that at a competitive jazz festival --especially one in New York City -- would get a cymbal thrown at their feet by the ghost of Papa Jo Jones, or I'd do it for him. Now I know how professional photographers must feel when they see an actor portraying a scene like a photo shoot where the photographer never bothers to focus any of the shots he or she is taking.

Do go read the entire interview. H/T to Mike Prigodich for the link.

VOQOTD: Erskine on Keltner and space

When you think of Keltner you think of these delicious, huge gaps, and when that backbeat comes down, it’s just sweet. And the reason it’s sweet is that it’s not filled up with a bunch of stuff.

— Peter Erskine


From Erskine's 2000 Drum! magazine piece.

VOQOTD: on swinging

To me, any drummer who hits the drums too hard doesn’t swing.

— Peter Erskine

Read the entire Drum! Magazine interview from 2000.

What is HIP?

George Colligan is trying to create a said thing. At his Jazz Truth blog there's a post highly worth reading, about High Intensity Practicing, or HIP— his phrase— or “practicing REALLY HARD, at a sort of all out intensity, for a short period of time.” Mainly, it seems to involve actually practicing things you can't do. Putting yourself in that space is not easy, because it means persisting and maintaining focus while sounding like— not much; and nobody likes feeling like they're struggling.

A slightly contrary thing that has never been too far from my mind is Peter Erskine's commandment of first be able to play a simple beat really well, which encourages a lot of practicing for refinement as you try to assess whether you are really playing that AC/DC beat truly well, yet. And I've never been so bold as to think I could really do everyday stuff well enough to stop relearning it and polishing it. But learning to play is not a strictly zero sum thing like that, and working on new, hard stuff using a lot of concentration effects your daily material for the better, too.

Anyway, Colligan ends with this quotation, some variation of which has been a big deal to me for years:

It's fascinating watching the Ken Burns documentary on Jazz and watching Artie Shaw talk about the Glen Miller Band during the Swing Era. 

And I didn't like Miller's band, I didn't like what he did. Miller was, he had what you'd call a Republican band. It was, you know, very straight laced, middle of the road. And Miller was that kind of guy, he was a businessman. And he was sort of the Lawrence Welk of jazz. And that's one of the reasons he was so big, people could identify with what he did, they perceived what he was doing. But the biggest problem, his band never made a mistake. And it's one of the things wrong, because if you don't ever make a mistake, you're not trying, you're not playing at the edge of your ability. You're playing safely, within limits, and you know what you can do and it sounds after a while extremely boring.

We've been talking about doing this in the practice room, but I've always tried to apply it on the stand, too... but that's for another post...

Groove o' the day: Peter Erskine — Clint

Because I like challenging you to hear past things that most people perceive as cheese, here's a little relic of the later fusion era, by the great John Abercrombie trio with Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine. Honestly, this is a case where it sounds cheesy to me, too. The tune is Clint, from the album Current Events.

On the head, the only things happening are the drums, the melody, and a little synth pad, so what Erskine plays is very exposed; he treats main part of the tune as something like a commercial arrangement, and it's a good idea to study how how he interprets the whole thing— it's very deliberately constructed. It's really textbook. The groove for the main part of the tune, then:

From the middle section. There's more activity with the rest of the group, and he plays more interactively. Play the unaccented notes very softly:

The triplet at the end is an embellishment; usually he just plays 16th notes through that.

Audio after the break:

VOQOTD: bad wallpaper

“[Things that are] complex and busy and amazing all the time are kinda like bad wallpaper after awhile.”

— Peter Erskine

Odd meter samba?

This line from Peter Erskine's The Drum Perspective is pretty much an instant classic:

I've felt strongly, for a long time now, that instead of seducing and encouraging the younger and learning drummer to practice, among other things, funk-rock beats in 7/4, odd-time sambas(!) or other marginally important aspects of the craft, young drummers should be encouraged to think. To play creatively. To compose on the instrument.

That parenthetical exclamation point speaks volumes— what the hell are you thinking, it says. This is an abomination. You're taking one of the most perfect, human dance musics of the world and turning it into an intellectual game, or a vehicle for exercising your technical prowess. It was compelling to me, and though I've never been much of a thinker in my playing, I've tried to live by that statement in my own way, particularly with regards to playing creatively, and not bothering with stuff that was marginal to what was going on in my own musical world.

And yet here we are. Let's listen:




Here's the primary groove, from the beginning of the tune; there is a lot of variation in the left hand part:

More transcribed grooves, and a few thoughts on this after the break:

Googled: “Elvin Jones triplets”

What the heck, we haven't done a “round up” style post in awhile. Here's a quick survey of Internet lore, briefly reviewing some of the information returned when you google “Elvin Jones triplets”:

First, the unambiguous winner:

Four on the Floor — Elvin Jones Independence Exercises
Extremely valuable piece in which Jon McCaslin shares some insights into Elvin's approach, learned in a clinic from the master himself. Revealingly, the concepts are fairly simple, at least by current standards of drummeriness. I won't summarize it here— just go read it and live it for awhile.


Drum! Magazine —Inside the Drumming of Elvin Jones
Transcription of the drum performance on the Jones composition Three Card Molly, with a lead sheet for the tune. The tune is found on the recording Genesis— the author neglects to mention that in the piece. This is a good illustration of the gap between all of the things you can say and write about music, and the music itself: it's pretty vast. Even the author, a highly qualified musician and jazz educator who knew Elvin personally, doesn't offer a whole lot of fresh verbal information about Jones's thing. That's because there is no verbal explanation to be had; it all happens in the playing and listening. In fact, most of what you can write about any art is either 1) false, 2) true, but obvious, 3) technical. Literally-stated deep insights are extremely rare.

More after the break:

Groove o' the day: Dry Cleaner from Des Moines

Extremely light posting again this week, obviously-- there's just a whole lot going on right now; so until Monday at least you'll have to amuse yourself by making another pass through our copious archives, or you can work up Peter Erskine's groove from Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, on Joni Mitchell's Mingus:

It's played with brushes on the snare drum. The toms are not played strongly-- it takes a close listen to even hear that he's playing them. The 16ths are lightly swinging.

YouTube audio after the break:

Feel in samba

I'll start this post with an enormous caveat that Brazilian music is not my field of expertise at all.  Many people around me are learning Portuguese, making trips to Brazil and being very serious about it, making me feel a little like the guy who sat next to the class clown, as I mentioned to someone recently. Still I thought this might be helpful to people who are, like me, seeking to put together some understanding from multiple, imperfect bits of information. See my "samba builder" download for applications for these concepts.

First, for reference:



The subject of feel in samba is intimidating because it has never been clearly and fully analyzed, at least that I've seen. Here in their entirety are three of the most helpful things I've read about it:

Duduka da Fonseca/Bob Weiner in Brazilian Rhythms for Drumset: One of the keys to understanding Brazilian music is feel the pull towards a "triplet pulse" against the 2/4 feel of the samba.

Eliane Elias quoted by Peter Erskine in The Drum Perspective: "You Americans don't know how to swing samba; you all sound like TI-KA TI-KA TI-KA TI-KA." I smirked and said, "Well then, how should it sound?" She sang, "DO-goosh-ga, DO-goosh-ga, DO-goosh-ga, DO-goosh-ga."

Peter Erskine in Drum Concepts and Techniques: Remember to accent on 2.