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. 

Things I learned at a Billy Mintz concert and clinic, and hanging at Revival Drums

Get it here.

I already knew this, but I was reminded of how great is the distance between things we can talk about and write about with drumming, and the actual music itself. The actual music is a living, instant process, and practicing it, and studying it, is just sort of nipping around the edges of understanding it. It's like science is to the natural world; it doesn't claim to be able to tell the whole truth about everything, just about things it can say kind of for sure based on its own method. So we talk about the things we can, given the limitations of our media— language, the Internet, the software, and an imperfect user, me— and we don't talk about the things we can't. And what we can't talk about is a lot of stuff. It's almost the whole real thing.

So I won't try to say a lot about the concert, except that there was significant music happening. The players' patience was striking. They were not always in a hurry to get to the next note, and certainly not to get to some big, obvious, emotional payoff; but the music was never boring, or especially long-winded. The tunes, I think all by Mintz, were beautiful— something Monk-like about them, which was reinforced by the playing of Roberta Piket, the pianist, without anyone being overly referential or obvious about it.

It made me realize that some other music which I had been immersing myself in for another post, is total f__ing jive bullshit. Suddenly it's about as admirable to me as someone delivering a truly impressive time-share sales pitch. I can't have the music be just about the players' talent, and how much stuff they know.

Other thoughts:

Billy had a funny cymbal set up with two 70s-vintage Paiste 2002 20" sizzle cymbals— maybe one was a ride and the other a “medium”, a crash-ride. I thought he picked them out of Revival's stock, but they were his. They're not light cymbals, and the sound is a little different than you normally hear in a jazz context, but they had a nice tonal thing going on between them.

Everyone needs to buy more CDs. Can we all agree to make it a habit? Go to a show > buy a CD. Here, go order a Billy record.

I finally found a budget (well, mid-range) cymbal that not only doesn't suck, but that is actually really good: Istanbul's Xist line. The quality of the sound is somewhere between an A and a K. Jose at Revival informs me that they're actually consistently good— unlike the Dream brand, which is in the same approximate price range, and is sometimes great, but mostly not.

Revival Drums is another reason why Portland rocks. Going there really makes me feel like I need to add about $1500 per annum to my gear budget. Highlights: the cymbals below, a really perfect early-80s Yamaha Recording Custom set for $1800, a yellow-sparkle Rogers double-bass set from the 60s, a rare Yamaha floor tom with a tensioning pedal for doing talking drum-like effects. Really surprised no one has snapped that up...

Another reason Portland rocks is the company Cymbal & Gong— Revival was carrying several of their— or his, I think the company is one guy— hand-hammered, K-type cymbals. I believe the cymbals are manufactured in Turkey, and C&G hand selects the ones that get their brand, and patinas them. They also have seconds that don't get patina-ed, and are cheaper. It sounds almost like a miniature version of the old Gretsch warehouse in New York here. Jose says Matt Chamberlain, the guy from Tortoise, and a bunch of other big rock people are buying these. I smell a CSD! feature here...

Anyone in Portland who missed the show can see John Gross and Mintz play a duo concert at Revival on Wednesday night, the 19th.

More on Pinstripes

The distressed font
indicates rockingness to me.

Ever since reading T. Bruce Wittet's piece about the drumming equivalent of the fusion mullet, the Remo Pinstripe, I've been sort of half-determined to try to them out for the first time since the late 80's, this time with a jazz tuning. I had the opportunity the other day on a visit to Portland's wonderful used/vintage drum shop, Revival Drums with my friend (and great drummer) Steve Pancerev, where I snagged a used set they had languishing in the head dump in the back room.

First impression: I got them home and put them on my drums, tuned them up high, and they actually sound OK. The last two-ply head I've used are Remo Emperors, which always tended to sound a little tubby, with a chunky attack; the Pinstripes have a glued-together outer ~1.5", which minimizes that quality somewhat. The Pinstripes have a fuller, bassier tone than the coated G1 Evans I was using previously, and while I was expecting to sacrifice response and some nuance, they feel surprisingly good with a high tuning. Better than you'd expect. I haven't let an uncoated/untextured head near my drums in over 20 years, so that clear-head tonality is something of a novelty- I can't say I'm wild about it. Something trailer-park about it...

Days later: They're not wearing well. What at first seemed full and round is starting to feel decidedly boomy with further playing. Definition suffers substantially on anything denser than 8th notes. The attack is flabby-sounding compared to the coated Ambassadors, Remo Renaissance, or Evans G1s I normally use. The instrument feels less responsive.

Conclusion: The Pinstripe is not as dead and buried as you might have thought, and worth trying. They're usable in a pinch, at the very least. Someone seeking a rounder tone than you get with the standard coated single ply head may dig these a lot. Overall they don't work for me with a jazz tuning.