Very occasional quote of the day: artificial excitement

“I think there's a tendency to overplay with most young drummers. Rushing is common in trying to force things to swing by playing on top a little bit. If things weren't swinging by forcing it a little bit, it might seem that by playing a little bit on top, it at least makes it seem more exciting. But, it also makes it feel a little more uncomfortable. I think that might be a common failing of younger drummers. To maybe artificially create excitement.”

Bassist Jack Six, , Modern Drummer, July 1981, piece by Scott K. Fish

Very occasional quote of the day: too loud

Another choice item from a 1981 column in Modern Drummer, in which Scott K. Fish talks to a lot of great bass players, about drummers:  

“Faults I hear in drummers? Mainly that they play too loud. They're too insensitive. A drummer can lead whatever band he's in. He can force himself to be the leader, just by the nature of the instrument. He can play the loudest, he can cover everybody up and he can make everybody go in the direction that he wants to make the music go. But, he should be sensitive enough to realize that if he's not the leader of the band, then he is just another member of the band. That everybody else's role in the band is just as important as his is. 

Drummers have said to me 'I can't hear you. I can't hear what you're doing.' And a lot of times I do that on purpose because I want them to stop and listen. I'm saying musically what I could be verbally saying: 'I can't hear the piano player or the horn player because you're playing so loud. You can't hear me because you're playing too loud, not because I'm playing too soft.'

I think that the greatest drummers had the ability to really burn with intensity while still playing soft. I don't say that a drummer shouldn't play loud. I remember listening to Elvin Jones with John Coltrane! To an extent it's volume but it's also space. A lot of drummers are just so busy that they don't leave spaces for other instruments.” 

 
- Carol Kaye

Very occasional quote of the day: futuristic

“A lot of drummers try to be futuristic and more modern, but they lose the groove and find themselves nebulous instead of in contact with what it really is. 

So all of the interesting things that are happening, all of the intricate things that are happening in their percussive playing or music making, don't have the same significance because they lose the groove.”

- Reggie Workman, Modern Drummer, July 1981, piece by Scott K. Fish

Max on the bass drum

An exchange on the evolution of the bass drum in jazz, from Max Roach, circa 1981, from his Modern Drummer interview with Scott K. Fish.

SF: Back in the '50s and '60s jazz drummers were primarily using the smaller size drums: 18" bass, 12" mounted tom and 14" floor tom. I've heard that one of the main reasons drummers used that size drum was because they were easier to transport than larger drums.

MR: Exactly. It made it easier to get from town to town. Pack up your gear, put it in your car, and off you go. That was one of the main reasons I think.

Plus, the bass drum had begun to become less and less an integral part of the whole musical set-up. It's different now. The bass drum, at that time, would stamp out what was happening with the acoustic bass. Even the pianists would leave that part. They would voice their chords so the bottom of the piano would be in thirds and sevenths instead of tonics and fifths. They left that part for the acoustic bass. So, your bass drum would only be used for accents and supports.

So the small drum was great, plus, you didn't have all the electronics around you, so you didn't need that power there. There were many reasons for it. But, today you do need that power with the electronic scene.

 
The italics are mine, and it's maybe a revealing part of the comment. Max typically played the bass drum in the way we now call feathering, but he doesn't bring it up as a role of the bass drum in modern jazz. It's important to note that at the time of the interview, larger bass drums were generally in favor— usually 20-22". And at that time bebop was not the only thing happening in jazz— many big players of the 60s had moved in a more fusion direction. 

But imagine Mel Lewis addressing this topic— well, we don't have to. He's rather strident on it. Art Blakey said something similar in his '80s MD interview: 

Like playing the bass drum: A lot of drummers today have no bottom. They talk about punctuating, but they don't keep that feeling in there, and that bass drum is the basis of the whole thing. And if you let that go it sounds like s*t to me. 

I don't know what Max would say if he was asked specifically about it— he absolutely might agree with Lewis and Blakey. Maybe somebody reading has talked to him or studied with him, or been to a clinic. But feathering the bass drum in a bop setting has become such a dogmatic thing, especially with jazz hobbyists on the internet, and I thought it was an interesting omission.

I originally wrote about this in 2012, and my thinking has changed a little bit— maybe it's time to revisit that. 

Max wants you to turn off YouTube

“We used to listen to records and take off the record what the person was doing. You didn't see the person. You'd just hear it. We'd figure out what was happening with our ears. Then we'd duplicate the sound.” 

Another snippet from Scott K. Fish's interview with Max Roach. This is how it's done, using your ears. 

It's also interesting that Max, who moved to New York when he was very young, and was around to see all of the biggest developments in drumming happening in person— the ones he didn't make happen on his own— is talking about learning about drumming from records. Most of the story of the next generation of drumming is of other people listening to Max Roach records and doing what he's talking about. 

Happy holidays

Merrry Christmas and whatnot everyone, here's a playlist with all 5 1/2 hours of Scott K. Fish's 1984 interview with one of my favorite drummers, Frankie Dunlop. Put this on while your turkey cooks, or whatever.

Do visit Fish's site. He was one of the main guys at Modern Drummer magazine for many years, and I don't know if people realize, but MD basically created the modern history of drumming by talking to players like Dunlop. Nobody else was interviewing them, and if they did, they weren't talking about drumming. And most of them died before the current explosion of media. But for some guys and a low budget magazine, the literature of drumming as we know it would be much thinner, or non-existent. 

Very occasional quote of the day: Motian on time

“I believe that 'time' is always there. I don't mean a particular pulse, but the time itself. It's all there somehow like a huge sign that's up there and it says time. It's there and you can play all around it.”

— Paul Motian, Modern Drummer interview by Scott K. Fish


This reminded me of one of the first things I shared on the blog, from Chuck Braman's invaluable 1996 interview with Motian:

“There's a specific tempo that's stated in the very beginning, and that's already there. I don't have to force it on to everybody else and myself included. I don't have to enforce it. It's happening already. I don't have to do shit. I could have just stayed there and not played a fuckin' note. They're playing along, they're playing that speed, you know? And so, what I'm doing is trying to add some kind of music to that.”

FRANKIE DUNLOP SPEAKS

This is incredible: AUDIO from Scott K. Fish's interview with Frankie Dunlop. A long, hilarious story— and ultimately hair-raising, when you get to the part with Tony Williams et al in the audience— about Monk making him solo on a slow tune:





I already put up some excerpts of Dunlop talking about playing with Monk, from that same interview. It's important to remember that this only exists because Fish, and a few guys like him, at Modern Drummer magazine, took an interest, sought these guys out, and talked to them about their experiences playing. I don't think there's a single other interview with Dunlop where he actually talks about playing the drums. Same goes for a whole lot of other great drummers who are now dead.

Here's another one— on rehearsing with Monk, or the lack thereof. What Monk said to Ben Riley about rehearsing was pretty great: “What do you want to do, learn how to cheat?”

Very occasional quote of the day: Max Roach - how you build a solo

Max Roach by Jean-Michel Basquiat

“What makes a piece an art piece is design. Design.

If you play any instrument, if you don’t create design…. If the artist doesn’t know how to utilize space and sound, and the dynamics of soft and loud — all the little things — and repitition and sequential dealing with all the rules that make up what we know as an art piece — and then some more –then it’s not [an art] piece anyway. Whether you’re playing an instrument of determinate or indeterminate pitch.

I hear some people who run up-and-down the piano and it’s not musical. All I can say is, “Well, he’s got good technique.” But I never say he’s playing music, or [that] he’s creating some design.

So when I build a solo it’s design within the structure of something, sometime. Basically it’s design. Like creating a poem, a painting, or anything else. It’s how you use [design] to set up certain things.

Space is important and dynamics are important. And things like sequences or sequential things are important. And how you relate to certain timbres on the [drum]set itself is important.

And that’s how you build a solo.”

- Max Roach, interview by Scott K. Fish

There's more— hit the link, go read the whole thing. Be visiting Fish's blog all the time— it's full of great stuff.

Very occasional quote of the day: the drummer's job

“Your job is to make everyone in that band feel like playing. It’s a very idealistic way of looking at it, but you have got to. Because that’s your outlet.”
— Ed Soph, interview with Scott K. Fish

Daily best music in the world: Roy Haynes Hip Ensemble

This is a nearly forgotten early fusion project by Roy Haynes: Roy Haynes Hip Ensemble. I read about the group in the Jack Dejohnette/Charlie Perry book, and was lucky enough to find a banged up used copy of the album at House Of Records in Eugene when I was in school.

Scott K. Fish says Roy was playing Ludwig Vistalites at this point. He's playing a flat ride, too, which may or may not be the famous cymbal from Chick Corea's Now He Sings, Now He Sobs— I thought he gave that cymbal to Chick after the recording. There's an ongoing conversation about that here.




A couple of more tracks from this album after the break.

New book, and Dunlop and Krupa

While I'm feverishly working on a new rock-and-funk book for the masses (or maybe a rock volume and a funk volume, if the thing grows out of control), visit Scott K. Fish's blog, where there a bit about Gene Krupa lining up some drums for Frankie Dunlop early in his career. And a whole lot of other great stuff from Fish's no doubt formidable archives— he was an editor at Modern Drummer in the early days, and met and wrote about a whole bunch of people we only dream about getting to talk to today.

The book, anyway, will be a complete system for rock/funk/pan-backbeat-genre drumming, using Ted Reed's Syncopation. The reason jazz drummers can improvise dense-sounding stuff so effortlessly is not because they/we are super-geniuses, it's because we have a good system for learning to play; in this book we'll adapt that system to the needs of backbeat-oriented drumming.

By the way, the Book of Intros, which I promised you late last year, has been basically finished for several months— I delayed putting it out to release the wonderful 2014 Book of the Blog, and now, before I actually release it, I need to open it up again and make sure I didn't embarrass myself by writing something stupid— always an urgent concern. We should be seeing the release of one or the other of these books within 6 weeks.

Very occasional quote of the day: reasons

“Where did the ride cymbal pattern come from? Why does ding-dinga-ding exist? Where did that come from? Why is the hi-hat played on two and four, and not on one and three? Why was the bass drum played on four beats? Why was it played on one and three? And why is it not played either of those ways anymore?

There are reasons for all that. Why did guys start playing drums with single heads? Knowing the reasons for all that is how you find direction in your own playing.”

—Ed Soph, interviewed by Scott K. Fish


Do make Fish's blog a regular stop, if you're not already. He made a major contribution to the literature of drumming as editor of Modern Drummer in the late 70s-early 80s. For a lot of famous players who are now dead, the only place in print where they seriously talk about playing the drums is in that magazine. 

Scott K. Fish blogs

Something new for you to read while I'm out of town for a few days catching the opening of Family Album, the new rock musical featuring my girlfriend: former Modern Drummer contributer and managing editor Scott K. Fish is now blogging about drumming, with a lot of anecdotes from the golden age of that magazine, when there were a lot more of the old drumming legends around, and being covered by MD. Definitely pay him a visit and check back in frequently.  

Ed Blackwell in Africa

Since we're doing a lot with Ed Blackwell lately, here's a little snippet from his November, 1981 Modern Drummer interview by Scott K. Fish, in which he discusses his 1967 and 1968 tours of Africa, and the influence they had on his playing. It's interesting that he felt he wasn't able to retain the specifics of the music he heard, and had to rely on his impressions to bring it into his playing.

Not that he didn't already do something similar; he was exposed to African-derived rhythm and drumming for many years in New Orleans, and it was a mature part of his playing before he ever went to Africa, as David Schmalenberger reminds us in his massive research project about him. But even with that prior exposure, what he heard in Africa clearly made a big impression:

SF: I've read that you felt your trip to Africa freed up your drumming.

EB: It did. I learned that the African drummers play a rhythm in such a way that it's continuous. Individually they were very simple rhythms that would become complex when they would merge. But if you had the chance to walk around the group while they were playing, you could see each cat playing a different rhythm. It was a very simple rhythm that they played, but when you hear the overall thing . . . man! It reminded me so much of the way the guys used to play in New Orleans. In fact, by going to Africa I was able to really dig how much the African culture was maintained in New Orleans as far as their funeral parades. In Africa, when they have funerals, everybody dresses up real colorful and after they're through with everything they have dancing and a big celebration! That was the same thing in New Orleans. They'd march to the graveyard with the body and they'd put the body down. Then they'd come back dancing! Africans, I guess, had the concept that death brings on another life, so it was not anything to be sad about. It's just that the soul is gone to another life. That's the same concept they have in New Orleans. I didn't realize that until I went to Africa and I was able to reflect on the way the funerals were in New Orleans. We had a chance to see a couple of funerals in different places in Africa. The people were just dancing and everything. It wasn't this weeping, wailing and crying. It was happiness. You couldn't tell the relatives of the dead person from anyone else. Everybody was happy.

SF: Did you get a chance to talk with many African drummers?

EB: We had a chance to play with an African troupe from the Cameroons. It was a dance troupe and they were travelling with only one log drummer. We did a concert with them. I had a chance to play with the guy and talk to him. There were two women and two guys dancing, and they were fantastic. They really had the whole show with just that drummer!

SF: Did you start to incorporate African rhythms into your drumming?

EB: Of course. But there's only so much you can retain. I was able to tape some of the stuff on my tape recorder until I ran out of batteries. It was difficult finding batteries around Africa! Some of the things I taped I was able to retain, but after traveling to so many different places, you hear something new and it would just wipe out what you'd just heard. I was exposed to so much stuff that I was able to retain very little . I was able to retain the overall effect of the African drummers as far as how the rhythms would affect an individual, and how to try to relate my own rhythm to that way of playing. But that was all I was able to retain.

Continued after the break, with some audio: