Nothing to do with drumming?

Dave Elitch (L) with Rational Funk's Dave King

There was a fascinating exchange on Instagram, starting with the drummer Dave Elitch (formerly of the band Mars Volta, done a bunch of big gigs), who gave a rather provocative reaction to a quote from Stanley Spector— which we talked about here before, you can read here. 

Elitch comments on it: 

I had a student send me some quotes by Stanley Spector who was a drum teacher that’d I’d previously never heard of before. He sounded like an interesting character and I still can’t decide if he was nuts or not because it’s hard to find a lot of information about him other than secondhand blurbs here and there.

I did however, come across this quote circa 1980 from him in regard to his opinion about rudiments and I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve always thought that there has been far too much emphasis on rudiments as a topic of study and how they are fundamentally out dated and largely irrelevant in regards to playing the drum set in a contemporary music setting in the 20th, let alone 21st century. You want to play drum corps or pipe band? Go for it, just don’t fool yourself into thinking it has anything to do with playing the drums. It doesn’t.

It’s imperative that we make smart choices when it comes to what we choose to practice. So many times when I’m working with someone, they are working on things simply because they can’t do them and that’s not a good enough reason in my book.

Emphasis is mine all the way here. The drummer Dan Weiss, who is a hot item in New York, comments: 

Love you and I think what you say has some value. But I also think that the rudimental vernacular is one of the defining elements of drummers such as Cozy Cole, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones , Elvin Jones, Frankie Dunlop, Alan Dawson Tony Williams, etc. If I am teaching someone how to swing and play in this style I most certainly teach rudiments ( see my new course :) because it is part of the language. If I teach someone who is interested in something else I might not teach rudiments at all. Context is everything. There’s no one way, there’s no right way.

(I don't agree with him that rudiments are strictly for learning a vernacular style, though they are necessary for understanding those players.)  

Elitch then responds: 

This is more geared towards someone who wants to play contemporary drum set and contemporary music. If we’re talking about jazz and a certain approach to jazz that harkens back to when military drumming was a direct influence on it as an art form, then sure, absolutely. I’m just saying that someone thinking (or being taught to) play a triple ratamcue as if that will help them or have any relation to feel/pocket/time - that’s where it all falls apart for me

Digesting all of that, I have a number of comments. 

Looking at the key portion again:

 [Rudiments are] out dated and largely irrelevant in regards to playing the drum set in a contemporary music setting in the 20th, let alone 21st century. You want to play drum corps or pipe band? Go for it, just don’t fool yourself into thinking it has anything to do with playing the drums. It doesn’t.

I don't know what they have to do with if not playing the drums. I play them on a drum. And obviously the idea that rudiments were irrelevant to contemporary music of even the 20th century is ridiculous. As is the idea that 21st century drumming is some revolutionary new animal totally unconnected from what was done in the past. It is not. 

About the rudiments themselves, their packaging is old fashioned, but there aren't many of them you can just throw away, and still be a competent drummer. A lot of them are simply articulations, or ways of making a long tone, or they're standard short rolls, or forms of paradiddles— all of which are heavily exploited on the drum set, in this century even, even by unprecedentedly modern players like Dave Elitch. Some of them, if they are of no other use to someone, are good for conditioning the hands for playing layered rhythms. 

About his response to Weiss's list of players as harkening to military drummers, I have to wonder has he ever heard a Tony Williams record? I'm not sure he has. How deep into Elvin Jones can someone be to say that? We assume that everybody has studied everybody, but show me you actually know something about them, to be making a comment like that. [Since writing this I've learned he knows them very well, it's still a strange comment.] 

Some of the other comments there are fascinating. I wish there were more constructive conversation involving Mr. Elitch. Mainly there are a lot of people thanking him for freeing them from having to learn to play some elementary stuff on a snare drum. A few people helpfully point out that pursuing the rudiments in a monomaniacally monofocused way that no one actually advocates doing, will not make you groove. True that! 

It's weird to me. It's a strange form of communication that I'm not used to, from people involved in teaching. Ultimately, great teachers— e.g. Ed Soph, Ralph Humphrey, John Beck, John Riley, Peter Erskine— want to make people understand. They work hard to communicate openly. They write a lot and give everything up. They generally don't denigrate entire, widely used, bodies of drumming literature.

Postscript: Oh, and I'm totally with him on the ratamacues, screw those things.

[h/t to Thomas at DW for sharing the quote]

Stanley Spector news

I received an email yesterday, from a violinist named Xinou Wei, regarding the “Spector School of Drumming”— which sells itself as an official Stanley Spector enterprise, and apparently it is a complete fraud. 

Wei says:  

“I just wanted to let you a bit about the situation, as a close friend of Stanley's widow Astrid. All the materials were taken from Astrid, around 2012 by John O'Reilly. It was verbally agreed between the two of them that John would make copies of the material, for studying purposes with no details envisioned. The opening of the school, the selling of the materials, [asking “thousands” of dollars, see comments. -TB] the lie that "from the Spector estate" was nothing but without Astrid's consent/awareness. 

Without an exaggeration, John's indecency remains one of the heaviest regrets the 86-year-old Astrid has to carry in her heart.” 

To clarify, that is not the respected drummer and author John Riley. The John O'Reilly who is doing this is a prog drummer living in Pennsylvania.  

So, he took a lot of Spector's materials on the pretense that it was for his personal use, and immediately ran out and set up a whole business entity around it, marketing it as an “official” Spector enterprise, using Spector's name, and hyping it from a very hard-sell paranoid angle.

And I see there's an interesting legal notice on his YouTube page: 

THE STANLEY SPECTOR SCHOOL OF DRUMMING is a trademark. MAVERICK MUSICIAN LLC

  

Maverick Musician is O'Reilly's business. Unclear whether he's claiming to own the SSSOD trademark, or that it simply is trademarked by someone. It's quite sleazy to ambiguously suggest he owns the trademark, knowing that the Spector estate owns it, and even more sleazy to have trademarked it himself, stealing Spector's name after stealing his materials. 

Looking further, on the site itself, under terms of use:  

Publications, products, content or services referenced herein or on the Site are the exclusive trademarks or servicemarks of Maverick Musician LLC. 

I'm pretty sure you can't just trademark somebody else's name, business name, and copyrighted work just because you got your little rat claws on some photocopies of it. I'm no lawyer! 

It's pretty slimy stuff, and pathetic. He thought he got his hands on a hot property, but he can't be making much money off it. Drumming materials, especially niche materials, are not that lucrative. I don't believe the hypey / secretive marketing pitch he's using will attract many students. I assumed he would've folded the con after it initially flopped— there are a few YouTube videos posted about ten years ago, and nothing since; but then the site was updated in 2022, and the Facebook page gets updated about once a year, so I guess he's still doing it.   

Wei said Mrs. Spector is seeking legal representation— I doubt there's any financial damages to recover, but she would like him to stop what he's doing. If anyone has any recommendations for music/copyright attorneys, please contact me via the EMAIL TODD link in the sidebar, and I'll pass it along to them.  

On Stanley Spector

In the spirit of that recent quasi-paranoid rant, here's something I wrote some years ago and never posted. Any time I think I'm getting too dogmatic in my writing, I look up the following personality.

I was re-reading an extended rant from the 80s by Stanley Spector, a drum teacher based in New York from the 50s through the 80s. All I know about him I got from his wordy advertisements and occasional letters to the editor in in Modern Drummer magazine. They had approximately the same tone and content as we see here:  

Would you imagine in your wildest hallucination that a jazz or rock drummer of yesterday or today could derive artistic stimulation and creative preparation through a method of drumming accepted in 1869 as a Manual of Instruction by the United States Army? When you sit down at the practice pad every day and go through the 26 rudiments of drumming to build up your "technique" so that you may better express your "ideas" what you are actually practicing is the Strube Drum and Fife Instructor approved by John A. Rawlings, Secretary of War, War Department, Washington, D.C. 111 years ago. That was years before the invention of the bass drum pedal, hi-hat cymbals, wire brushes, and the discovery of the rim shot. It was years before Louis Armstrong first picked up a trumpet and discovered that when he blew in one end that jazz music came out the other end. When I see that the Strube Drum and Fife Instructor came off the press at a printing shop located at 284 Asylum Street in Hartford, Connecticut, I get the feeling that somebody is trying to tell us something. 

Is it reasonable to suppose that in the present age of space travel, atomic energy, and television that what was good for a Board of Officers meeting at Fort Columbus, New York Harbor in 1869 is still relevant for the jazz or rock drummer? Are we to believe that Major General G. L. Hartsuff, Brigadier General H. D. Walden, and 1st Lieutenant E. O. Gibson, the officers of that board knew where it was at with drumming for all-time when they decided that the Strube Drum and Fife Instructor had to replace Upton's Tactics because the latter was "deficient in preliminary instruction" for training drummers and fifers of the United States Army in the Army Camp Duty of 111 years ago?

It goes on and on like that. He had a real thing about rudiments. But he never getting around to explaining his own concepts— a recurring theme, we'll see.

Spector died in 1999 [correction: 1987], but there is a site selling recordings of lessons with him, and the people running it have really amped up the mysterious/hard sell/paranoid angle:

WARNING. This was and still is considered the most controversial course in drum set study ever created. It's for the most discerning and ambitious drummers worldwide. When it was first introduced almost Fifty [sic] years ago it divided the drumming community. Either you tried it and believed in Stanley's method or you were a doubter who went with the conformist crowd, never to consider it. 

Then they make you pay way more than you should to find out what it is. 

Keep in mind, we're talking about teaching people how to play bebop. It's music for grownups, but we're not re-splitting the atom here. In the old days you would get yourself some Chapin, some Cusatis, maybe Wilcoxon, and go to town. It's hard but not that hard.

And valuable drumming information isn't that valuable. Personalized expert guidance on what you should be doing right now is valuable— that's what private lessons are about— but a book of information and exercises is not valuable. The best things the best players and teachers in the world could think to write down sells for about $8-30 for permanent, total access— 40-100 pages of written materials. 

You have to give it up: put out a book, charge $0-30 for it, and let people see it and use it... or not use it, if it proves to be not good enough.

If you like being frustrated, listen to the free introductory lesson from Spector's site— it's a cassette recording of a lesson given in the 70s. 

The main point of that lesson is to figure out what the lesson is. Spector gives incomplete information, then spends a long time critiquing the student's thought process when he isn't able to figure it out. It's very strange. He's trying to have a student play a three beat pattern while counting in 4, a simple polymetric thing we do every day, which is normally learned by doing the thing, not by having to figure out what the thing is in the first place. Even if I wanted a student to do that, there's an effective way to communicate it— you stay focused on the problem, you don't wander off into meta-issues about how the student is thinking wrong. Who knows if it's a fair representation of his teaching. 

I imagine there was more to the guy than is apparent today. People who were in New York in the 60s-80s probably could tell us. Otherwise we don't know, because he didn't publish anything. He decided secrecy was his ticket to business success, and then died, and now we have nothing to gain from his career, except for some written rants, and some taped lessons locked away behind a paywall.

You have to write, you have to publish.