A drumming blog written by Todd Bishop.
Most of the examples don't have much in them for actual drummers, but he's very businesslike about it. It's funny to bring in one of the top drummers on the planet to point out, OK, there's no bass drum there, here's how you hold the sticks.
This is all just an excuse to share that screen shot, which I thought was hilarious. It is funny when they get to the movie Whiplash.
Enjoy:
“Last night some of the guys in the band were talking about that movie, Whiplash. After watching this cloddish potboiler about an aspiring drummer's experience in jazz school, the jazz players I know either go berserk with indignation and/or howl with derisive laughter. Many jazzers, including pianist Ethan Iverson and Richard Brody of the New Yorker, have written about this ignorant and mendacious film, so I won't belabor the point.
Suffice to say that Whiplash has nothing to do with actual jazz unless you consider it to be a species of martial arts, as Buddy Rich often did. It makes Paris Blues with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier look like a golden edifice of verisimilitude. I'm not saying Whiplash shouldn't be seen in theaters, though. It should, at midnight, along with Plan 9 from Outer Space and, especially, Glen or Glenda.”
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| DEP'T OF CORRECTIONS: I thought he was going to say “Come on, swing, you mother— SWIIIIIING! YEAH! YEAAAH!”, but in the actual movie he said the only stupider cliché possible: “Faster! FASTER!” |
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| Waitaminit, 3&2&? What the hell are you writing
in a school chart, and why are you doing it in ink?
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A drumming performance that sounds like the soundtrack to a “shreds” video.
A drumming performance that sounds like a bad Sunny Murray clone. [With apologies to Sunny.]
A reference to “double-time swing.”
Someone playing “double-time swing” like it's a polka.
A piece of drum equipment wrongly set up.
A jazz student who looks like a JC Penney catalog underwear model.
Gratuitous visual cue signifying paranoia, fear, alienation.
An elite student musician with obviously terrible technique.
An unimaginative, unfunny, homophobic/sexist slur.
A strategic visual edit or camerawork to avoid showing that the star is definitely not playing the drumming on the soundtrack.
Blood. Someone putting on a Band-aid.
A 22" bass drum.
A verbal or visual reference to a jazz drummer who is not Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Jack Dejohnette, or Philly Joe Jones.
An obviously jive count-off— meaning every single count-off in the movie.
Someone turning pages of someone else's music, or a reference to such.
JK Simmons making an absurdly dramatic entrance.
JK Simmons demanding something random from a student.
Abuse of an instrument.
An injury to a part of the hand that never touches the drumstick.
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| Jazz educators respond to the makers of Whiplash, who are represented by the hapless trombonist. |
Fifteen minutes in, I was ready to leave.
I decided to stay and watch the whole movie, and not just because my wife needed a ride home.
"Whiplash" is, to begin with, so technically inaccurate that you wonder whether the director bothered to consult with anyone about basic things like:
What's it really like at a music school?How does jazz music work?How does one set up a set of drums?and so forth......
[...] I'm not saying that a movie about music school has to be 100 percent accurate. I'm saying that this movie is SO inaccurate that it puts in the comically bad category for me- the same category as gems like, "Plan 9 from Outer Space," "Ishtar," "From Justin To Kelly," and so forth.
I could go on and on. I believe that these things will be obvious to most musicians who see the movie. What's telling is that non-musicians are not bothered in the slightest by these issues. When you consider how medical shows or legal shows or even historical movies seems to spend a lot of effort on painstaking accuracy, why would a jazz education movie clearly not even be bothered. If you saw a medical show where the doctor referred to the heart as part of the skeletal system, or ask the nurse to hand him a scalpel and she handed him a stethoscope, you'd be rolling in the aisle!
I was excited to see Whiplash, of course, because it's about drumming, but I had several issues with it. That approach to teaching [physically and verbally abusive, dictatorial] is something I really don't care for. I think it's more damaging than helpful. It's [fine] to be inspiring and tough, but it's gotta be done with love, a different kind of attitude.
[...]music's not a competition.
As far as [Miles Teller's character, Andrew Nieman's] technique and the portrayal of him working so hard that he's bleeding, that's completely unrealistic. [...] You can't get speed without relaxing. You can't get speed and control with your hands like that, getting bloody. If you're getting blisters, you're doing something wrong. It's not to say you're not going to get them when you're learning. But you're holding them too tight if you're doing that.
[...]let's say you have [a great band director;] he's gotta be strict and tough to get a great performance like that [... b]ut all those kids loved him, you know? They're not in fear. Music is supposed to be joyous, but of course you have to work at it. And I know it's the same with classical piano competitions for kids and violins. I think that that sort of approach is probably more abusive with piano and young kids going to those competitions and going for those placements with certain schools. It's very competitive. Jazz is a personal journey, too. You've gotta love that music and work really hard. That kind of teacher is a detriment to any path of improving in a way that brings joy and life to the music.
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| If you don't know your subject well enough to convey the real emotion of it, there's always this. |
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.
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.
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.
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| The Keanu firing his gun up in the air and going AHHH scene of the movie. |
The movie’s very idea of jazz is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature.
In “Whiplash,” the young musicians don’t play much music. Andrew isn’t in a band or a combo, doesn’t get together with his fellow-students and jam—not in a park, not in a subway station, not in a café, not even in a basement. He doesn’t study music theory, not alone and not [...] with his peers. There’s no obsessive comparing of recordings and styles, no sense of a wide-ranging appreciation of jazz history—no Elvin Jones, no Tony Williams, no Max Roach, no Ed Blackwell. In short, the musician’s life is about pure competitive ambition—the concert band and the exposure it provides—and nothing else. The movie has no music in its soul...
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| Like, I'm pretty that firing his gun up in the air to express raw emotion is one thing a highly- trained FBI agent would never do. It's pretty much the last thing he would ever do with his weapon. |
The core of the movie is the emotional and physical brutality that Fletcher metes out to Andrew, in the interest (he claims) of driving him out of self-satisfaction and into hard work. Fletcher levels an ethnic slur at Andrew, who’s Jewish; he insults his father, smacks him in the face repeatedly to teach him rhythm, hazes him with petty rules that are meant to teach military-style obedience rather than musical intelligence. [...]
To justify his methods, [the abusive professor] Fletcher tells [our young egomaniac drummer] Andrew that the worst thing you can tell a young artist is “Good job,” because self-satisfaction and complacency are the enemies of artistic progress. It’s the moment where [the director] Chazelle gives the diabolical character his due, and it’s utter, despicable nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with “Good job,” because a real artist won’t be gulled or lulled into self-satisfaction by it: real artists are hard on themselves, curious to learn what they don’t know and to push themselves ahead.
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| Probable dialogue: “Come on, swing, you mother— SWIIIIIING! YEAH! YEAAAH!” |
This is a muscular and accomplished work of kinetic cinema built around two tremendous acting performances, and it’s really about teaching and obsession and the complicated question of how to nurture excellence and where the nebulous boundary lies between mentorship and abuse.
Chazelle [the director] clearly understands the intensely competitive world of music schools in general and jazz education in particular,
but “Whiplash” is about jazz in almost exactly the same way that “Black Swan” is about ballet. Miles Teller (of “21 & Over” and “The Spectacular Now”) really does play the drums, and that’s where his character, a socially awkward 19-year-old conservatory student named Andrew, is most at home. (I’m pretty sure a professional drummer is used for the most difficult passages, but Teller’s pretty good.)
The musical performances in the film are intensely compelling, and drive the drama forward to a large extent, just as the big game drives a football movie or opening night drives a backstage musical. Chazelle also captures the fact that music is always a physical endeavor, a fact exaggerated by the demands of the drum kit; Andrew literally sheds blood, sweat and tears in his pursuit of greatness.
