Too perfect

Perfect and boring

For a long time I thought robotic perfection was basically impossible to achieve for people not practicing massive hours... so you may as well just try your best to achieve it. Lately, as people have more practice time on their hands (no gigs hahahaha -tb), I'm seeing more cases of people actually getting there, and sounding good in a bad way... for my taste. 

The major resulting defects(?) are with some high level players, with whom everything played sounds ironed out, sanded off, and tensionless. I won't name any names, but there are examples of that with “technique” guys, with “musical” guys, and with lifelong practicer/improvers— I'm talking about very accomplished players, so that's a pretty egregious way of characterizing them— but that's kind of how they're known in internet drummer land. More concerning for more of us are the ordinary players fixated on the metronome to the point of sounding robotic. 

And it sucks— we spend our whole lives trying to master this instrument, and then you get there, and somebody says you're too good at it. I'm not criticizing— people have to do what they do. I'm just interested to the extent that it affects my playing, and the music I like. I'm talking about drumming as an art form here.

So, some thoughts on keeping an edge while pursuing mastery: 

Attitude
Start from a position that your job as a drummer is to create emotional energy, and kick a little bit of ass. I had to work backwards from that— I started out always trying to kick ass, and had to learn how to sometimes just play stuff. 

Play right in the moment— don't know what you're going to play until you're playing it. That's not a comfortable place to live, for a lot of people, and it is contrary to what they learn about parts, preparation, correctness.  

I want there to be at least a feeling that there is the possibility of something going wrong. Like, oh my goodness, is he playing too loud? What is he doing? Is he screwing up right now? Can he even play? Those can be open questions at some point in a performance— see Billy Mintz, Paul Motian. The saxophonist John Gross playing a Strayhorn ballad. That creates some tension, which is resolved in the course of the remainder of the performance. Amazing guy comes in and is unambiguously amazing and wins everything is not a very interesting story arc. 

I mean, you see Joe Henderson play and there's never a question of his ability, but he didn't sound worked out and ironed out. He's not being perfectly mellifluous and hanging out a sign saying MUSICALITY HAPPENING NOW. Billy Higgins's humility as a player was so great, you underestimated how great he was. It took you awhile to figure out that you were hearing something great.

Dynamics
Use them dramatically. Roy Haynes and Brian Blade are two drummers who do that extremely well— you can't miss that lesson listening to them.  

Timbre
Stop tuning your drums so pretty. There is such a thing as sounding too good. It's like a Master Series cymbal from Bosphorus; they are fantastically refined instruments, to the point of not sounding like anything. They're beautiful vapor. Any number of jazz drummers play these lovely round, warm tom toms and delightfully woody, tonal 18" bass drums, and it's a sonic snoozefest. Change it up, get some fiberglass drums, put some Black Dots on them, something. 

You also have to play the things in a way that gets an energetic sound— don't just go for optimal timbre, lay into them at times, vary the sound.  

Rhythm
Thinking in terms of a grid is good for baseline competency, but I believe not great for your general musicianship. Think in terms of interlocking rhythms instead— the rhythm (as you might read it in a book like Syncopation), and its opposite. This is another big topic, for a future post.  

Practice with a slow click— whole notes or double whole notes, at whatever actual tempo you're practicing. I believe this develops good musical time, without being painfully exact about it.

Have a deep concept of rhythm, that is grounded in real music. See African drumming, in which rhythm is a matrix, with a deep field of polyrhythmic possibilities coexisting simultaneously. 

Listening
Put on some McCoy Tyner, or some African drumming, and pursue that energy your whole life.  

Ultimately, we're drummers, we're not concert pianists. We're not Apollo articulating principles of geometry and perfection of form, drums are a communication from a hidden wild place. This is a dance hall instrument, an instrument of war— literally and metaphorically— and a religious instrument, that's what I want to do.   

Ornamentation overdose

This has been going on a long time.

Another entry in the ongoing real-world musical saga I call “Music didn't suddenly get good when a lot of people learned how to play fast.”

Let's reminisce about another point in history when people would slather creative works— visual, architectural, or musical... clothes, hairstyles, digestive tract— with as much ornamental decoration as possible, rendering the object's structure into a formless mass of exquisitely elaborate froth.

During the Rococo period in 18th c. France, the superprivileged degenerates patronizing the arts were demanding infinitely increasing visual and aural luxury. Direct statement of a creative idea was thought to be howlingly gauche, and art self-vaporized into a swirling sweet-smelling cess-cloud of ornament pirhouetting endlessly around ornament off into the stratosphere, until some people had enough and everyone was executed.

This phenomenon was exemplified in the hideous harpsichord music of the period:

I'll save us some time, I've got actual footage of a 18th c. harpsichordist trying to play a quarter note:

We had a similar thing happening about 20 years ago with some R&B-derived singers, who would dance around for 20 minutes on one syllable before getting to the next actual note in the song. I'd like to present a good example of a drummer committing this type of offense, but that would require me looking around and finding it, which I'm not going to do. You've heard them, you know they're out there. Perhaps drummers don't embellish so much as atomize, turning functionally single notes into long tones, or long tone clusters. 

We all do it at times. It's a big part of Metal drumming. Certainly the whole point of rudimental snare drumming is to embellish a simple march beat. 

So maybe it's not something to totally avoid in our creative playing, so much as to understand what the real center of our musical content is. Which is rhythm and melody*, and some other things that happen strictly in performance, like groove expression. And to understand when we're getting into a jive area that is going to get us all guillotined. 

* - OK, more than that— it's a topic for another day.

Very occasional quote of the day: Ndugu on musicality

“I think a drummer's success and notability are based on sensitivity as a musician—not as a drummer. I don't even approach myself as a drummer. I'm an orchestrator. The drums are just the instrument I use to orchestrate—paint the picture.

It is very important that you don't lull the people to sleep with one volume or one style. I think the great drummers are the ones who can give you peaks and valleys in their performance. That's very important. Dynamically we're playing an instrument that naturally can be played loud and hard, but the beauty of the instrument is when it's played soft. Just as you can get your point across loud, you can get it across more so soft because you can draw more attention, number one. Number two, dynamics and accentuations are part of music, period. For drummers to think that they can't do that means that they're not total musicians.

It's very important for drummers to vary not only their speed concept, but their volume concept, because those things are synonymous. If you play everything fast— your fill-ins, your beats, a lot of intricate things— you don't give the people time to breathe. If you play everything loud you don't give their ears rest from the volume, so you slowly numb people to what you're doing, which is unfair. So I think that's half of being a drummer. We're not at a point where anybody's playing anything so drastically different. It's just that the style they're using is different. That's all.”

—Ndugu Leon Chancler, Modern Drummer interview, November, 1983

Barry Altschul on playing melodically

This is an excerpt from a pretty amazing 1981 Modern Drummer article by Barry Altschul, in which he discusses the drummer's relation to tunes, form, and melody, and playing melodically: 

It is [...] the drummer's responsibility to know where the chord changes fall in the tune, and the song form. Knowing the names of the chords isn't necessary, but you should know where the chords change, and when a chorus is over.

Drums are a musical instrument and melody can be implied. Many drummers seem to get lost within a tune. If this happens to you, you should be able to find yourself by listening to the bass player. But, in order to know where he is, you must be familiar with the tune yourself.

Short of studying a melodic instrument, there are ways to achieve this familiarity. First, you must listen! Listen to tunes, sing them, learn the chord changes. Listen to saxophone, piano, and trumpet players. Learn to improvise around the melody of the tune by singing or whistling. Hear the chord changes while you're improvising.

A good method for accomplishing this, and one that will also help your conception and technique, is to learn a saxophone solo. Take a Lester Young solo, for example. Sing the solo away from the record. (The actual notes are not as important for the drummer as is the contour and the rhythms of the solo.) Tap the solo out on the snare drum. Then play it as if you are accompanying a band, with your right hand playing steady time, two and four on the hi-hat, and the solo between your left hand and bass drum! Interpret the sax solo as if it were a drum solo. You'll soon start to develop a melodic approach. You'll also become familiar with tunes and forms, and become aware of what the melodic instrumentalists are actually doing.

To imply melody, sit down at the drum set and make one sound. Then make another sound. Don't be afraid to be unconventional in your approach to making that sound or in the sound itself. Any sound imaginable can be used if it's used in a musical way. Do this again and again until you have explored all the sounds your set will give you. Concentrate on doing the same thing on each part of your set. A cymbal, then your snare drum, another cymbal, your bass drum. Even your stands and whatever else you use! If you want more sounds, use percussion instruments.

After you've found your sounds, utilize them when you are playing the saxophone solo we talked about earlier. Play the contour of the sax solo with your sounds to imply the melody. The only “notes” a drummer has are the high, low and middle pitched sounds. These must be related to in a melodic way with a drummer's own conception. Once this is achieved, melody can be implied. Melodies are also rhythmic, so to play in a melodic way, think that way!

Interpretation and playing expressively

I hate long instructional videos, except when I don't. Usually they go long because they underestimate their viewers' knowledge, and get caught up in explaining WHAT IS A DRUM STICK and a lot of other elementary background stuff. So they waste a lot of your time getting to their actual message, which itself usually ends up being less than Earth-shattering, and you hate yourself (and them) for having wasted 15 minutes watching it. Very rarely they will go long because they contain a lot of information, and, if they are telling you something you already know, it's something you actually need to hear spoken again and again.

In adherence to the stupidly dramatic style where you then say “this is such a video”, I will say this is such a video. The latter kind— the good kind. Tony Cirone is a well-known percussionist, educator, and author internationally, but he's really the center of the percussive universe here in the northwest quadrant of the US. My college professor Charles Dowd studied with him, and many of my peers, and most of my teachers, including drum corps instructors, studied with Dowd, or Cirone himself, or both. One of the big unifying things with all those people is that they've ingrained the idea of percussion as an expressive family of musical instruments. They do not have the deep meatheadedness that is—sorry to say— a feature of much of the drumming world.

This video gives you a little sample of why that is. It's directed at classical percussion students, but the spirit of it can, and should, be applied to every area of drumming: