drumming
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Listening And Remembering Qualities Apparent: Tony Williams On “Cantaloupe Island”
For three or four years when I was a teenager I bicycled on weekends to second hand record stores, searching for jazz albums I had read about or listened to on late night FM radio. Mostly I was interested in the drummers on these albums—Tony Williams, Max Roach, Jack DeJohnnette, Roy Haynes, Baby Dodds, Papa Continue reading
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Air Drumming
“When you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern recognition system.” – autotranslucence.wordpress.com 1983. I’m drumming along to music. The headphones are attached to a small boombox playing the latest Rush Continue reading
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How Drummers And Percussionists Use Rhythm To Engage Time
Drummers and percussionists use rhythm to engage musical time in a variety of ways. Here are some of the techniques we use: Marking time through articulating meter. (One-two-three-four-five-One-two-three-four-five…) Dividing time through subdivision of the meter’s main beats. (One-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-five-and…) Decorating or accentuating time through accents and emphases. (One-two-three, Two-Two-Three…). Driving forward time (or somewhat worse: pushing). Continue reading
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Notes On Russell Hartenberger’s “Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich”
I first heard Steve Reich’s music in the early 1990s when I was studying music at the University of Toronto. At a used record store I bought an LP of his Six Marimbas and Sextet, and a CD of his early tape pieces, Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. The music sounded otherworldly—as if Continue reading
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On The Ergonomics Of Music: Reflections On Flow In Steve Reich’s “Drumming”
“But how the paths sounded to me was deeply linked to how I was making them. There wasn’t one me listening, and another one playing along paths. I listened-in-order-to-make-my-way.” -David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand (MIT Press 2001, p. 40) Every once in a while warming up before a show I noodle around by playing Continue reading
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On The Paths Of Spirit Music: Ken Hyder’s “How To Know”
“It’s not the music which creates the magic, it’s the magic sitting over, under and all through the music.” – Ken Hyder Ken Hyder is a Scottish percussionist and shaman. His brief but sparkling e-book, How To Know, is a story about his journey through percussion, shamanism in Tuva, and what he calls Spirit Music. Continue reading
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From The Archives: Bill Bruford’s “Bruford And The Beat”
“Sometimes faults can be turned to good advantage. A musician is the total not only of his good things but his faults too. And when you can understand your faults and live with them and turn them to creative use, that can be of interest.” – Bill Bruford The two things that made the drummer Bill Continue reading
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From Faucet-Playing To Prepared Drumsets: On The Musicking Of Glenn Kotche
I recently watched an entertaining commercial for, of all things, Delta Faucet, that features percussionist Glenn Kotche playing faucets in a musical way. As he turns on the taps one by one, water streams out of them and strikes inverted pots, pans, and colanders to produce sustained pitches. With the help of a few overdubs, Continue reading
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