Cruising and Being

Wednesday the MSC Divina shall shove from the Miami shore packed to capacity with music lovers, myself included, eager for vitamin D and roughly 20 daily hours of music. I’ll also be one of the musicians officially on board to perform, first with Zach Deputy and later as second drummer support during the Bernard Purdie Jazz Lounge set.

It’s a funny position: the lineup is saturated with talent; I’m a lifelong fan of many of the people who will be my colleagues this week. And Purdie? I’d carry that man’s drums, and his suitcase if he asked (actually I have carried his drums twice, happily, just to be in the presence of greatness).

Fight or flight is real; I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit that part of me doesn’t just want to slink off into obscurity when I see that Stanton Moore, Adam Deitch, Joe Russo, Sput, Nate Werth, Alan Evans and Grandmaster Purdie are just a few of the drummers on that little private island with me.

Well, I’m not going to fly. Nor am I going to fight however, I think I’ll just be.

On a drum-specific level, just be-ing is where I see people struggle the most. I’ve seen the practice room dragged out onto some sizable stages; sometimes I can even name the book and page I’m hearing forced into a jam. (Yuck!). In reality however, there is room in popular imagination for a handful of “name” drummers whose personal skill set is the feature of everything they do (and you better bet you’re not identifying which page of syncopation they’re using on stage!). If you’re wondering if you’re one of them, you’re not! If you were you’d never have to ask. So what does that leave? Everything else! Play a sweet beat, support the music and give thanks.

This week I’ll be be-ing me vis-à-vis Zach Deputy’s band in which I attempt to channel his ridiculously solid beat boxing on the drumset. The group is new, but we’ve landed in a deeply pocketed Afro-JamRibbean musical stride. However, it will always be a work in progress that, in the drum section, requires open-heartedness from all of us. Zach could do it all by himself, and has for years, yet he’s willing to show Jamemurrell Stanley and I the parameters and let us find our own route in. He trusts me to interpret something he’s worked unrelentingly to develop for almost a decade in front of his audience. On my part, I’m willing to try anything, including a crazy groove composed of 5 vocal sounds, none of which are hi hat, which he spits in my direction on stage in front of several hundred people with no warning. There are no passages of 9/8 to rip over, but there are funky agogo breaks, meditative one-drops, and Jamemurrell and I recently unearthed the uptempo calypso pocket of destiny. Jay and I have been connected at the hip for the better part of a decade, yet there is a language of grooving that is new to us. Sweet! 

I’ll be blogging whilst on board this week whenever I can harvest the Internet. Stay tuned.

Practice: 

• As drumset players we tend to think in permanent 4-limb mode. Recently I’ve been playing along with “Elegua” by Jerry Gonzalez without the goal of it becoming a “drumset groove.” The ensemble features three bata drummers, each with two tones and slap sounds, bell, clapping and singing. Things I do:
• Pick one pattern and play it through the track with my hands on kit, or 
• one stick and one hand. Or 
• I try to make a pattern out of two parts with a foot and both sticks. Or… 
• anything! There is so much rhythm and rhythmic melody in this one piece that I don’t think I could ever exhaust the possibilities. Practicing like this opens my ears to melodic grooving and the possibility that sometimes I can trust the other people in the group to hold it down while I add color, etc. Also, doing it by ear, without any books or guidance, prepares me for the inevitable moments when I'm on stage in front of an audience performing that I don't really know.