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.