MD: You use a lot of dynamics and have a beautiful touch.
JW: I’ve worked very hard on that lately: just getting the quality of my sound together. It’s not that I don’t want to play energetically, but whenever people come to see a drummer they almost expect that, and there’s an art to bashing. Some people bash away and it sounds contrived.
There’s a sound that a drum and cymbal get that’s primal, that’s part of the tradition of the instrument, and that can only be achieved by hitting them with a certain force and intensity. Now I know that, if during a set I play two and three sweet ballads, a couple of medium-tempo blues, and maybe a hip Latin thing, and if, during an upswing thing, I cut loose for a minute and bash, the average person will go away remembering that I was bashing. So that’s part of the drums, but I don’t want to be limited by that.
MD: Well, a drummer is supposed to create excitement.
JW: I do enjoy that, definitely: sweating, burning, and swinging hard. That’s what our band is about.
– Jeff Watts, Modern Drummer interview by Chip Stern, September 1985
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