Some thoughts I wrote down after a Mark Guiliana solo show, that I caught here in Portland a few weeks ago, at the Mission Theater. He was promoting his 2024 album Mark, and had some video loops running, and ambient backing sound, two drum sets, a Nord keyboard, and a lot of small accessory percussion scattered around the stage, some locally made. It was a well paced 75 minutes, and fully entertaining, with alternating segments focusing on each of the instruments, or collections of instruments. The audience was about 80 people, which a little more than half-filled the venue.
Here’s a little video from his Seattle show, which had the same format:
At the front of the stage was a bebop set, tuned high, except with a techno-sounding bass drum— possibly he was using a triggered sound— which he used to good effect. There were two not very good 18″ cymbals, I believe both by Istanbul Agop, some form of crash ride, and a thin flat ride— first time I’ve seen a flat ride used deliberately for its uniquely horrible crash sound. I do have to mention that a die cast hoop on a snare drum is a really unfriendly sound for solo percussion.
There was a second set at the back of stage right, facing right, with a snare drum, 22″ bass drum, and floor tom, all in a rock tuning, with a mini double hihat set up. At the back of stage left, facing left, was the Nord, on which he played some simple modern atmospheric compositions, that would be at home on the soundtrack of a Soderbergh or Bennett Miller movie, with a pensive-sounding vibe.
The video portion had some impressionistic footage of freeway traffic, a marching band, a baseball game, and abstract imagery. The accompanying audio was ambient sounds, baseball game commentary, some speaking I assume recorded by Giuliana, that was pretty content free, some transient thoughts of a musician. That element was not hugely ambitious, but it supported and expanded the solo drumming performance well, without trying to force it into being a larger thing than it was.
The bop drums were tuned tonally, which he used melodically in some fairly obvious ways— a lot of thematic repetition happening overall, not so much apparent development. He seemed to be telegraphing that a little bit for the audience, or maybe it’s a limitation of having only four drums to work with, or maybe it’s just the music he wanted to make. Repetition is also a form of development, I can’t criticize someone for doing it not precisely to my taste. Overall the entire event was a master class in musicality, in the playing, and the spaces between the playing, using a pretty full expressive range of the instrument.
Strictly my personal taste: I find the high tuned drums to be kind of emotionally limiting, especially with the floor tom. We’ve got an extra pure tone to work with melodically, but the range of timbres is narrower. We’re sacrificing expressiveness and power for that clean four-tone scale, which is ultimately not a whole lot to work with.
Playingwise, he is clearly using the same basic materials as the rest of us, but more developed, more polished, which you would expect from a player of his status. I can recognize the impetus, the source ideas, but he executes them with a much higher level of precision and flexibility, which takes it into another level of thing.
As a listening experience, it is interesting that the polished chops may create another kind of limitation— or they become intrusive to the pure musical effect. The developed thing is its own effect, but possibly it crowds out another kind of effect. You’re listening to the music, but these hands butt in to be awesome. I think there’s a player ethic of working at the limit of your abilities, which doesn’t go away when someone has a lot of abilities— I felt this with Ari Hoenig as well. Not that anyone can do anything about it, or should— we’re supposed to play what we can play, and not be thinking about critical concerns. Very few drummers will actively try to subvert their chops to avoid that effect— Billy Mintz is one.
He said he wasn’t used to appearing solo— a particularly exposed way to perform, with one guy needing to account for every second of an audience’s interest. But he held the stage by himself, his presence felt unforced, and he was funny when he was on the mic. The performance elements were next to nothing, with a little more wandering than was necessary moving between instruments, and at the end he distributed instruments to the audience. It came off perfectly well, carried by his easy charisma.
I assume that by this point in his career he would be entirely unselfconscious on stage, and would be playing an entirely different “inner game” of performance than the rest of us. Or maybe the game is exactly the same for everyone, forever, except for very special personalities— George Benson or somebody— with people experiencing minor crises of confidence, and conflicting pressures to impress, and keep people interested, but also to breathe and leave some spaces occasionally. And feeling varyingly in a zone of pure music making, and dealing with it when you don’t. All of which would be greater than normal when performing solo.
There was a confidence in the power of the sounds— the drums and the miscellaneous percussion—and the spaces between them, to hold the thing together. It’s necessary for playing free, and he did it to good effect, the events felt perfectly paced. It is interesting to compare it with Michael Griener’s solo performance I shared in November— in a much more intimate setting, and truly on another level in this respect. In comparison Guiliana’s concert might have shown more of that American neurosis of needing to force attention, and to deliver pyrotechnics. To an extent I think it’s a reflection of the audience, or of the performer’s confidence in the audience— I think that’s part of what’s happening in Michael’s case. I’ll ask him about it.
As always, anything I’ve said that looks like criticism is not criticism, it’s something I thought about— it says more about me than it says about how great or lousy somebody else did.