Sounds

Three drummers, Bill Stewart, Matt Wilson and Tony Oxley, opened my eyes to my interest in using the drums for making sounds as opposed to playing conventional rhythms.

In 1995, I bought every John Scofield album on which Bill Stewart played (I think there are six) and Bill Stewart’s three solo albums. Bill is a very modern sounding drummer who fuses funk and jazz very successfully (in other words, he can play funk and jazz with equal conviction). At the time, I was hanging out with two drummers, Roy and Phil, and both of them were very funk-groove oriented players with what we drummers call “deep pockets.” Roy applied his playing toward a jazz context, and Phil drummed in a rock (and later blues and country) style. I realized the advantages of being able to lay down a simple 4/4 funk groove, but, alas, I could cop an Elvin-esque swing, but never a convincing deep funk groove. When I found out Bill Stewart grew up in Des Moines and that we both studied with the same drum teacher (Woody Smith) in high school, I became optimistic that I could find my inner groove. So I listened and listened, but what inspired me most about Bill Stewart were his excellent sounding ride cymbal and this sound he made every so often that sounded like a metallic “boi-oinNNG!”

For some years, I went around to drummers and music stores and asked, “Do you know how to make a boing sound that raises in pitch on a cymbal?” Nobody knew what I was talking about. (The best guess was by hitting a cymbal and dunking it in water- a technique employed by Stravinsky.) Eventually I saw Bill play and discovered he had a small metal object that he’d put on the floor tom and get it to make that sound. This inspired me to experiment to see what sounds I could cull out of various objects (with the hope of stumbling across the boing sound). Because of this, my entire perspective on drumming changed- instead of developing the technical methods of hitting drums with drumsticks, I began intensely listening to the various sounds things made, both when struck in different ways and through discovering infinite methods besides striking that evoked sounds from objects.

In those days, I went to every single jazz show that came to my university. Most of them did not cost anything. That is how, in 1997, I saw Matt Wilson play. He had a looser, swingier, more laid-back approach than Bill. But when he pulled out a string of metal beads (which are normally used as pull cords on overhead light switches) and played his drumset with them, he blew me away. The random way in which the beads hit all the drumset, including the stands and shells, sounded fantastic. Interestingly, he played on the same night as my university’s jazz band try-outs, and I had to leave the gig early to get to the competition. It would be impossible to relay how humiliating of an experience the try-out was. The times in which I have drummed poorly are not few, but this must have been some of the worst drumming by any human in all of history. I worked nights back then, and suffice it to say I went straight from the try-out to work and cried through most of my ten hour shift.

Before the ill-fated jazz try-outs, I had been practicing various musical styles, because I knew that the try-outs consisted of “Play a swing pattern,” “Play a samba pattern,” etc. After that, I more or less gave up on trying to play in any style. Initially, I stuck to mostly hitting the drums with sticks and keeping things rhythmic, or at least polyrhythmic. In fact, I delved pretty deep into polyrhythm before I could truly embrace arthythm.

Upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2000 with the goal of becoming an audio engineer and producer, I predictably visited all the music shops around and soon discovered Clarion Music in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It is jam-packed with every imaginable gong, and, acting on what was still an educated hunch, I asked the owner if he had any small gongs that went “boi-oinNNG!” He immediately showed me the two Chinese Opera gongs. He played the smaller one, and to my astonishment, it made the sound I had been seeking for all those years without any trick at all- you simply hit it in the middle with a mallet. Traditionally, it is paired with its larger brother, which goes “BOOw-ooo-oo!” (I have since gotten really into Chinese Opera, which is truly sublime.) Clarion Music has at least one-hundred of each of these gongs, and with permission and after putting on some gloves, I literally played every single of the smaller ones they had, sorting them into “Yes” “No” and “Maybe” piles but eventually buying the one I dared not put in any pile lest I forget where it was.

Perhaps finally solving Bill Stewart’s mystery sound allowed me to become intrigued by another mystery sound. This time it came from Tony Oxley, whom I initially discovered through John McLaughlin’s “Extrapolation” album, in which I was impressed by his phenomenal polyrhythmic playing and use of his left foot. (It’s hard to relay the attraction of a good left foot to a non-drummer, but Papa Jo Jones, Jack DeJohnette and Paul Motion’s left feet are all also very influential to me.) But in seeking out more Oxley (through whom I thankfully discovered Cecil Taylor), I fell in love with a squeaky, nails-on-a-blackboard type sound he often incorporates seamlessly into his playing. I thought it was made by rubbing a bow across a cymbal, so I went to a very helpful violin store with a couple cymbals and bought a bass bow. Today I never play a gig without that bow, because there always seems to be a moment in a song where I am at a loss as to what to play if I am without it, but it soon became apparent that that was not actually the way Tony makes his sound. He simply rubs the tip of stick across a cymbal, a technique my friend Scott Looney was very gracious in helping me work out.

I think my realization that I was actually more interested in making noises I find interesting than in playing the drums conventionally can be traced to a gig at the De Anza Hotel in San Jose in late 2003 or early 2004. I played a monthly gig in the bar area there with Eddie Gale for a couple years, and once my parents came to see me and paid for a room for me so I didn’t have to drive home after the gig. (I had started playing with Eddie at a weekly free jazz workshop in 2000, and he had played with such greats as Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. We played a sort of free form post-bop.) I don’t remember anything about that particular gig, but I do remember spending the next hour turning the lights in the bathroom in the hotel room on and off, fascinated by the tinkling sound they made and convinced it was the single greatest sound I had ever heard. It occurred to me then that none of my favorite sounds had anything to do with hitting things with drumsticks. When I thought of sounds I loved, I thought of playing Hungry-Hungry Hippos, Ker-plunk, jacks and Yahtzee as a kid. I thought of the light sabers in Star Wars. I thought of those plastic lassos that hum when you whirl them over your head (which John Zorn made a wonderful song with on his “Music for Children Vol. 1”). I thought of smacking those plastic covered wires that run to the ground from telephone poles. The hum of the drinking fountain next to Mr. Leach’s room….

It’s interesting to me now that most of my introduction to noise and found object playing was indirect, as percussionists have been doing it for millennia; in fact the invention of the “traps” (drumset) was a direct result of making many noisemakers, sound effects and contraptions easily accessible in theatre pits. I spent the next several years discovering lots of drummers, including Paul Lytton, Vladimir Tarasov, Han Bennink, John Stevens, Malachi Favors and Milford Graves, who incorporate tons of interesting sounds and “effects” into their drumming, and others, such as Gino Robair, Karen Stackpole and Toshi Makihara, whose drumming usually relies exclusively on making interesting sounds.

In August of 2004, I performed my weekly routine of driving to San Jose for two to three hours in rush hour traffic, hauling my drums a half block into a practice room at San Jose State, playing for two hours with Eddie and whoever else showed up, packing my drums back up and hauling them home. On that particular evening, I spent the majority of the time playing a disco beat while three electric guitar players noodled endlessly in what must have sounded like an outtake from The Grateful Dead’s “Terrapin Station.” Afterwards I mentioned that I didn’t particularly like what we had played, and Eddie irritatedly pointed out that that was the kind of stuff you had to play if you wanted to make any money in this business. I retorted that I’d rather work at McDonald’s than make money playing music I didn’t like. That statement got me fired from Eddie’s paying gigs, which mercifully ended my attempt at a drumming career. Eddie was right- and so was I.