Wednesday 24 August 2011

Tapping into Drums

In the film Small Town Girl Ann Miller sings the opening line, ‘I like the sound of a tom tom’ from the song “I Gotta Hear That Beat.” If you’ve never seen this production number, you’re in for a treat.  It’s percussion heavy with bizarrely disembodied musicians – no gender here, just great music!


Miller was famed for her ultra speedy tap dancing. I see lots of young drum students who are double bass pedal crazy before learning the basics on a single pedal. I’ve been known to suggest tap dancing lessons whilst embarking on pedal studies. If you really want fast feet, this is a great route to getting there. Many of the old jazz drummers were also hoofers – it makes perfect rhythmic sense. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else requiring that much dexterity between the heel and toe.

Yet Jojo Mayer says it’s not how fast you can play, but rather how fast you can hear. A constant barrage of bass drum notes begins to sound like one long note, with nothing in between or left to say. Musicians I find interesting tell a story and engage the listener. Not everything on the drum set has to be hard, fast and loud. It’s quite easy to play aggressively. How do you convey other emotions besides excitement? Joy, humour, melancholy? I often tell my students anyone can make noise, let’s try to make music.

I can tell I’m playing well when I start a tune with just a drum beat and people get up to dance. It’s one of the benefits of being a drummer – doing something that makes peoples’ bodies move. And in that bodily movement is the space between the notes. This is why swing, funk and hip hop are great to dance to: syncopation creates the space for the body to move.

To paraphrase Gavin Harrison (among others), use the muscle in your head as much as the ones in your hands and feet because that's where ideas come from. A reliance on speed is a reliance on technique. And technique is not expression. Play not only as a drummer, but as a musician. Beauty is in the nuance and detail. Play like a dancer. Kick ball change.  

Check out Fred Astaire's momentous tapping with drums from both A Damsel In Distress and Easter Parade




This article appeared in Tom Tom Magazine / September 2011 

Tuesday 16 August 2011

Don't Make Me Vibra Slap You!

I'm very pleased to announce that I've been asked to be a regular contributor to Tom Tom Magazine.



Monday 15 August 2011

Biography

I’m an ex-pat who grew up in Los Angeles and went to university in New York. I now run a drum kit teaching studio in Belfast and have heaps of experience as a player. I’ve been playing for about 30 years and teaching for 13.  

My dad was a jazz drummer and I grew up learning the kit like a second language, a sort of bilingualism if you like. No formal lessons, but rather through observation and a total immersion in music. Dad passed on his love of big band swing music and took me to see both Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson when I was a little girl. 

My folks split up when I was seven but my dad had a double Ludwig set up and left one whole kit behind. He left me with some grammar and syntax on the kit, but not how to conjugate all the rhythmic verbs.


I remember being nine years old and figuring out how to play Todd Rundgren’s ‘I Saw the Light’ off the radio (with that mambo-like double tom tom hit). Well, that was it for me. I knew right there and then that not only did I know what I was doing, but that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. In a way, I saw the light.

In high school I majored in music and all available electives were filled with music classes. From theory to orchestra, jazz band to choir. I even took marching band instead of PE. Marching band was very 'sociable' -- kids used to smuggle cans of beer in the fuzzy hats to football games. I soon learned that musicians were cool. The Venice High Gondoliers were funky (not as funky as Compton High, hell, nobody was), but we did win some competitions.



I played in lots of bands in and out of school. Not always drums, sometimes keys and occasionally the clarinet. I moved to New York and got a degree in Comparative Literature. I have a love of words and am a bit of a linguaphile.