No one has noticed but the title of my blog has changed.
The never knowingly underpunned 'Catering for the Contemporary Drummer' has given way to 'Music and the School of Life', part of the reason is that the new moniker is the working title of a forthcoming book, a book which will explore in significantly greater detail a lot of the ground covered by this blog in its six year existence.
More significant though is the abandonment of the c word.
Contemporary.
There's very little about me that is genuinely contemporary, other than the fact that I am currently alive, and whilst I don't do the ever so slightly absurd thing of dressing in period clothes, sporting 1930s round glasses and playing a set of drums that looks like an impeccably curated museum exhibit, the fact remains that much of who and what I am as a musician is rooted firmly in the past.
That's not to say that I reject innovation and progress, far from it. Back when I was teaching degree students I would take huge interest in their contemporary drum idols, and I would be lying if I said that I hadn't stolen ideas from drummers like Chris Dave, Tony Royster, Nate Smith and a whole lot more besides. The difference is though, any ideas I snag from the cutting edge end up being reimagined in the context of my existing approach to drums and music. I shan't be making what I consider to be a mistake, a mistake that I have seen middle-aged drummers fall prey to in previous generations, including one or two who I very much admired. The mistake consists of tearing down much of what has been built up over a lifetime of playing, this can present in the form of abandoning long established techniques concepts and approaches on the instrument. Another commonly displayed symptom is the drum set itself, which overnight doubles or triples in size. I often see this as a rejection of a previous way of being, as though what had gone before was suddenly no longer good enough.
Architects and town planners did something similar to the centre of Birmingham in the 1960s, and it didn't age well.
Some of the greatest drummers we have ever seen, Steve Gadd and Buddy Rich to name but two, got their identities early on, but continued to innovate and develop (as Gadd still does of course) and there is a consistency as well as strength of identity which is one of the hallmarks of greatness. The big exception to this of course was Tony Williams, whose playing changed so much in the 70s that there is an 'old testament' and a 'new testament' Tony. Both great, but very different. I know which one I favour,
I'm all for a bit of self reinvention, but it should be subtle, and not the main source of attention. Otherwise it's like bad cosmetic surgery, where you notice the facelift rather than the face itself.
So, the bottom line in all this is that there is a very small percentage of what I do as a musician that could be deemed truly contemporary. An ever-increasing amount of what I play could be classed as original, but that's a whole different ball game. This is the seventh decade in which I have been playing drums, so if by this point I was still merely repeating what I have heard elsewhere (which, don't forget, is how you begin to lean to communicate in any language) I think I would be giving myself a pretty stiff talking to.
In short, I am deeply comfortable in my own musical skin. Confidence, along with a good ear, is a quality I feel blessed to have in adequate quantity. If you know where you are, and at the same time know where you are going, take a moment to be thankful, because there are a great many among us who are not quite so fortunate.
Anyway, here's the plug. To mark my 60th year, and 40 years since my big band first took to the stage, I am putting on a couple of special events.
First of which is The Great Drum Show, which is also not contemporary, and will feature tributes to some of the legends of our instrument, and be made up almost entirely of music dating between the 1930s and 1970s. So it's not contemporary, but it isn't pure nostalgia either. Like all the best live shows featuring historic repertoire (of which there is no better example than Simon Spillett's forensic big band investigation of music by and associated with Tubby Hayes) the primary pull factor is the opportunity to hear classic music performed in the moment, in the flesh, with everything that that entails.
There's a try out show in April, details here. After which we'll either go into the West End, or just go west. The likelihood will be somewhere in between these two polar opposites. It's going to be an interesting process trying out and deciding on repertoire, but as I said the other day, you can't beat having things to do.
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