NYT Profiles Five Jazz Drummers To Watch

NYT

June 12, 2009
Music
Five Drummers Whose Time Is Now
By BEN RATLIFF

Drumming is jazz’s foundation, but it’s also where the music makes its deepest adjustments.

Ten years ago jazz suddenly started to sound different, and drumming had a lot to do with it. Not everything, but a lot. At the time Nasheet Waits, Rodney Green, John Hollenbeck, Eric Harland and Daniel Freedman were among those developing their own identities but also connecting everything through groove and pulse: making traditional jazz rhythm fit with free improvisation, Afro-Cuban music, funk, Middle Eastern music, classical percussion.

Those five, whom I wrote about in 1999, have helped widen the language of jazz. Here are five who have come to light more recently. They’re all finding new ways to look at the drum set, and at jazz itself. Despite the demise of the JVC Jazz Festival, which would ordinarily run this month in New York, this city is a jazz festival year-round. They’re part of what makes it so.

Marcus Gilmore

Marcus Gilmore, 22, is the grandson of Roy Haynes, jazz’s most important living drummer, but he has proved his own virtues quickly. Around the winter of 2004-5 he created that pleasant citywide buzz when someone new and special blows through New York clubs and jam sessions. Now you can hear him regularly, playing with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Nicholas Payton, Vijay Iyer, Ambrose Akinmusire, Yosvany Terry, Gretchen Parlato and others.

Before graduating from LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, Mr. Gilmore had serious nonacademic training; his bandleaders were some of his teachers. One was the saxophonist Steve Coleman, who uses the Afro-Cuban clave rhythm in unusual patterns. At 15, Mr. Gilmore started rehearsing and performing with Mr. Coleman.

“I met Steve through my uncle,” he said last week in a cafe near his apartment in Harlem. (His uncle, Graham Haynes, is a trumpeter.) “Steve introduced me to concepts that I really wasn’t used to. He’d play me a line on the saxophone, a low note for the bass drum and a high note for the snare. And he’d just keep looping it till I got it. I guess his type of structures are kind of abnormal. The first time I finally got one of those tunes down, my head hurt. But I felt like I was smarter and stronger.”

Mr. Gilmore tends to work for bandleaders who write complex music, which he phrases with a rolling grace and swing, adding furtive microfills of funk. The demands of the compositions have shaped his style; it sounds natural and never looks easy.

“I always wanted to be a drummer who knew how to get around the drums,” he said, “but also I wanted to be a taste drummer — someone who knows how to interact, as opposed to bashing out everything. I want to be musical.”

Kendrick Scott

Kendrick Scott writes a prayer on all his drumsticks. “Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace,” it reads.

Mr. Scott, 28, moved to New York in 2003. He plays with the trumpeter Terence Blanchard; he also leads his own band, Oracle, for which he writes all the music, edging into various kinds of slow-moving, harmonically sophisticated, twice-removed pop.

He came from the same performing arts high school in Houston that produced Eric Harland. Mr. Harland, whose nearly orchestral drum style became immediately influential, is two years older than Mr. Scott and had gotten professionally situated a little earlier. In 2007 Mr. Scott replaced Mr. Harland in Mr. Blanchard’s band.

“When I joined Terence’s band, I tried to play like Eric,” he said. “Eric has a certain openness to his sound. I always say he plays from underneath: from the drums up, not from the cymbals down. He uses the cymbals as more of a color rather than as a primary timekeeper. He takes the rims of the drums, the side of the drums, all these other things into account.

“But now I’m always thinking, what is my contribution going to be to the music, not just to the drums? If I can give my soul to it, that’s going to fulfill my calling to play the music.” He says the prayer on his drumstick helps him let go of playing like anyone else, as well as the demands of the moment when he’s on the bandstand; he wants to think several paces ahead.

He articulated the challenges for himself and his age group, drummers operating in the wake of Mr. Harland, Antonio Sanchez and others from that late-’90s efflorescence.

“I cling to that bottom-up philosophy too,” he explained. “But one of the things that’s different with my generation is that people are writing in all these odd time signatures” — 7, 11 and so on, instead of 3-beat or 4-beat rhythms — “but now the odd time signatures sound free-flowing. Whenever I look through someone’s music that’s really complicated, that’s the first thing I do: look for the common denominator. So even if it’s in 19, it can sound like 4.”

Dan Weiss

Afro-Cuban rhythm became increasingly important and specific in jazz in the 1990s, but it had been a part of jazz from the start. Newer to it, in the music of Mr. Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Dan Weiss, among others, are Indian rhythmic cycles.

Mr. Weiss is 32. At 14, growing up in Tenafly, N.J., he saw a video of Ravi Shankar performing at the Monterey Pop Festival, with Alla Rakha playing tabla. It stayed with him as he learned jazz drumming. Twelve years ago another drummer, Jamey Haddad, put him in touch with the tabla player Samir Chatterjee, who became Mr. Weiss’s musical guru.

“I’m trying to get to the point where I feel as comfortable on tabla as I do on drums,” he said, quiet and sanguine, with a chuckle. “It might take another 15 or 20 years.”

Part of the diversification of jazz drummers — learning from hip-hop, clave and tabla rhythm, from rock and classical percussion — has to do with job opportunities. But it’s not so much that bandleaders want drummers who can play a given language correctly. It’s that compounds of rhythmic ideas lead toward originality.

“Bandleaders want to hire people who have their own voices, more so than in the past,” Mr. Weiss said. “If they have a drummer with a strong personality, they might feel that their music is limitless in where it can go.”

Mr. Weiss plays with the bandleaders David Binney and Miles Okazaki, among others; he’s also led his own trio, with the pianist Jacob Sacks and the bassist Thomas Morgan, for which he writes long-form music with careful rhythmic subdivisions, influenced by late-20th-century classical music, Indian rhythm and metal.

Until a year and half ago, Mr. Weiss also played in the doom-metal band Bloody Panda. “It was too much physical stress, too much volume, playing really hard,” he said. “I love the music, but I couldn’t do it all. I fainted after one gig.”

Tyshawn Sorey

Sometimes Tyshawn Sorey’s drumming, big and precise, threatens to take over a band completely, to pick it up like a backhoe and swing it around. But more recently his playing has been surprisingly quiet, drawing you into small, rhythmic clicks and the decay of cymbal sounds.

These are the consequences of an idea Mr. Sorey, 28, picked up 10 years ago from Kenny Washington, one of his early teachers. “I was very heavy-handed then,” he remembered. “Kenny encouraged me to get a big sound without putting so much force into the instrument. Thanks to him, I can expand my dynamic range. Him, and Morton Feldman as well. I realize I can go to extremes, playing with the same intensity while playing very quiet as while playing very loud.”

Mr. Washington, the traditionalist drummer, and Mr. Feldman, the minimalist composer: not often put in the same sentence. But this is how Mr. Sorey thinks. The other day at a Manhattan coffee shop, he spoke in complete paragraphs for two hours about his inspirations, and he mentioned the drummer Vernell Fournier, the composer Anton Webern, the rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the rock drummer Dave Grohl and the comedian Andrew Dice Clay (for his improvisations). He is a constant learner: this fall he will start a master’s program in composition at Wesleyan University.

More serious on the trombone than on the drums until he was 19, Mr. Sorey, a native of Newark, moved quickly once he finished his studies at William Paterson University in 2004. Like Mr. Gilmore, he has worked with Mr. Coleman and Mr. Iyer. He can play complicated swing as well as his own version of electronic drum-and-bass rhythms, more funky and more spartan.

In general he doesn’t like to play a role. (He doesn’t identify himself as a jazz musician per se.) Especially in his own band, Oblique, he might do anything for a particular sound: play an upturned cymbal with mallets, scrape the legs of his snare-drum stand on the floor, throw sticks at the wall. He tries not to use the standard drum tuning or cymbal tones for jazz. He doesn’t like to play with sticks on the high hat during a bass solo. Etc.

“I see my instrument as being an extension of me,” he said. “I don’t see the drum set as a musical instrument anymore.”

Really?

“No,” he said. (He meant that it shouldn’t have prescribed functions.) “There are so many colors I can get out of the snare drum, or any one component of the drum set,” he elaborated. “For me it’s more about awareness of my instrument. I always know there’s so much more.”

Justin Faulkner

One recent surprise in New York’s jazz life was Justin Faulkner, positioned high over his drums and playing them with an almost obsessive sense of narrative evolution, at Jazz Standard last month. Mr. Faulkner, 18, replaced Jeff (Tain) Watts in Branford Marsalis’s quartet three months ago. Even before the job started, Mr. Faulkner loved Mr. Watts’s playing; since March he has had to become more familiar with the older drummer’s polyrhythmic language to understand its function within the band. The two have still not met.

“My approach isn’t cymbals-and-drums,” he explained on Monday by telephone from Philadelphia, soon after his high school graduation rehearsal. He warmed into an intense monologue about his style. “It’s just music. Servicing the song, having the song rise to a certain point. It’s like parabolas: up, down, up, down. You get to a peak of excitement, and then you come down. And you have to make the big peak become one solid thing with the small peaks.”

What are the preconditions to modern jazz drumming? “No. 1,” Mr. Faulkner said, “you have to know the vocabulary, and No. 2, you have to understand that you’re making music. So what you’re feeling and hearing should go from within to the drums. If you’re not feeling what you’re playing, then you’re just meandering.”

Like Mr. Sorey, he sees Fournier’s drumming with Ahmad Jamal as a model. “In ‘Ahmad’s Blues’ he’s just swinging his behind off, but the next chorus he changes it, adding some little piece to make the music build,” Mr. Faulkner said. “It’s all about that. If the music doesn’t build, what’s it going to do?”