Great Interview with Bass Guitar Master Anthony Jackson

Conducted by drummer Cliff Almond that he posted in 2007.

More Drum Master Cha-Chá

Cha-chá Plays Rumba

The great Esteban Vega Bacallao, otherwise known as Cha-Chá, video posted by Mark Sanders. I logged many a day in that room, but Cha-Chá is younger here than when I first met him in 1996:

Study on Drumming Error Patterns

From the Harvard Gazette. Rhythm pulses inside the brain of a Ghanaian drummer, sitting in a physics laboratory in Gottingen, Germany. His hands caress the skin of a bongo drum, guided by the metronome’s tick through his headphones. He plays for five minutes, filling the sterile lab environment with staccato sounds, as a team of physicists records him, searching for a pattern. But the researchers aren’t interested in what he does correctly — they are listening for his errors. Though the drummer is a professional, like all humans, his rhythm is imperfect. Each time his hand hits the drum, his beat falls ahead or behind the metronome by 10 to 20 milliseconds. On average, he anticipates the beat, and plays ahead of it, 16 milliseconds ahead — less than the time it takes a person to blink, or a dragonfly to flap its wings. What the physicists want to know is: Are these errors random, or correlated in a way that can be expressed by a mathematical law? ... Check it out HERE.

Aña: La MAGIA del TAMBOR (1994 Cuban documentary)

Changuito timbale solo 1985

I saw this on a VHS copy of a copy that circulated back in the 1980s. Poor audio but absolutely stunning solo:

The Buddy Rich Bus Tapes

For many years these were an underground secret, secretly recorded in the early 80s (1983?) on the band bus while Buddy Rich chewed them out.

Music From a Dry Cleaner

Diego Stocco - Music From A Dry Cleaner from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Mike Clarke and Paul Jackson Lay Down Deadly Grooves

New Yorker article on the Brain and Our Sense of Time

Profiles
The Possibilian
What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.
by Burkhard Bilger April 25, 2011

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”

In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. Physically, he seems no worse for the fall. He did a belly flop on the bricks, he says, and his nose took most of the impact. “He made a one-point landing,” as his father puts it. The cartilage was so badly smashed that an emergency-room surgeon had to remove it all, leaving Eagleman with a rubbery proboscis that he could bend in any direction. But it stiffened up eventually, and it’s hard to tell that it was ever injured. Eagleman has puckish, neatly carved features, with a lantern jaw and modish sideburns. In Baylor’s lab-coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a bounce in his step that’s suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure Island.

If Eagleman’s body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. He is a man obsessed by time. As the head of a lab at Baylor, Eagleman has spent the past decade tracing the neural and psychological circuitry of the brain’s biological clocks. He has had the good fortune to arrive in his field at the same time as fMRI scanners, which allow neuroscientists to observe the brain at work, in the act of thinking. But his best results have often come through more inventive means: video games, optical illusions, physical challenges. Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness. “There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science,” he told me. “But we live these short life spans. Why not do the thing that’s the coolest thing in the world to do?”

.................
A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is some other mechanism at work? The only way to know for sure was to re-create the situation in a controlled setting. Eagleman and one of his graduate students, Chess Stetson, who is now at Caltech, began by designing and programming a “perceptual chronometer.” About the size of a pack of cards, it had an L.E.D. display connected to a circuit board and powered by a nine-volt battery. The unit could be strapped to a subject’s wrist, where it would flash a number at a rate just beyond the threshold of perception. If time slowed down, Eagleman reasoned, the number would become visible. Now he just needed a good, life-threatening situation.
..............

Early this winter, I joined Eagleman in London for his most recent project: a study of time perception in drummers. Timing studies tend to be performed on groups of random subjects or on patients with brain injuries or disorders. They’ve given us a good sense of average human abilities, but not the extremes: just how precise can a person’s timing be? “In neuroscience, you usually look for animals that are best at something,” Eagleman told me, over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill. “If it’s memory, you study songbirds; if it’s olfaction, you look at rats and dogs. If I were studying athletes, I’d want to find the guy who can run a four-minute mile. I wouldn’t want a bunch of chubby high-school kids.”

The idea of studying drummers had come from Brian Eno, the composer, record producer, and former member of the band Roxy Music. Over the years, Eno had worked with U2, David Byrne, David Bowie, and some of the world’s most rhythmically gifted musicians. He owned a studio a few blocks away, in a converted stable on a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, and had sent an e-mail inviting a number of players to participate in Eagleman’s study. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno said. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?printable=true¤tPage=1#ixzz1LOe5zlfe

Jason Marsalis: The Definition of a Jazz Nerd

"The Definition of a Jazz Nerd"
by Jason Marsalis
Note posted on the Facebook page of Jason Marsalis
Reposted by permission of Jason Marsalis
June 16, 2010
originally posted to Facebook today at 12:20pm

I’ve been lucky to grow up as a privileged musician. I’ve been surrounded by a considerable amount of information and various influences from different genres of music. As a high school and college student, jazz students I knew were very knowledgeable about music and hungry for even more. Then in the early 2000’s, something happened. While performing with some of the new jazz students relocating to the New Orleans area, I noticed something missing in their music. As I became familiar with their compositions and solo performances, my suspicions were confirmed; while their music was often complex with a different mood, it was unfortunately lacking in knowledge of the Jazz tradition.

These musicians did not take sufficient time to investigate jazz before 1990 nor did they have a belief in that music. I then realized that these musicians did not have many opportunities to play outside of the classroom situation. Therefore, playing Jazz for an audience was not part of their musical experience. As I traveled the country, I began seeing this as a trend. Jazz students would play an abundance of notes in an abstract manner without an understanding of basic melodic content.

During this time, I overheard a musician describe hearing music in which musicians played notes and patterns over complex chord changes as “nerd music”. That term struck a chord with me because that was same thing I was hearing from college students, and some professional musicians, around the country. At that moment I realized the trend that was happening with Jazz music and I coined the phrase the “JNA”, the Jazz Nerds of America.

As I traveled to Europe and Canada, I discovered common attitudes were pertinent my observations. Jazz musicians in both countries said the same thing is happening with music students in their respective regions. At this point I’m getting notoriously disturbed about the new music I’ve been hearing. Finally, in a conversation with my father, he told me of a set he attended at a New York Jazz club and heard music that I would describe as being played by JNA members. He noticed that the band members had their heads buried in the music and made no eye contact with the audience. He also observed a very attentive audience working hard to like what they were hearing. Basically, instead of enjoying the music, they were expending energy in an attempt to connect with what was being played.

At this point I decided to warn the Jazz audience about the JNA. When I would tell my story, it would be part musician/part raving street preacher to elicit laughs from the audience. I would advise them to run away from “nerd music” as fast as they can. One night in Toronto, I told my JNA story to the audience and Keita Hopkinson, someone who was helping put together the show, wanted to film my rant on his iPhone. I agreed and he posted it on YouTube.

I recently received a phone call from band mate and pianist Marcus Roberts and he mentioned that received an e-mail about my “jazz nerd” video and that it was getting a lot of attention over the Internet. I did a Google search on jazz nerd international and lots of entries appeared. It was humorous that JNA was getting this much attention. The articles were also interesting reads. The only troublesome aspect was that my views were misconstrued and misdirected into another conversation contrary to what the video was about. Some of the blame falls on me because a lot of the musical examples presented in the video were done in a vague fashion. This is why I have decided to write an essay to explain my problem with the “jazz nerd”

Let’s define a jazz nerd. A jazz nerd, or JNA for short, is a Jazz student who reduces all music to notes and concepts only. JNA worships complexity while ridiculing simplicity. JNA will hear groups lead by Dave Holland and Wayne Shorter and will marvel at the complex musical structure but ignore the historical substance behind their music. JNA saxophonists will listen to and worhsip the music of Mark Turner, Chris Potter, Michael Brecker, and other modern players but ignore the musicians that have influenced their music such as John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Warne Marsh, and Sonny Rollins. JNA will hear the music of James Brown and say that it’s no big deal because it only has two chords. JNA looks down on blues as “simple” while wanting to play endless non-melodic eighth and sixteenth notes over “All the Things You Are” in 7/4 straight feel. JNA finds a slow blues boring. Swing is uninteresting and straight feel is actually more “challenging” and “exciting”. Instead of embracing both, the JNA worships one while ridiculing the other. 4/4 is “old” while 9/8 is “new”. A basic drum groove is boring unless you fill it with lots of notes. For the JNA, that’s modern music-as many complex notes as possible while ignoring the simple elements and history behind the notes.

In the infamous video, it seemed as though I was attacking odd-meters. Anyone that knows my music would rightfully label that hypocrisy. It isn’t the time signatures I was attacking but rather the highly indifferent approach the JNA would employ in the name of creating music. They play all odd meters the same way, straight and medium-to-fast. They’re not interested in bringing a variety of grooves and mood to odd-meters. Furthermore, a jazz nerd will have music that will modulate from 5/4 to 9/8 to 7/4 in a matter of measures while playing a barrage of notes that make no sense. As an audience member you actually can’t tell what the band is playing since there’s no clarity of chord movement or rhythm. This approach to odd meters can work, as exemplified by tenor saxophonist John Ellis’ composition “Bonus Round”, but cluttering the space doesn’t help the music. The music student has fun but the audience has nothing with which to connect and therefore is sitting on their hands.

As far as today’s music is concerned, I do have a problem with another trend that isn’t exclusive to the JNA, but it affects jazz music and JNA members usually believe in it. It’s what I call “innovation propaganda”. It is rooted in the fact that starting in the 1980’s and through the 90’s, there were jazz musicians interested in the history of the music. They wanted to explore jazz music from the 50’s and 60’s, a period of music that there generation hadn’t previously explored. While there was an audience for this music, there were jazz writers and musicians who excoriated them as “neoclassicists” who were bringing jazz backwards and were not moving the music forward. Starting from 2000, the majority of today’s jazz started to reference rock, hip-hop, pop, R&B, and world music. That’s great except there’s a catch. Almost no jazz before 1990 is referenced in the majority of music played today. Jazz magazines and writers created this flavor of kool-aid named “innovation” and when a musician drinks “innovation kool-aid”, you believe the following principles.

1. Jazz has to move forward into the future
2. We can’t get stuck in the past with hero worship
3. Swing is old and dated. We have to use the music of today.
4. Jazz is limiting. You must take a chance by bringing in current styles.
5. I don’t care about the past. I have to do my own thing.
6. We’re past playing American songbook standards. That’s yesterday’s music.

This point of view actually mirrors the same narrow-minded point of view that the “traditionalists” are being accused of. “Traditionalists”, apparently, are only interested in music from 1900-1969. With the majority of the new music, music after 1969, and sometimes 1999, is the only period of interest. Here’s the reality about music. Genres are neutral, all music is old, and music is information. The 20th century has produced lots of music. Rather than dividing it up with categories like “traditional” and “modern” or “old” and “new”, it should be viewed as a century’s worth of information. There’s information in Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, The Beatles, Cecil Taylor, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Weather Report, Michael Jackson, Public Enemy, Genesis, Nirvana, Common, John Legend just to name a few. Hundreds upon thousands of artists in numerous genres were left out, but the point is this music is all available for any musician to employ. There are those that complain of narrowing music through categories; my complaint is about narrowing music through dates. There’s information that can be incorporated in music from 1900 to 2000 in today’s context. Jazz is an open architecture that includes everything from genres to history.

In closing, there are those who wonder why do I bother? Why am I so outspoken about music? Why not let the music speak for itself? Why am I wasting my time with this subject instead of practicing? Well, I’ve been inspired by music for many years from all walks of life and to be honest, I’m bored with the majority of the new music being played today. Newer musicians are being selfish by not including a wide range of history and only thinking of themselves over the music. But there’s a bigger problem; I’m not alone. Earlier, I mentioned that jazz had a larger audience with music that was apparently “retrogressive”. Now, today’s music is hailed by some as pushing jazz into the future but guess what? The audience has dwindled and there are magazine articles asking if the music is dead. Furthermore, the response to my “jazz nerd” video is interesting because there are musicians who disagree with me, but not as many non-musically trained jazz fans share the same view. They’re collectively known as the audience, remember? The jazz audience could care less whether any music is “new” or “innovative”. The audience pays its hard earned money to hear a good show. I’ve talked to many audience members who feel the exact same way I do and are just as frustrated as I am with most of the new music. The problem is that because of “innovation propaganda”, they feel guilty if they don’t like the music. They feel that it’s their fault for not understanding the “intellectual capacity” of it so they work hard at trying to enjoy the music when they aren’t in the first place. This, in my view, is part of the reason why the jazz audience is getting smaller.

Is there a way to solve this problem? One solution is to restructure the academic curriculum in university programs to be inclusive of all music and introduce students in elementary school, 4th through 12th grades, to music studies. The best thing for a musician to do is not to divide music by years or genres, but by basing it on at least a century’s worth of information. The more, the merrier. Where this will take the music, we shall see. But this approach of unity is more intriguing than division and Jazz music can truly grow into the 21st century. In the meantime, I would like to thank those who have commented on my impromptu video and I’m glad we are having this conversation.

Francisco Aguabella (1925-2010)

Legendary Cuban drummer Francisco Aguabella died today after a battle with cancer. Aguabella was born in the Cuban city of Matanzas on October 10, 1925, the youngest of seven children though only one of two to survive a typhus epidemic. Though neither of his parents were musicians, Francisco began playing music while a child and was drawn to the music that surrounded him in Matanzas. He began to play the sacred batá drums at age twelve, taught by another youngster at the time, the legendary Esteban Vega Bacallao, popularly known as Cha-Chá (1925-2007). According to Raul Fernandez' book From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz, Aguabella apprenticed on the supporting drums for five years (two on okónkolo, three on itótele) before studying the lead drum of this ensemble. He became known as a fierce and powerful drummer in both sacred and secular contexts, becoming, by his own account, the lead soloist for a local comparsa group at age 16, an accomplishment of which he was very proud. At age eighteen Aguabella was initiated into a local Abakuá potencia (an Afro-Cuban male initiation society). During this time he also became friends with drummer Julito Collazo (1925-2004), who would later become, along with Aguabella, an important source of batá drumming in the United States.

In his early twenties Aguabella worked on docks in Havana and Matanzas while continuing to drum during his free time. Eventually he was asked by influential Havana drummers to join their show troupe in Havana. In Havana, Aguabella also played in various sacred, band, and comparsa groups. In 1953 American dancer Katherine Dunham saw Aguabella perform in a nightclub and requested his services for a show scene in a movie (Mambo, starring Shelley Winters and Anthony Quinn)that was being filmed in Havana. Dunham invited Aguabella to join her company, and he soon accompanied her to Italy, the first of many tours. In addition to drumming, Aguabella had small dance and acting roles in the company's productions.

After touring with Dunham, Aguabella came to the United States at a time when Latin music was mixing with popular jazz. While fellow drummer Collazo settled in New york, Aguabella settled in California, living in Los Angeles and San Francisco for the rest of his life. Aguabella had an impressive career, including recordings, performances, and tours with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Eddie Palmieri, Cachao, Lalo Schifrin, Cal Tjader, Nancy Wilson, Weather Report, Poncho Sanchez, Bebo Valdes, Carlos Santana, Malo, Three Dog Night, Paul Simon, and the Doors. (According to Francisco, Sinatra would introduce him to audiences as "My Italian conga drummer, Francisco Aguabella.") Aguabella also led his own Latin jazz group, playing concerts and issuing recordings for many years. He also composed music for his and other ensembles, mostly works that took advantage of his extensive drumming knowledge. Importantly, Aguabella was a source of authentic sacred Afro-Cuban music in the United States at a time when few knew the secrets of sacred drumming. Aguabella was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Durfee Foundation's Master Musicians' Fellowship, and was recognized by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. He was the subject of a documentary film by Les Blank titled "Sworn to the Drum." Agubella taught Afro-Cuban music at UCLA from the mid-1990s until 2008.

Aguabella was the strongest, fiercest drummer I have ever seen. I once saw him play a sacred tambor in the 1980s (for Changó, with frighteningly fast, loud, and long sections of drumming), and also at the famed Conga Summit concert in San Francisco. By the time I got to study with him a bit in the mid to late 1990s, he had mellowed considerably from his earlier days, when he had the reputation of being a tough taskmaster. I last saw him in late 2008, when the photos below were taken.






Information above was based on Aguabella's own biography, Raul Fernandez' From Afro-Cuban Rhythm to Latin jazz, and personal communication.

Silfredo La O Paints and Dances to the Music of the Afro-Cuban Oricha

A cool event on April 3, 2010, the debut of a space in downtown San Diego called The Salon. Cuban dancer, painter, and drummer Silfredo La O danced and painted to the music of the oricha as performed on batá drums and voice. Photos and video by Kevin Delgado.

Joseph Kwame Degbor StoryCorps Interview by Stephanie Boegeman

Much thanks to Stephanie Boegeman for putting up this interview for everyone to access. Stephanie made this in 2006 as an undergraduate student in an impromptu manner when the StoryCorps oral history project visited her campus. Though she had never conducted an interview before, she utilized StoryCorp's audio equipment to talk to Kwame about a culture and life. For those who knew Kwame, it is a precious thing to be able to hear his voice with such clarity. You can listen HERE.

Joseph Kwame Degbor (1953-2010)

I am saddened to pass on information from John Gabriel, Executive Director for the Center for World Music, that the talented Ghanaian performer/educator Joseph Kwame Degbor passed away in Accra, Ghana on Monday, February 22, following a sudden two-week illness. 

Joseph Kwame Degbor was born on November 11, 1953 in the village Botoku in the Kpando District of the Volta Region of Ghana, West Africa. His father, Paul Kwame Degbor, was a village chief. As a large collection of drums existed in his father's palace, Kwame grew up surrounded by drums and quickly demonstrated a prodigious ability for drumming. By six years of age he began competing with elderly drummers on the talking drums, Borborbor, Zigi, Agbadza, Asafo, and Adowa. In middle school Kwame became the leader of the school's Cultural Troupe, and at the Training College, he emerged as a talented dancer and singer. After training as a teacher, he focused more on dance and created a dance group in Agate village, where the Arts Council of Ghana was impressed with his abilities and appointed him as a representative for the Hohoe and Kpando Districts in 1982. Kwame also became an integral part of the Centre for National Culture beginning in 1982. In 1999 he graduated from the University of Ghana, Legon with a major in Theatre Arts (Dance). After completing his degree, Kwame returned to the Centre for National Culture in Ho and continued training various traditional performance groups in the region. At the Centre for National Culture, Kwame was put in charge of Performing Arts, becoming Director of Programme, Artistic Director of the Centre's Folkloric Company, and Acting Deputy Director for the Centre. Respected for his vast knowledge of folk performing arts, Kwame traveled outside the Volta Region to teach and evaluate dances in other parts of the country.

Between 1992 and 2005 he assisted with the San Diego State University Summer Workshops in Ghana. In 2004 he was invited to San Diego by the Center for World Music to be an Artist-Teacher in Residence. He served as a lecturer at San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego, and as an artist-teacher he taught and performed at California State University, San Marcos and at numerous junior colleges and public schools. He also acted as Artistic Director of San Diego-based drum and dance troupe Ho-Asogli, and as a drummer, storyteller, and especially as a phenomenally graceful dancer, introduced thousands of San Diegans to the beauty of West African Arts. Kwame was preparing to travel to San Diego when he became ill. Kwame is survived by two wives, four sons, and two daughters.

The Center for World Music will organize a memorial service for Kwame in San Diego; information will be forthcoming when available.

See also this newer post with link to an interview with Kwame.

* This post was updated to correct the number of children Kwame had.

African Drums as Possible Cause of NH Anthrax Case

Yet another reason to avoid drum circles! :)

AP/Yahoo

Drums probed as possible cause of NH anthrax case
By HOLLY RAMER, Associated Press Writer Holly Ramer, Associated Press Writer Tue Dec 29, 7:45 pm ET

CONCORD, N.H. – A New Hampshire woman diagnosed with a rare gastrointestinal anthrax case may have swallowed spores propelled into the air by vigorous drumming, a state health expert said.

Officials haven't confirmed how the woman contracted the disease but are focusing on a drum circle gathering she attended Dec. 4 at the United Campus Ministry center in Durham shortly before becoming ill. Public health officials who learned of her diagnosis last week immediately began investigating, and earlier this week shut down the ministry center after anthrax spores were found on two drums.

Some health officials believe it's the nation's first case of gastrointestinal anthrax, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is unsure.

Dr. Elizabeth Talbot, an adviser to the state's public health division, said one theory is that the woman ingested airborne spores from a drum's animal-hide covering.

"This was a wild type of anthrax that is found ubiquitously in our environment. It can become stirred up or agitated to a place where it briefly suspends in the air, and this patient likely contacted it on her fingers and introduced it into her mouth or inhaled a ... spore into her mouth and then swallowed it," she said.

Two recent U.S. anthrax cases involved African drums covered with animal hides, but those involved spores that were inhaled or entered through the skin.

On Tuesday, officials said spores also were found on an electrical outlet and that antibiotics and vaccines would be offered to about 80 people, including about 60 who attended the drum circle as well as University of New Hampshire students who lived in the building and those who worked there.

Samples have been sent to the CDC to determine whether the patient's anthrax strain matches that found on the drums or electrical outlet.

The ministry center is not part of the university, but it houses students and runs a variety of campus-based programs. Pastor Larry Brickner-Wood, the center's director, said the monthly drum circles involve people playing hand drums and other percussion instruments to build community spirit and promote well-being.

"Our thoughts and prayers remain with this young woman and her family," he said.

Anthrax is a potentially fatal disease caused by bacteria. There are three types of infection based on where the disease manifests itself: inhalation affecting the lungs, cutaneous affecting the skin and gastrointestinal affecting the digestive tract. Infection from natural sources such as animal skins, soil or contaminated meat is rare in developed countries, but occurs regularly in poor nations. It is not transmitted from person-to-person.

In 2007, two members of a Connecticut family were treated for skin anthrax traced to animal hides used to make African drums. In 2006, a New York dancer and drum maker who collapsed after a performance in Pennsylvania recovered from the first case of naturally occurring inhalation anthrax in the United States since 1976.

According to state public health officials and The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, there have been no previous confirmed cases of gastrointestinal anthrax in the United States. A Minnesota farm family was believed to have symptoms of the disease in 2000 after eating meat from an infected cow, but blood test results from exposed family members were negative, state health officials said.

read the rest HERE

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?”

Jesús Alfonso Miró, Director of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Dies at 60

From Ned Sublette:

At 6:45 a.m. today, June 3 2009, at 60 years of age, Jesús Alfonso Miró,
musical director of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, exceptional composer and
percussionist, died in his home town of Matanzas, Cuba. The only son of the
Alfonso Miró family, he was the father of 8 children, all dedicated to the
rumba as musicians or dancers. Two of them have been members of the
Muñequitos and at present, Freddy Jesús Alfonso Borges, a practitioner of
his father’s art, plays the quinto of the group and has begun to follow as
well in his path as the composer of heartfelt rumbas.

As a musician of Los Muñequitos Jesús traveled to almost all the continents.
Wherever he went he left friends and disciples. He shone on every stage he
played on, but he never forgot his roots and lived a full life, proud of his
lineage as a rumbero, enjoying the flavor of every corner of his barrio, la
Marina. Beginning at the age of seven, he participated as a musician and
dancer in the Comparsa La Imaliana, founded by his father and by Félix
Vinagera. For a time he was a member of the Orquesta de Música Moderna of
his city and of the Papa Goza group. From 1967 he was musical director and
quinto of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, a group which he profoundly loved and
to which he dedicated the greatest part of his life.

As a composer he was indispensable to the repertoire of the group, with his
works known worldwide. He was the author of “Congo Yambumba,” “La Llave,”
“Chino Guaguao,” “Lengua de Obbara,” “Saludo a Nueva York,” and many others
that are now classics of Cuban rumba. Prestigious interpreters including
Eddie Palmieri took note of his sabrosura and the popularity of his works,
including them on their records and mentioning him as indispensable to the
music of our continent.

When Jesús Alfonso was still very young, together with another of the great
figures of Los Muñequitos, Ricardo Cané, he went to the mountains of Cuba to
teach literacy to the people of the countryside, graduating later as a young
revolutionary teacher. For his great contributions to music and to his
community, he received the title of Hijo Ilustre (Illustrious Son) of
Matanzas.

Jesús Alfonso, member of the Matanzas society Efí Irondó Itá Ibekó and
respectful observer of the regla de Osha, will be remembered by all his
community and especially by rumberos around the world. His name will never
be forgotten. His strong voice and the sound of his hands on the skins will
remain in the memory of those who knew him and recognize him as one of the
most celebrated musicians of all time, because Jesús was to the rumba as was
Cuní or Chapottín to the son. Jesús gave his entire life to the rumba. His
name is next to Chano, Tata, Papín, and all the greats of Cuban music.

Viewing will be in the place where Los Muñequitos de Matanzas rehearse every
day, at 7906 Matanzas Street, between Contrera and Milanés. After respects
are paid, he will be buried in the early hours tomorrow.

To his wife Dulce María Galup, to his children and other family members, to
Diosdado Ramos and all his compañeros in the rumba who have so much admired
him and are today feeling his loss, we send our heartfelt condolences.


CARY DIEZ

As per Ned's List (Sublette)

NYT profile on drummer Bernard Purdie

NYT

[M&C note: see media samples on original NYT post]

Great anecdotes about recording, Purdie's shuffle, ego...

March 31, 2009
A Signature Shuffle Enjoys a New Life
By DAVID SEGAL

For bowlers the ultimate test is the 7-10 split. For card sharks it’s the hot shot cut. For drummers it’s the funky little miracle of syncopation known as the Purdie Shuffle.

You’ve heard Bernard Purdie — better known as Pretty Purdie — perform his creation on Steely Dan’s “Home at Last,” from the 1977 album “Aja.” And you’ve heard variations on songs by Led Zeppelin (“Fool in the Rain”), Toto (“Rosanna”) and Death Cab for Cutie (“Grapevine Fires”).

Created with six bass, high-hat and snare tones, the Purdie Shuffle is a groove that seems to spin in concentric circles as it lopes forward. The result is a Tilt-a-Whirl of sound, and if you can listen without shaking your hips, you should probably see a doctor.

Now the beat has a whole new life. On YouTube dozens of amateurs, aspiring pros and assorted dilettantes have uploaded videos of their attempts to teach or demonstrate the Purdie Shuffle.

But you post at your peril. A guy identified as BazyBeats was savaged in the comments section of the video he posted of his attempt at “Fool in the Rain.” He slightly bungled the pattern on the snare, and dozens of angry nitpickers let him know it. Eventually he asked them to “go somewhere else with your negative, hateful, blackhearted and useless souls.”

Mr. Purdie can be found these days at the Al Hirschfeld Theater playing for the Broadway revival of “Hair,” which has been in previews since early March and opens Tuesday.

For Mr. Purdie, the “Hair” gig is one of those full-circle experiences that can’t be planned. He worked with the show’s composer, Galt MacDermot, in New York in the early 1960s, when demos of the songs for the show were first recorded. Those tracks were later refined for the musical.

At the time Mr. Purdie was a relative newcomer to the city, having spent most of his life in Elkton, Md., a town near the Delaware border. One of 15 children, he had started by banging on his mother’s pots and pans.

“I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said. “No matter what happened, I wanted to play the drums.”

Mr. Purdie, who says he is 68, was sitting at a sushi bar across the street from the theater, dressed in a dark suit and a satiny white tie. He was an hour from changing into Tommy Bahama-style casual wear and climbing onto the rear of a colorful pickup truck stationed onstage, where he drums for the show.

He’s an ample, teddy-bearish guy with a graying mustache, a hearty laugh and an ego that is legendarily large. For years he showed up at sessions with two professionally made signs, which he would place on music stands near his kit. “You done hired the hit maker,” read one. “If you need me, call me, the little old hit maker,” said the other. It was both a gimmick and a calling card, and it would have come across as pure braggadocio except that Mr. Purdie always delivered.

“He was one of the top five drummers in Manhattan back when Atlantic was recording here, when all these great independent labels were recording here,” said Phil Ramone, a producer who worked with Mr. Purdie in the late ’60s and went on to record Paul Simon and Billy Joel. “Purdie just had a way of inspiring confidence in everyone.”

He also had a way of implying that he was finished with a session as soon as he had nailed his part, which was often before anyone else in the room.

“You’d do a first take, and he’d put on his overcoat as if he was about to leave,” said Donald Fagen, the Steely Dan keyboardist. “The problem was that some of the other musicians had just become comfortable with the chords. You had to cajole him to do some other takes so everyone else could polish up their parts a bit.”

Within a few years of arriving in Manhattan Mr. Purdie was touring and recording with the greats of ’60s soul, funk and jazz, including James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Louis Armstrong. He is heard on more than 4,000 records.

Some of the greats, in his telling, were ornery characters. The Godfather of Soul fined him $25 for a mistake he didn’t make, prompting Mr. Purdie to quit. During a concert with Ray Charles in Chicago, when Mr. Purdie started playing a few bars too soon, Charles barked, “Don’t play, drummer,” into the microphone, a rather public embarrassment before a huge crowd.

“He would turn around and look at you — I always thought the guy could see,” Mr. Purdie said. “And he’d say, ‘What is your problem?’ Now, what are you supposed to say to that?”

Before the current “Hair” gig Mr. Purdie spent much of his time in different bands, one of which, the Hudson River Rats, plays a lot of private parties and clubs. He is sampled often, turning up on Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” and most recently in “Mother of All Funk Chords,” a YouTube mash-up by an Israeli producer known as Kutiman.

A new generation of drummers, meanwhile, is keeping his shuffle alive. Jason McGerr of Death Cab for Cutie says it’s not quite accurate to call the beat on “Grapevine Fires” a Purdie Shuffle.

“It doesn’t matter how much I practice, I will never play that shuffle like Purdie,” Mr. McGerr said. “It’s because he has an attitude that seems to come through every time. He always sounds like he’s completely in charge.”

Mr. Purdie has half a dozen theories about the shuffle’s appeal — the challenge, the energy, the versatility of the rhythm, and on and on. It’s easier for him to pinpoint the beat’s genesis.

“It comes from the train near my house where I grew up,” he said. “When I first started working this out, I was 8 years old, and I called it the locomotion because that’s what I was trying to capture: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”

It started as a regular shuffle, but then he began weaving in what are called ghost notes, created by lightly brushing the snare with the fingers or stick. And instead of a straightforward tapping on the high-hat, he moved his right hand up and down so that he was hitting the side of the high-hat, then the top, over and over — creating this tock-tick tock-tick sound.

As buoyant as the beat is, it can convey a lot of different emotions, as Steely Dan figured out during the recording of “Babylon Sisters,” from the 1980 album “Gaucho.”

“I guess we expected more of a regular shuffle, and he started playing something very complex,” Mr. Fagen recalled. “We were amazed, because it was perfect for the tune. ‘Babylon Sisters’ has this dark mood to it, and the beat seemed to accentuate the floating dark mood that the song required.”

Mr. Purdie said he was flattered by the versions he has heard by other bands, though if you want to hear the real thing live, you’ll have to come to “Hair.” The shuffle turns up at least half a dozen times during the show.

“You’ll know it when you hear it,” he said, “because when you do, you’ll have to move your feet.”

NYC Percussionist Manny Oquendo dies

World Music Central

Master Timbalero and Bandleader Manny Oquendo Dies in New York

Saturday, March 28 2009 @ 02:22 PM EDT

Renowned salsa musician Manny Oquendo died March 25, 2009 at a New York hospital. Oquendo was a veteran of the days when Latin bands crowded into a studio to polish off a recording in an all-night session. "The first recording (singer) Tito Rodriguez did, we took the 7th Avenue train to record for SMC label," Oquendo recalled. "Tito Puente did the arrangements. You recorded on monaural, with just a few mikes. You couldn't stop and overdub. You just played."

Oquendo's musical education consisted of the old-school, "just play" approach, and he was in the right place to learn. He grew up on Kelly Street in the Bronx, New York, not far from the great Cuban tres player, Arsenio Rodriguez. Colin Powell, who'd later become a general, lived on the block too, so did pianist Noro Morales. And a lot of kids who'd later make their names in Latin music, such as Joe Cuba, the Palmieri brothers, Little Ray Romero, grew up playing stickball on Kelly Street.

Oquendo became an expert on Cuban rhythms and began playing bongo and timbales with a succession of New York's top bands , with José Curbelo and Vicentico Valdes before moving into the orchestras of Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez.

In 1963, he joined La Perfecta, the conjunto organized by pianist Eddie Palmieri. "La Perfecta was struggling at that time, trying to compete with all the other bands at the Palladium," says Oquendo. "I'm talking about big bands with 15 people in them. Eddie's was a small conjunto group. But what made us different was the music and the playing " we were looser, more free."

In 1974, Oquendo and Jerry Gonzalez left La Perfecta to move in their own direction. In the years since, Manny Oquendo and Libre became preservationists of the tipico sound, nurturing some of the most dedicated sidemen in the business.