Drummers As Students

Leave The Snare Alone (RIP Alain Tousaint)
By George Porter

"There was a period of the old recordings where bass drums were not very prevalent in the music. It was mostly the top end of the drum kit. It wasn't till the 70s when bass drums got into the mix or when they started remastering some of those old sessions. The drum kit got to be a little bit more fuller. As a kid I remember hearing the top end of the drums more then I heard the bottom end of them.

I think I got the idea to be closely related to the kick drum and leaving the snare drum alone through my session work with Allan Toussaint. It was a strict rule that you don't put a note where the snare drum is. In the jazz community the backbeat wasn't that necessary in the music because the snare drums were playing kind of free kind of things on top of secondary melodies on top of the swing thing."

Excerpt of Jake D Feinberg's interview with GP on the JFS.

Give the Drummer Some

My take on this point was different. My ear heard how the bass drum was played. It was difficult to hear on a lot of stereo equipment, but it was there. Starting out as a drummer in my teen years it was important to follow the transitions from Africa to the chain gangs, to the Dixieland drummers, to Cozy Cole, Ellington's drummer and on to those killer Funk drummers who knew how to play with math, sound and old African rhythms from West Africa. It was a heck of journey.

The intelligence of creative drummers in each era informed me. I learned why they played they way they played by the sense of the times and the music's interpretation of Black lives for each era. The bass drum? It was always sensuous. The bass drum pulled the shy out of the body and for each music style changed the music's sense of self and how it moved the body to engage in dance moves.

 

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories [11.10.15]

Gregory E. Woods drumming with abandon at Fall Festival 2015 at
Frog Pond Early Learning Center in Alexandria, Virginia.