The Found Poetry of a New Era

Pathways

There is the desire to sound good.
The desire to control the expression
so the notes occur on an area that is
intellectually understood in advance.

Licks, grooves, scores, charts, notes etc.
Or as Milford Graves calls it
Standard Organized Music.

A conceptual framework somehow legitimizes
and proves knowledge of rhythm and melody,
an execution of a predetermined structure,
or an improvisation projected onto a predetermined structure.

It's like "Oh he is repeating himself therefore he knows."
It's safe. It's a form of GPS. It has its pleasure and limitations.
Groove. It's OK have structure sometimes but how deep are the roots?
If the roots are not deep "music" can become imprisonment.

The foundation is built upon breath and the feeling of the intention.
Fear and vanity keep people on the surface and afraid of violating the structure.
Conversely if you are at the center of the wheel you are omnipresent and timeless.
You are time, keeping it or not keeping it is redundant.
You can't reach the center without breath and relaxation.

Control without balance is FASCISM
Letting Go without balance is NIHILISM
and both together are TAOISM or SURFING

Lose Control in the name of gaining it.
Weave these domains together.
Sure practice MASTER Studies and Stick CONTROL
but then also get out the machete and do some bushwhacking.
How are we going to become strong and fearless if we only mow the lawns
and don't forge new neural pathways.

These new pathways come about by making music
at the level of silent intuition and openhearted innocence.
By stumbling into methods and sounds that are unknown
and possibly uncomfortable and awkward.

Falling and flying and failing.

The axiom in creative writing
"no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader"
Lovemaking requires no GPS.

Vantage Point

I have a gigging kit and a kit that stays set up permanently in my living room. For my show on Friday night I took the snare drum from my permanent setup with me. Today I got on my drums to mess around with some African Claves from Billy Martin's book but my snare drum was still in its case in the van.

I decided to use this as an opportunity to move toward sound and away from musical dependencies and habits. Expanding intimacy with drumming itself rather than with a drum set, with sound itself rather than with music, with the act of drumming rather than with what I am drumming.

I walk around the town playing on mailboxes, road signs, thrift store objects, telephone poles, benches, buckets, cups. Anything that looks like it might have a song I check to make sure. So why doesn't that extend to the drum set as much? Habit? Comparison? Expectations? Musical taste? Fear? I think the main thing is there is no preconception about a mailbox or a five gallon water jug. There is not an extensive library, in the exalted annals of music history, of mailbox and water jug recordings and techniques.

These found-percussion trysts are innocent encounters with sound. There is no, "am I doing this correctly?" because there is no "correct" way to play a mailbox or a water jug.  The obsession with technique and perfectionism, as it correlates to the learning of an instrument, is only useful if it does not tamper with the ability to innocently experiment with your instrument stripped of all historical and musical context.

That is why I didn't go and get my snare drum. I did a practice session and some soloing minus the snare. It completely changed my relationship with the toms.  It changed the way I thought about melody and drumming. The grooves were wilder and simpler. Africa came to visit or vice versa. When you change vantage points your vision and your knowledge expand.

Set up your drum set backwards.  Use only floor toms.  Remove all your cymbals. Do a solo blindfolded. Drum in the forest. Video tape yourself and play it backwards.  Duct tape your right hand to your heart and drum with your left. Do anything to break your dependency on your instrument in order to increase the chance of entrance into extra terrestrial innocence where intuition and sound converge in the melted heart.

Four Arm Drumming

I just had a wake up call on the drum set. I've been putting a lot of attention on the expressive side of drumming, drumming as a language, drumming out of time as a rainstorm aka I'm John Cage and Merce Cunningham at the same time etc, mischievous ANTIDOTES and joyful FUs to the institution of airbrushed-smooth jazz-perfectionist-I'm looking at myself in the mirror while I over rehearse laptop karaoke-purgatory timekeeping of Swiss watch salsa as a whipped mule of general business-school of drumming. Even though the metronome is a demon there is still a place for Him on the altar as we all must enter the volcano together.

In other words even though a large chunk of my time is spent outside the suburbia called music and into the wilderness called Sound Itself,  I still am always hungry for techniques that make my experiences in all three worlds more pleasurable, competent, and primed for  unlocking the greatest possible power and surprise in the world of innovation and proficiency when I am at the drum set.

Today I realized that so much of my playing is handcentric. I think many players have this, let's call it PPS (Practice Pad Syndrome). I know all the American rudiments and can rock the first 1/3 of Alan Dawson's rudimental ritual over a samba but even still all the focus is on the hands. So today I got rid of one stick and pretended like my right foot was my other hand.  I did the seven stroke roll (and some other and eventually why not all the rudiments?)

FOOT FOOT HAND HAND FOOT FOOT HAND

I know this is common knowledge but thinking of the feet as 3rd and 4th arms unlocks so much.  It turns common and sometimes boring sticking patterns into grooves and unlocks the feet as soloing and integrated voices of our four limb arsenal. Water the root to enjoy the fruit. For real.

Losing Control: Antidotes to the Grid

Drummers are obsessed with rhythm. But not the moon rhythms that drive the oceans, no the pre-fatal abstraction of machine rhythms.  Devotees to the false god of the clock.  Perfectionism among drummers is an epidemic, and because of that the paralysis of the fear of the unknown is rampant.

The grid is a very small area, just as visible light is an extremely narrow wavelength. The grid I define as the area where a traditional "note value" could theoretically house a "note"....similar to the options on a drum machine, any quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty second, and maybe sixty fourth, in whatever numerical subdivision up to say 12.

Yes the the grid is worth knowing. And if you are looking to be employed where metronomic exactitude is the karaoke death sentence of Sisyphusian muledom then by all means learn accountability so one can be of service to all styles and feels of music.  Even though there is survivalist sarcasm here I fully believe in knowing the grid.  Marcel Duchamp says, "I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."

But this loyalty to the machine, to the standardization of the ear, to the extremely narrow bandwidth of "rhythm" I think is causing drummers to be too careful.

To fully gain control there has to be the courage to completely lose control.  The reins are held loosely. Shamanic trance, drumming as painting, drumming as breathing, drumming as language, words, love letters mailed and love letters set on fire, the freedom of off-the-grid exploration.  For some off-the-grid will be a place to live and to work and to never come back to the compressed heart of the machine.  For others it will be a way of relating to the instrument with a new perspective so that the grid becomes more lively and dynamic rather than a fixed and passive structure.

Some antidotes to perfectionism and slavery to the grid.

First the "grid" can always be loosened and humanized.  Allow imperfections, fluctuations in tempo, fire up the neurons in the heart and bypass the cul de sac autoeroticism of the intellect in a searing arc of red meteor fire.

Accelerations:   (feet play ostinatos on the grid:) hands speeding up slowing down creating rhythms based in the joy of movement and the feeling of the sound as the criteria.  No devotion to bar lines or time signatures and each hand has freedom of tempo, dynamics, and domain.  Practicing total freedom of the language of the hands while the feet hold down a very tight pattern or an extremely loose unfixed pattern.  The soul itself can become the groove and that needs no commentary and all music becomes ornamental to that primary condition of ecstasy.

Monologues: In the same way that speaking does not require any practice to a metronome. Drum for or to someone or something.

Weather: waves, rain, haunting of fog, the wind, the atmosphere is full of images and beautiful pulsations that are off the grid, natural, and primal as fuck.

Minimalism: let silence be the dominating voice like a very distant thunderstorm. Practice primarily listening and get transfixed in the ecstasy of non-doing.

Making love:  The dynamics of lovemaking, infinitely silent and sweet to violent euphoria and abandon.

Polyrhythms:  Set up both sustainable and unsustainable systems. Experience not being able to maintain a rhythm as an entrance into it's own oscillation of creation destruction creation destruction. That is a very primal thing to be a part of.  Fall off the horse and get back on.  Invent new ways to gallop.

Sound barrage:  Avalanche, eruption, downpour,  experiment with a full and complete unleashing on the drums but play at a dynamic that IS sustainable, in other words let it increase your energy rather than playing over the edge that will deplete you.  Try a quiet incessant barrage and then build from there.

Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance: This is a pre requisite for all drummers

Sing Sing Sing Sing Sing:  This is a pre requisite for all drummers

 Adore the wildness of the masters: MILFORD GRAVES

Chris Corsano..... Yummy

I'm Convinced this Group is Proof of Something Major :)

Yes! No!