Do Drum Lessons Take Away Your Soul?

Does formal instruction take away the grit and rawness that makes you an individual? That gives your playing soul and wabisabi?

When some random commenters implied as much, I was at first defensive of the idea. (As a drum coach myself, I would certainly hope not.) And indeed you can find multiple soulful drummers, from Max Roach to Adam Deitch, who received formal training, and don’t seem the less soulful for it.

Still, it’s hard to get that example of “teaching birds to fly” out of my head. The archetypal illustration for my generation is the show choir from American Pie. Memory is sketchy, but one character joins show choir to meet girls, and accidentally ends up soloing in the end-of-year concert. Not the point. The point is the choir covers a song Marvin Gaye and James Taylor made famous - How Sweet It Is to Be Loved By You. And they do not do it justice. The “academic-ness” of their performance is played for laughs, but it sticks with you.

Did Marvin have a choir director shouting “chest voice” at him? Did James sing “bumble-bee-eee” to warm up? What about Bob Dylan? What about Eric Clapton or Robert Johnson.

Schooling, you see, gets a bad rap.

We picture square, untalented paper-pushers, pushing “square pegs into round holes”, and preaching “one-size-fits-all” pedagogy probably developed by somebody equally untalented, smoothing out all the individuality. Filing off the grit. Stealing the soul.

But how real is this?

First, there’s the issue of good vs bad pedagogy to confront. Yes, bad teachers can probably take a natural talent and kill it, mostly by killing the drive. But good teachers can foster and nurture that talent.

Next are two sets of very different things that can seem the same.

At the beginning, there’s “novice sloppiness” that can, at first glance, seem like “soulful wabisabi”. And while there’s certainly a rawness and abandon some students exhibit that we don’t want to squash, for most novices, including me, that sloppiness is nothing like the grit of the greats. We rush and drag in decidedly-unsoulful places, have inconsistent dynamics, are passive instead of proactive in playing for the song, don’t listen well, etc.

Next, there’s the “crucible” every learner needs to go through as part of the learning process; a natural artifact of taking something innate and intuitive and deconstructing it and making it conscious. A good educator can do this in a more “as necessary”/”microsurgery” way, but some self-consciousness is probably inevitable.

We’re seeing Nate Smith and Adam Deitch at the end-state, not during their first 2 years of drums.

So what was going on with that show choir?

Probably nothing very representative of the overall effect good training can have. I too have been in high school music programs, and the emphasis is to take a group of people with various levels of training and interest and create a serviceable performance on a deadline. You’re going to round off some edges. But considering the experience levels, it’s probably not like you clipped the wings of a fledgling Erykah Badu either. If she was in the choir, she had plenty of time to keep going on the journey.

Just like you, dear reader.

Hope you enjoy!

I Was WRONG About Jazz Drumming - Here's How

First things first - grab your transcription here.

A few years ago I made a video called something like Six Crucial Jazz Solo Idioms From The Greats. In it, I chronicled some of my favorite “block and tackle” jazz licks. The type of stuff that if you play, people know you’re playing jazz drums.

The Philly Joe stuff. The Max stuff.

In subsequent years I actually coached a handful of jazz drum students, and realized what a monumental jump I’d be asking them to make if I simply handed them some transcriptions of famous licks of great players and expected them to come out in their playing.

To begin, we’re far-worse-equipped to synthesize other people’s vocabulary into our own than I think most novice drummers realize. But it’s basically memorizing a sentence in a foreign language. Sure, you can say it, but are you reeeeally speaking it?

But even proto that, I hadn’t realized that simply playing swung 8ths - let alone with the hats on “2” and “4”, is a complex task, even for a drummer who can play basic vocab in so-called “straight 8ths”.

So in this video, I set out to right my wrong. I want to supply all the missing “connective tissue” that will help you synthesize the licks of the greats, not just memorize them. The swing feel, the coordination.

Then, some basic vocabulary to “flow” in swung 8ths, into which we can then insert Philly Joe or Max licks. And that very act of joining them to the existing flow helps to synthesize them.

If you’ve ever wanted an overview of how you might go from total novice to sounding pretty good at jazz drum improvisation, this lesson is for you.

Hope you enjoy!

If You're A Serious Drummer, You Should Do This

First things first - grab your transcription here.

And, until Thursday the 24th at midnight, get your membership to JP Bouvet Method here, using the code SaveAnnualJul25 to get $100 off an annual subscription, or SaveMonthlyJul25 to get 50% off your monthly sub for the first 6 months.

One useful way to show you’re not full of “it” on drums is to keep an ostinato with one limb or another.

From the “four on the floor” of drummers like Gene Krupa, to “2 and 5” on the hats in bars of 5 from Max Roach, to left foot claves, to more modern “stack ostinatos” from drummers like Jharis Yokley, to even big band figures, or the “hits” of the solo section of Jazz Crimes - which we can thank for the thumbnail inspo…

…drummers have been using ostinatos since way back.

And if we’re really being honest, part of it is to signal to an audience we know what we’re doing. Because we might know we’re not dropping any beats in that solo in 7, but to the audience, it’s abstract art their toddler could do.

Of course, that’s not the only part - ostinatos are a great “cross training” device to help make our time and coordination, and even our ideas, stronger. Not to mention they’re often useful to signal to a band where we are in the bar, in case of rare events like needing to arrive at the downbeat together.

But lest you look askance at the idea of signaling to an audience that you know what you’re doing - and I know my audience, and I know at least some are looking at it askance - let’s remember a few things…

First, drums have been a showpiece since their inception. We don’t begrudge Papa Jo or Sonny Payne being a little showy.

What’s more, throwing the audience a bone about where the beat is is often a way to bring them along in the musical story you’re telling.

Finally, sure we’re artists, but, per Benny Greb, are we not also entertainers?

Well, we’ll get into all of that in today’s video.

At any rate, hope you enjoy!

The Tony Williams Take That You Might Not Like

First things first - grab your transcription here.

And, until Thursday the 24th at midnight, get your membership to JP Bouvet Method here, using the code SaveAnnualJul25 to get $100 off an annual subscription, or SaveMonthlyJul25 to get 50% off your monthly sub for the first 6 months.

We revere Tony Williams. Drum royalty. One of the true greats of jazz drums, nay drums writ large. Real ones know. Everybody from Vinnie Colauita to Mike Mitchell credits Tony for quantum-leaping the genre. His performance are masterclasses in raw emotion balanced with control.

And that’s exactly why this controversial hot take from a clinic in 1985 might rub you the wrong way. Because it’s about the control side of “emotion balanced with control”.

First off, I love all my commenters. And you know what comes with a “but”, and the “but” is that there’s a sizable contingent I like to call the “just feelers”. Who are probably directionally right if they’re giving advice to overly-cerebral drummers. “This is supposed to feel good. It’s supposed to happen in your guts; not your brain.”

But that last clause needs another word. “Not just your brain.”

Because at least Tony Williams thought control was important. That raw emotion was mostly interesting in relationship to control. That he didn’t want to be “reeeeally hoping something worked”. He wanted to know for sure. And that’s not going to sit well with everybody.

Because it’s one thing if I say “practice, you guys. Control is important.”

You can dismiss me as “too up in his head”/”too cerebral”. But Tony?

But for anyone tempted to dismiss the “just feelers” entirely, they have at least half the equation too.

This stuff is usually much easier to see when we take it out of the realm of music. Do we hope pilots and astronauts have a good “seat of the pants”/”stick and rudder” sense of what to do, and good aviating instincts? Of course!

Do we think those develop without years of study and training?

How about doctors?

My favorite type of hot take is one that’s not really that controversial once you look into, but which still gets people up in arms. It’s like an underpriced stock. Anyway, my hot take on this hot Wednesday afternoon is that you need both the cerebral - the control - and the rawness - the emotion.

And “stick around” for when I reveal why that’s like golf.

At any rate, hope you enjoy!