By Nils Jacobson
III. Jazz Drumming: Old School, New School, and the African Helix
AAJ: So get back to me on the jazz angle.
GEB: On the jazz angle, from the drumming standpoint, it's been Art Blakey and Max Roach.
AAJ: But that's old school.
GEB: Yeah. That is old school.
AAJ: How about new school?
GEB: Blackwell. [laughs] Yeah, he's kinda old school too.
AAJ: I hear new school in your playing. You're not just tangled up in swing and bop. You've got other things going on.
GEB: Well I've definitely checked out Other Dimensions in Music, and I've checked out what Susie [Ibarra] was doing, even previous to David S. Ware. I did gigs with her, like Context Studio. I was singing and doing poetry (totally different). Pheeroan Aklaff really introduced me to opening out a little and running free, cutting it. But then when I cut, I conceptualize it as samples.
I think to myself, "Well, OK, I have all these particular drumming styles or drumming periods to access." So I'm going to cut to 1920, or 1967, or Rashied Ali; or I'm going to cut to Tony Williams (Miles) or Tony Williams (Lifetime). I'm going to cut to Joe Zawinul from Weather Report. I'm going to reference that, because those two worlds were totally ignoring each other in the '70s. And I think we're just coming to terms with that now, in a lot of ways. A lot of people were turned off to the music because of various political structure, or various economic structure. Because of the way the distribution system was set up, that particular music didn't get to particular outlets.
AAJ: It was sort of the dawn of serious commercialization in the music. It's amazing that an iconoclast like Jimi Hendrix could make it big. Hard to make that happen now when your competition is Britney Spears, you know. She's got a navel.
We don't need to talk about that, though. I hear this cut thing. What's interesting is when you choose to do it... the context. Because when you're playing with other people, you're juxtaposing personalities. You're layering them. And you want to layer them in a way that's coherent. That's hard.
GEB: Sometimes you can hear old R&B from the '50s in some of his [David S. Ware's] growls. To me it's kind of obvious. If you're going to go there, go there. Some free jazz drummers don't even know... either they don't know how to groove, or they don't want to ("that's not free jazz drumming!"), or whatever. To me, "free" is not limited. "Free" means I have all this information about the history of whatever's gone through my instrument, and I can access it at any time and play it free. Or freely access it. It's not just, "I'm going to do my thing." For some people it is, but for me it means that I am free to groove here, not groove there...
AAJ: Do a little calypso there.
GEB: Exactly. I'm not taking it back. If there's a groove, you know, some other people are going to hear it. Some people who might not check it are going to check it now.
AAJ: It's funny, because when I talked to David [Ware] he said essentially the same thing. That some of these "free jazz drummers" don't play time. They refuse to play time.
GEB: You ask them to play time, they look at you like, "What are you talking about?" They look offended, or scared. One of the two.
AAJ: At their roots, drums are all about time. That's the core of it, really.
GEB: Don Moye, also.
AAJ: Let's talk about that African thing, especially West Africa. They do a lot of hand drumming to get different textures, and there's an ensemble thing...
GEB: A fabric. Just kind of weaves. It's like a matrix, almost. A matrix, a wave of information. It's like bits. It's just going to swirl, almost in a hive, and then spread out, then flatten. It's like some kind of helix, almost, that continuously rolls and flattens.
Yeah, that's the other thing in this drumming tradition and it has that that in it as well, and there's only one drummer now. And a lot of my lessons also come from West African drumming, and also samba (a New World, diaspora concept). But the same concepts are apparent there. The bell, call and response. Bass, snare sounds.
AAJ: So what's your experience or desire to play with other drummers? Are you doing that with electronics?
GEB: The drummers for me, right now who I'm playing with ... Yorel [Lashley], a percussionist I'm playing with right now. And the machine... the sequencer. That's expanding for me. Right now I'm getting into programming a bit. Just live processing, and taking that to another level where the computer is free to react to what the performer's doing. So that's my goal, to get that kind of exchange. I'm not really stuck on playing with the sequencer, but it works.
AAJ: So how about the Old World drums? Tunable drums?
GEB: I don't play with those. I think that there's so much inside the drum set. I studied a bit of West African music. Listened to a lot of things. But I haven't... something about tradition that I'm not necessarily that fond of. That might just be the "free" in me, the ability to do anything I want.
AAJ: But when you're talked about shifting or sampling in Ware's group, you're applying the tradition. You're just fragmenting it.
GEB: Right. It's fragmented. It's like, "yeah, I'm an American drummer, but I can try to trace my roots to Africa." But it's going to be fragmented. It just is. I can go, and try to do whatever I can do.
AAJ: You'll never be the total drummer.
GEB: Yeah. I can go to West Africa, but I can also go to my great grandmother's roots as a Catawba Indian. It's that... I have yet to even uncover that drumming tradition. There's this whole world of... You know, America was doing fine for a long time. And now it's doing fine in a lot of ways, too. Yeah, there's negative consequences of colonialism, but there's also positive consequences of colonialism.
The concept that I go back to is that the drums, the music that we have... jungle, drum-n-bass is a perfect example of the beauty of our connected culture and our connected economic system. It's a cross-pollination, a cross-fertilization. The New York hip-hop scene getting constantly stuffed down the throats of people in the UK and Europe. Being sold... also the history of and the connection between the United Kingdom and the Caribbean and Jamaica, and Europe's own techno and dance music. That whole continually cycling cross-pollination of ideas, the exchange of culture (and money).
AAJ: Which are becoming equivalent.
GEB: Right, really. And we're having this constant conversation about "Who stole the soul?" It just keeps coming, and it's not something that we can get away from.
AAJ: So how do you view your place in that? You're just a little speck of dust in the big picture, economically.
GEB: I'm just trying to make my way, and be a positive influence in my own small way. I work at a settlement house in the Lower East Side. Mostly it's my dance company. My girlfriend runs a dance company called Silver Brown Dance, and I'm the music director for it. So we use the space. But there's also community based space. You know, it's been there since 1886. It's been there through all the changes the Lower East Side has gone through, from Eastern European immigrants to Latin American and Chinese immigrants. And now to chic hipsters, Euro and non-Euro. So I'm trying to put my statement out to the world. I'm doing this series of performances called Soul at the Settlement. I'm taking my little steps, and trying to just work it out. Live it out in my life as much as possible. I'm working through multi-identities, and understanding what it means to be a citizen of this world. And there's no denying that we're in a mix and we're going to be continuing the mix. And I'm all for it. And that's how I grew up.
AAJ: It's all consistent.
GEB: It's not just a coincidence that Bon Jovi was the first record that I could play through all the way, you know. And I love that. It's all connected, and it's all in there.
On to Part 4-7...
