drummige cru (slight return)

Aaron at Airport Through The Trees with pt 2 of his posts on 1970s drummage

drummage (slightest of returns)

tiny bit more on Drummers Who Are Characters


Andrew Parker on the battle for #1 :

Ringo Starr vs. Keith Moon drum battle:

I don't know quite what to make of it all.
Did Keith Moon play on Abbey Road or just get inspired by it? 

Our God Is Speed reminds us that Robert Wyatt is both an excellent drummer and a Character. 

That reminded me of a couple more ommissions:

Mick Fleetwood (whose buffoonery was touched upon in the very first drumstuff post) 

And Bun E Carlos of Cheap Trick

His regular-schmoe, cig-hanging-off-lip, tie-undone, office-slob shtick very evident in this promo for "Dream Police." As is his non-flashy excellence as a drummer

drummige cru, 5

Andrew Parker:

"Ride - Here and Now. Ride was briefly one of my favourite groups during my teenage years, in part, because of the terrifically kinetic drumming of Loz Colbert. Mixed beneath the walls of shoegaze guitars, his flurry of fills imbue a wonderful tension to the group’s debut album, Nowhere, always serving the song despite constantly threatening to spill outside the constraints of the guitar-based pop songs. If he’d played in a blues-based rock band in the 1970s, he’d be considered an absolute maniac behind the kit"

                    [in all honesty i never thought Ride would come up in a discussion of great drumming, rhythm, etc]

Douglas Keeley:

Silver Apples “Oscillations” -  "Just listen to the precision of the drumming and how crisp the snare and hi-hat sound! This song was really unimaginatively sampled by UNKLE for their track “Rock On” in the mid 90’s, but let’s not go there!"

                                          [cor, good choice]

"Silver Apples then got me thinking of garage rock, so here’s The Haunted’s “1-2-5” - which early incarnations of Loop used to play (c.1986)"

 

"and The Groupies “Primitive” 

                              [love it -- drummer's great but it's the crypt-like echo that makes the difference] 

"Finally, here’s Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut” which I’ve included for the percussion break from 2m 37” to 3m 19”…"

 [righteous choice, those sploshy, laden-sounding ride cymbals and hi-hats.... i would however go, in fact i WILL, go for 'War Pigs' -- which, when it came on the car radio recently, prompted from my 13 year old son in the back seat an involuntary, virtually emetic reaction: "this is terrible music" [pause, then as if shaking his head in disbelief] "terrible music". i drily noted, while in mid air drum,  that it was only one of the greatest rock songs of all time, not that that cut any ice with Kieran. i never did establish whether it was ozzy's vocal, ah, 'grain' that distressed him so, or the bombastitude of the almost breakbeat like drum intro]

Marty Brown:

"Here's something from my home town of Melbourne, Australia. The band is My Disco and the drummer is Rohan Rebiero. An amazing combination of the minimal and the maximal."

Jake Smith:

"Enjoying the drum series, but, all very hip underground choices for the most part so far. Where are the in plain view greats? Thinking: Frank Beard of ZZ Top (La grange is great), Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell, Bill Ward, Neil Peart, Phil Rudd of AC/DC (laying down the solid groove you can dance and drink a beer to without spilling a drop), Charlie Watts. All these guys are so good they pretty much make my heart explode with joy and make my toes a tap, tap, tap. Give it up for the stadium monsters!"

[absolutely. indeed i'll probably be leaning that way, towards the obvious-er or at least the mainstream here on out. leavened with the odd obscurity. but i  appreciate the digging people are doing, some great rhythmic arcana being shared] 

Andrew Bowman: 

" Marvin Gaye "T Plays It Cool" - This one was sampled a lot in hip-hop but already has a ready-made loop feel to it. Marvin does this fill and the end of the first four bars and it must have just seemed so good to him, that he just keeps doing it every time round, never really altering it or missing it out. There are changes in the groove's intensity, but the patterns with the killer open hi-hats remain throughout. "

"Inell Young "The Next Ball Game" - Filthy New Orleans business. James Black's drumming is so wild and in your face, it's like "oh, there's a song going on in there somewhere?" [warning sound quality is poxy on this -- sounds like it's being played by fleas inside a thimble]

"23 Skidoo - "The Gospel Comes To New Guinea"--  Ten-minute jazz drum showcase dressed up as apocalyptic industrial, innit. "

and finally (for now)


John Lydon:

[via Ashley Bodenham]

drummige cru, 3 - kodwo special

got another massive bunch of suggestions to unload here -- and i really need to get back on track with with my own (still, amazingly, unduplicated by anybody else) - but for starters,  a post dedicated solely to the laser-focused listening of Kodwo Eshun:

Zap Pow, "River"

"Both versions of this are magnificent, I can't, or don't want, to choose between them 

 

 "These productions from 1977 are Lee Perry at his zenith 

"Were drums ever more sibilant and luminous than this?"

Watty Burnett, "Open the Gate"

"More Lee Perry- the drum-kit-at it's most dread, reggae at it's most hallowed" 

The Beatles, "Its All Too Much"

"Astonishing in its splash and thwack. Above all, its chorused beat, as if Ringo has learnt how to clone each impact and is intent on demonstrating his newly born powers"   

 

Morton Feldman, "The King of Denmark", 1962, played by Max Neuhaus

"Feldman said this should be played quiet but I always ignore this and turn the volume right up in order to luxuriate in its gamelan-esque intricacies" 

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/aspen/mp3/denmark.mp3

The Scratch Orchestra, "Paragraph 2" of "The Great Learning", 1971 

"The score calls for the Orchestra to beat cushions with sticks- but you would never know - I imagine the relentless courage of Maoist march into battle  - onward onward 

"Cardew said the Orchestra had to imagine themselves drumming against a waterfall "

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/scratch_orchestra/great-learning/Scratch-Orchestra_The-Great-Learning_Paragraph-2.mp3 

Add N to X, "The Black Regent"

"In case anyone missed the point, I recall seeing Add N to X perform this with two drummers - what a glorious rampage" 

Michael Bundt, "The Brain of Oscar Panizza"

"The DNA of 'The Black Regent' is here in this amazing track rock-drum-kit v syncopated- synth death match from 1977"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

wicked selections -- particularly "River" (which I know and love from a Woebot roots 'n' dub tape from years ago;  it's also on this Pressure Sounds release) and Michael Bundt, who I'd never heard of... what a find that is!

drummige cru, 1

bloggers first: 

An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming (a/k/a Loki a/k/a IX-Tab a/k/a A Man Like Saxon) with three offerings in the zone where primal, cosmic and intensely corporeal meet  - the first, a serious case of give the drummers some...  the second, well yeah I did call for embodied rhythm, didn't I.... the third, dude must have chronic tinnitus...

The Phil Zone, shining a spotlight on Thom Mooney  and then on Kenny Jones

... and thus initiating what I hope will be a protracted battle of heaviosity with Man like Carl (formerly known as the Impostume, until recently Jason Phereus, now seemingly Neither Here Nor There) who counter-attacks with the mighty Sir Lord Baltimore,  having earlier kicked off with The Ventures

Our God Is Speed, a/k/a Greyhoos, seems concerned that this is a rock-only zone --  not at all: funk, rhythm & blues, disco, jazz, reggae, Africa, Latin America... absolutely any form of music where things are hit with sticks or hands. There's some good drum bits in classical music, I'm sure. Actually I have a bunch of percussion-only post-WW2 records, although they don't sit as well with me as the avant-electronic and musique concrete ones. Greyhoos then warms to the idea, offering something rootical, the sticks wielded by the mighty Carlton Barrett - and that's a favourite of mine too.

And finally Cardrossmaniac2, a/k/a Tim Space Debris, with a dollop of "ultimate drums" from the southern hemisphere, and way out of left field...

^^^^^^^^^^

And now the mailbag:

hey hey hey, it's Kodwo Eshun

Of "A Little Max" (Duke Ellington on piano, Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums, 1962)  he says:

Marvel at how irresistibly catchy Max Roach's drums are - 

Those fills and the rolls carry the composition as much as Ellington's piano - 

In fact, it often feels as if its reversed - the piano is keeping time and the drums are soloing- rolling out a continuous texturhythmelodies   

The drums are so deliciously wriggly, busy, lithe and limber...

And you have to admit, he's got a point there.

Drummage 2 from Kodwo is "From the Side of Man and Womankind", Tony Conrad with Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate, 1973. About which K says: 

Werner Zappi Diemaier's awe-inspiringly primitive, monolithic flat-beat, fusing with Jean Herve Peron's Stonehenge-bass

When gods walked the earth, it must have sounded like this  

That is a big sound. I expect we will  be hearing more from Faust.

Julian Weber, over in Berlin, nominates something pretty darn obscure:

A big song for me, when I was 15: the only recording by Double O, part of the DC hardcorepunk scene, 2nd song on B-Side, starts with great guitar feedback, the drumbreak is short, sharp and comes around 5:10. Sounds like it's played on cookie boxes. They listened to Go Go funk and Rotodrums, but it sounds not too funky, rather eerie. There's other great drum sounds from the same era: check out Void or United Mutation.

Wow, if Julian hadn't mentioned "hardcorepunk" , I'm not sure I'd ever have guessed. In fact I'd have been more likely to place it as some kind of  Duul-ish Airplane-influenced commune-dwelling combo out of early 70s Germany -- until maybe the voice comes in.  Oh, wait a minute I'm listening to the first track of two in the same YouTube clip! Okay, the second one is pure 1983 hardcore, and the break at 5.13 does pummel.

Marc Goodman says:

I was looking for live footage of Warren "Baby" Dodds, a big influence on Han Bennink whom I also considered, and found this astonishing solo by Jo Jones (not to be confused with Philly Jo Jones) during a performance of "C Jam Blues" by an augmented Oscar Peterson Trio. Solo begins around the 2 minute mark.

Fuck me, that is incredible. "Look ma, no sticks!".



John Mullen asks:

How many great punk drummers were there? Only two I can think of, Chris Frantz and Stephen Morris. I suppose any drum flourishes were associated with the supposed bad old days (cue up shots of Emerson Lake and Palmer's truck convoy).  Morris is just incredible in this clip - managing somehow to be metronomic, inhumanly precise but also providing the perfect frenetic backdrop to Curtis' words. There's are great bits around 2.20  and 2.59 when Curtis' jerks mirror exactly Morris' drum rolls. Despite its virtuosity, this isn't flamboyant drumming, it's perfectly measured to the chaos of the song (and Morris is so great at that - a drummer who embraces drum machines for New Order because it just fits).

Ferocious - Liebezeit auditions for the Stooges. 

Robert Dansby proffers a big batch -- I'll save some for the next go-round, but here's a couple that are coming from the same postpunk zone of not-rock insistence:

The Woodentops "Why Why Why", of which performance Dansby notes:

kick and snare crisp and loud and as always with benny staples relentless

 and 

Now that left me wondering if Rollo and the 'Tops maybe had actually heard the Feelies...  even if there's no direct inspiration, if you were to triangulate those contemporaries-of-each-other Woodentops and Violent Femmes backwards, the lines would converge at Crazy Rhythms 

Finally, the antithesis of these collegiate types: rock at its most implacable. The choice of Eoghan Barry, who says:

the one that immediately springs to mind is the opening of "When the Levee Breaks" although it is about the drum sound as much as what Bonham is playing. I'm sure if I thought harder I'd come up with plenty of others from Jaki Liebezeit, Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Mitch Mitchell but obvious as it is, that one does it for me

Obvious, yes, but undeniable. I was going to suggest it myself if nobody else did.