I was raised in a family of musicians and music aficionados. No instrument or music was out of bounds, but no one was allowed to like music just to like it. The lowest form of music was music that was meant to be ignored like in an elevator or the grocery store. Our troupe were bards, not scholars, so extra emphasis was laid on untrained and naturally gifted players.
As a boy with a drumset in the basement, but not yet any actual drummers in the family, I took close notice to the few drummers mentioned in this way: Ringo, Levon, but especially Ginger. Two refrains: He was a jazz musician in London before becoming a global mega-star of rock drumming, and “his drum solos were so precisely tailored to the songs that you could hum the tune and the band would just pick it back up; It was an actual drum solo in the composition, not just a drummer flailing about wildly.”
As one does, I trusted this as gospel. It came directly from the people around me I trusted with my development as an artist. Then I started to learn about Mr. Baker. I watched the solos and the tape available. I listened to the recordings, learned about the man, his legacy and thought to myself, what is different about Ginger Baker and John Bonham? Why is it that more people will remember White Room than will know who John Bonham is, but more drummers will remember John Bonham than Ginger Baker?
Fucking ego. Both men had terrible ego problems, and their unwillingness to put it down behind the kit is what made them interesting to watch, but we’re done with watching our artists die before us for pay. We want them to live, and that has created JD Beck.
JD Beck is an American drummer, producer and songwriter. If you don’t know, listen to this then this, then you’ll know. They are currently promoting their first album and I’m very excited to watch their career and see what kind of new and interesting things they bring to the drums. Anderson .Paak; you’re on notice. Don’t let this one do anything dumb. I wanna see what Jaco would be like at 80.
JD is special because the way that JD plays the drums is respectful of how humans experience the drums. As much as Ginger and Bonzo and the like would have you believe that you need resonance and a broad range of sonic options to make the drums fit into a broader musical composition, JD has discovered that it’s not true. In much the same way that Jaco Pastoreus discovered a relationship with how people want to experience his instrument in their music, JD has taken an example from a generation of musicians who are digital natives. On top of all of that, the average quality of speakers have never been shittier. While Ginger and Bonzo will tell you 4 toms minimum, the average person can’t tell the difference between a drum set with 2 and a drum set with 5. While this is fairly unscientific, my wife can’t actually hear the chord changes in most songs with distorted guitars, but she’s not alone. While musicians and auteurs crave fidelity and the extended information it provides, the amount of auditory information coming off a drum-set is a lot. Need more proof? Turn on the radio to a station that plays pop music. Listen for a few minutes, then SING the drum part. Regardless of how you go about it or what song you hear, it will sound something like this. This is how tabla drum music is shared between players. Even a simple clay drum like the tabla, in context, presents so much information to the listener that the actual performance is obscured, so the players use a simplified language of mouth sounds that sound like drums. Mouth drums. The mouth drum set is always rudimentary. There are no extra tom-tom drums or cymbals on the mouth drum set. Similarly, there are no extra drums or cymbals on JD Beck’s drum set. The drums sound short and the cymbals sound high and scratchy. The floor tom and the bass drum make essentially the same noise, but the listener pays no penalty. In fact, the listener isn’t forced to think about that decision at all.
One of the things that makes JD Beck’s actual playing so special is that when they perform, JD makes the crowd feel the beauty of metric modulation, rudimental drumming, jazz comping, and a couple hundred years of tradition while completely missing the off-ramp to the drummer’s circle-jerk. By doing so, JD has created a path to feeling the way it feels to play the drums from your soul. John Bonham just wanted to share that with his family, and this profession tore him away from that. Ginger Baker is a sociopath who wanted to be a famous drummer. Of course they both loved the off-ramp to the drummer’s circle jerk. To be fair, JD Beck had a whole generation of hip-hop, synthpop, and electronic music producers who had already, by necessity, stripped most of the information out of the drumset, JD is just the bolded and brightest of a generation of drummers who will likely do the same.
Here’s what I mean, when I say JD is curating a selection of complicated musical conversations and making you feel them. In this exercise, you’ll listen to a short part of a song twice. The first time, you just listen to it. Just enjoy it, but bob your head or tap your foot.
JD Beck @ Zildjian Live: give it about 30 seconds to a minute.
The second exercise is to try and do that thing we do with all pop music: try and divide it into 4. Start back around @4:20 in the song, and whenever you feel comfortable start counting out 1, 2, 3, 4. You will immediately get that “rubbing my belly and patting my head” feeling. The music follows the familiar “4/4” pattern. You can stop and go back to listening for entertainment now. The tune is on their new album as a track called 2 SHRiMPZ featuring Mac Demarco.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Musicians who play drums need to be protected, and not because they are in danger of becoming machines, but because they are in danger of being just a drummer.
