It's a running joke amongst many of my students that they come to me to learn about jazz drumming, and I'm the person that makes them quit.
I tell them all that there's really no point learning how to play "jazz drums" (whatever that means) unless they actually love the music and want to be involved in it. There's a lot of evidence of drummers in the world who can't operate in the jazz world who have built great careers, and to be honest there's a lot of great jazz drummers who just aren't making enough to money to make it a full time career.
While it sounds like i'm being discouraging, what I am actually trying to do is to encourage all my students to be honest with themselves about their personal tastes in music. I really believe it's not my job to tell my students what to like, but it's my job to teach them a process that allows them to over time break down whatever it is that they like in a systematic and logical way to get closer to the ideals they have in mind. The work involved in really getting to know a certain style, or to learn to emulate whichever drum hero it is the student is trying to work on is so involved that in reality the only thing that will sustain a student through the process of learning is a true love for the music he is trying to learn.
In the context of learning how to be a jazz drummer, very often young students are drawn to the more modern styles of contemporary drummers. It's very usual for teachers to tell them things like "you aren't ready to try to be like that, you don't know shit until you have listened to (insert drum hero from the 50's to the 60's here). And drum teachers are not wrong, but I believe that we need to also engage the student in their process. We think of the masters like Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Cobb, Billy Higgins, and Roy Haynes (amongst so many others) as the "old school" way we need to learn to play first, before we can move on to the more "modern" stuff. But i've come to realize that these drum heroes are not only the foundation we build our vocabulary on, but they're also the guys who are going to be eternally hip and eternally relevant. The truth is that a student can only glean the information his ear is ready to accept, and the old masters had so much going on in every single note that a young student whose ear is not as attuned yet may not even be able to hear why what they're doing is so amazing, and important.
It's easy to be drawn to fast moving, metrically complex drumming. It's much easier for a young student to be inspired and drawn to something that is obviously impressive, rather than subtle genius. And that's okay, that's actually part of the process.
I encourage all my students to be honest about who they like, but to also wholeheartedly chase being their heroes to a 100% degree. And that means not just learning the licks, but the tone, the timefeel, trying to understand the musical decisions they are making, trying to understand their heroes to such a degree that even though they're not playing the exact notes their heroes played, the vibe they bring to the music will remind those in the know of who they're trying to emulate.
I state this again - being able to bring the energy and the vibe of the person you're studying is much more important that being able to play the transcription you've transcribed note for note. In fact, to me it's much more impressive if you are able to sound like your hero, without playing the exact notes.
If we start putting the target of 100% emulation into the picture, it is inevitable that the young student will fail. This is mainly because whichever modern hero he has chosen, that modern hero didn't grow up listening to himself. it's impossible to get to the core of what any musician is without tracing through the influences that drummer has listened to in his own process. What ends up happening for so many of my students is they find they can play all the notes, but they can never make it sound and feel like their heroes.
It sounds like failure, but in reality it is at this point that the student's ear is more open and ready to accept the subtleties that makes what their modern hero play magical. The magical timefeel of the old masters is always there, and present in the drumming of our modern heroes. But it's disguised because it's so cut up, turned upside down and reinterpreted that it makes it hard for us to really hear the foundation of the time feel that our modern jazz drummer heroes are building their vocabulary on.
Make no mistake, there are tons of guys who can play Marcus Gilmore's vocabulary. But they'll never make that vocabulary sound as good as he does UNLESS they're coming at it with the same foundation in the history that he does.
I'll never forget something one of my teachers said to me about time feel
"You young guys, you can't play time cause you've never heard what it really is. All you listen to is music where the timefeel is there, but it's so cut up that you don't get to hear clearly what it's all about. If you want to know what a quarter note sounds like, go and listen to the old big bands, because those bands played NOTHING but quarter notes all night long. And they made it feel great, because their job was to do just that".
He was absolutely right, but I wouldn't have accepted that truth unless I was in a place where my ear was searching for it.
It's at that point that i encourage my students to then listen to their hero's heroes - and to try then to sound like each of those guys. And because they've already gone through the process of trying to sound like somebody by using their EARS, and not a pen and paper, I can then guide them by trying to tell them to always listen out for tone, timefeel, blend with the rest of the musicians and how the drums always fit into the musical relationship with everyone else.
Inevitably, they also realize they can't be 100% like their hero's heroes, but they learn so much from the process of trying to emulate the masters by ear that when they come BACK to listening to their modern heroes, they come back with a much greater appreciation and understanding of what it takes to execute drumming of such complexity while still always being locked in the the time feel that has made people dance from the beginning of history.
So in a roundabout way, here's what i'm saying. I've been asked multiple times how much i've transcribed in my life. And what i tell students is that i've transcribed some whole solos from some jazz drummers and tried to write down and play what some drummers where comping note for note across full choruses. But in reality, I never really used those transcriptions ... I never committed them to memory, I couldn't start and end anywhere in the phrases, I didn't know what the music should SOUND like, i only knew what it LOOKED like on a piece of paper.
I got a lot more out of listening very intently, over and over again, to my favourite records and trying to close my eyes and imagine HOW Elvin Jones was hitting the cymbal to get his magical sound, HOW to use my body in conjunction with the stick to get Tony Williams' combination of clarity and raw energy out of the cymbal, how Roy Haynes left hand made the snare drum sound the way it did, HOW Billy Higgins shoulders would be moving while he was playing with Cedar Walton and comping perfectly with Cedar Walton's left hand ... you get the picture.
When I came across a lick that I couldn't figure out by ear, sure I wrote it down. Then i would play it in different subdivisions, displace it, reorchestrate it, connect it to vocabulary I already could play easily to create new vocabulary, all that jazz nerd stuff. But most importantly even when I would steal from the old masters to create vocabulary that sounded like my own, I was always asking myself how I could make it SOUND and FEEL like something that my heroes would have played.
When we transcribe something on paper, we are limited in how we describe the music. We only have dynamic markings like Forte, or Pianissimo, and accented and non accented notes. But what makes MUSIC happen is the dynamic cadence of every phrase and the placement of every phrase in the conversation and context of the music as a whole. And that's something that really can never be put down on a piece of paper. Imagine watching your favourite stand up comedian do his act in a complete monotone where he didn't manipulate the timing and placement of his words. Well, when we think learning music is all about just putting what we hear to paper and learning those things from memory, we are in danger of sounding that way.
To all my friends trying to figure this out, I encourage you to learn everything you can from both the history of the music, and the music that is currently around you. Nothing great is ever created from a vacuum, and there's nothing new in the world of music, it's just presented in a new way. What is important is to remember that when we're trying to emulate our heroes and to learn from them, the vast majority of the information in the music that is important and magical simply CANNOT be put down on a piece of paper. The only hope a student has is to use his ears to connect the sounds that he loves to himself and to form an emotional and physical connection with the sound he is chasing, because it's only when that has happened that he has a chance of recreating it in a performance setting and bringing the weight of history and information with him wherever he goes and whoever he plays with.
The notes on the page are the very important 1% of the music we're trying to learn - all i'm saying is it's also as important to learn the other 99%.
All my Best,
Wen