You
Hum It, I’ll Drown It. (A drummer breaks silence)
First published in the Open University Music Society Journal, Autumn 2019.
The drollery…you get used to
it. What do you call someone who hangs
round with musicians? A drummer. How can you tell if a drummer’s at your front
door? The knocking speeds up. What’s the definition of perfect pitch? Throwing a drum-kit into a skip without
touching the sides. Ancient lore, too,
gets in on the act: ‘If thine enemy do wrong thee, buy each of his children a
drum.’ Like drum solos on rock
double-albums from the Seventies, the gags roll on.
Drummers are not alone, of
course, in being the target of status-banter in the music world. Viola-players
know the feeling. Despite the excellence
of the likes of Slim Harpo and Larry Adler, the harmonica remains for many a
last-minute buy as a child’s Christmas present (inviting wounded looks from the
parents: see ancient lore, above). The
‘perfect pitch’ quip is also applied to the banjo, an instrument that suffers
further from P.G. Wodehouse’s pronouncement that a gentleman is someone who
knows how to play it but refrains from so doing. But drummers…ah, they’re beyond the
pale. Preferably far beyond, otherwise
they’ll misread it as pail and want to clatter it.
I’m a drummer. I also play guitar and ukulele (skip-alert) and
I belong to a singing group. As old-time comics were wont to say, however, it’s
the way you tell ‘em. If I tack
‘drummer’ to the end of the list, some people take me for a relatively serious
musician. If I lead with ‘drummer’, I’m
branded. ‘Ahh, Ringo,’ they might say,
as if mis-remembering the Bisto ad.
Sometimes it’s ‘What do your family think?’, as if I’ve just confessed a
yearning to reinvent myself as Vlad the Impaler. A similar question, ‘What do the neighbours
think?’, implies my profound misanthropy.
Actually, the neighbours are
unaware: for home practice I have an electric kit with headphones, which keeps
the sound intimate and allows me to experiment with different settings, ranging
from Country Rock through Reggae to Timpani. So all that the transient fauna in
our cellar ever hear is a tapping-fest, as of someone in Starbuck’s who ordered
a coffee half-an-hour ago.
What does a drummer ask a band
leader? “Do you want me to play too fast
or too slow?” Ah, these we have loved. This is an important point, though, and not
just for drummers. Wooziness of tempo is
bad news, especially if poor acoustics are on hand to aggravate it. But
drummers are expected to be guardians of the pace—not least (and quite rightly)
by bass players, with whom they form the engine room of a band. Once I played with a blues band whose leader,
the bass guitarist, was fastidious about tempo.
One of the band’s highlights was the Muddy Waters song ‘Baby, Please
Don’t Go’ (a sentiment which wouldn’t benefit from being urged to the sound of
drums), popularised in the early Sixties by Them, Van Morrison’s group. Famously, that version ends with a dead-stop. Woe betide any guitarist who, copying it,
allows a note or chord to ring on. And
woe betide any drummer who sees the last bar as a perfect opportunity to
demonstrate that, look, they’ve got the drum-line to Bolero down pat. The leader
and I were rehearsing once and he became so worried that I wouldn’t stop dead
that he inadvertently did just that about three bars from the end, leaving me
to disarrange the air on my own. I say
‘inadvertently’: perhaps it was an electrified version of a knight-errant’s
test. At any rate, from his perspective
I was just blithely clattering on and might not be trusted to put a sock in it
with the others. I exited the band
shortly after.
Nowadays I play the djembe, a
large West African hand-drum, with a group connected to the Elgar School of
Music in Worcester. For some time the
leader has been seeking a snappier title than Elgar School Folk Ensemble. My suggestion, Eddie and the Nimrods, has yet
to find favour. We play a variety of
pieces from all over the world and gig in various places: local festivals,
fetes and most recently in a bandstand in the middle of a lake. Our melody instrumentalists know what they’re
doing; I strive to sound as though hanging around with them has paid off. As you would expect with folk tunes, most of
the pieces are 3 / 4 or 4 / 4 and some require less interference from me than
others. Technically, late medieval tunes
such as ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Pastime with Good Company’ require just one
emphatic beat at the start of every bar (or, for 3 / 4 time, every second bar,
otherwise I start sounding like an insistent bailiff). For a while, with such tunes, I pondered
nipping out for a quick drink, having rigged up a dummy’s hand to be worked by
remote pedal. Then I realised I could
smuggle in some Latin American beats, provided that the fills weren’t
intrusive. I’ve yet to be caught
out. If and when I am, I plan to state
as historical fact that both Elizabeth I and her dad used to hold Samba
Dance-Offs at Hampton Court.
But you can’t rely on the safe
haven of crotchet values. The Greek
pieces we play are invigorating, colourful—and 7 / 8. In one, ‘Kalamatianόs’, there’s a rest-bar
between parts A and B—or almost. The
leader fills it with a vamp on his mandocello (cue Frankie Howerd raised
eyebrow), nearly everyone else comes in on the sole quaver at the end and I
have to join them at the start of the next bar.
It’s like ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ in reverse but usually I’m present and
even correct. A more recent piece,
however, ‘Zwiefacher Die Alte Kath’, flits capriciously between 3 / 4, 2 / 4 and 5 / 4. Should my path ever cross Kath’s, be she
never so alt, there’ll be a free and frank Gesprӓch.
Throughout this article I’ve
sensed the drummer jokes hovering in the ether, so I feel duty-bound to sign
off with another: my favourite, really, since for good or ill it says something
about this drummer’s character. A boy
was at a jazz workshop and became enthralled by the drumming. At the end of the day, the organisers asked
him how he’d enjoyed it: ‘Great,’ he said. ‘When I grow up, I want to be a
drummer.’ ‘Son,’ came the reply, ‘you can do one or the other. You can’t do both.’
Michael Thomas is a tutor on A815, Part
1 of the Open University MA in English. He tends to keep
his hands clasped tightly together in lectures.
www.michaelwthomas.co.uk
