Interview: Eric Ineke - The Big Beat!

Eric Ineke is one of Europe's most distinguished drummers, with an extraordinary career in which he has played with some of the greatest figures in jazz. For a full picture of the breadth of his career and a fascinating insight into a myriad of great players, and what it was like to work with them, you should read Eric's wonderful book 'The Ultimate Sideman', in which Eric speaks about his experiences and, in conversation with Dave Liebman, explores all aspects of being a sideman at the highest level over a long career. It's a must-read for any serious jazz musician.

I've had the pleasure of working with Eric in recent years, and as a bassist, I can tell you that when you play with Eric, you're playing with the Rolls Royce of the swing beat - you just sit into it and it takes you away effortlessly! We were together at a recent meeting of the IASJ, and I took the opportunity to talk to Eric and ask him about his life, music, and experiences. Eric is a great interviewee -  in conversation, just like his playing, he is honest, passionate and humourous. What follows is a fascinating glimpse into the life and work of a great jazz musician.


RG: How did you get started playing the drums? What age were you and how did it start

EI: Thirteen. I was thirteen years of age, and there was a friend at school who had a snare drum, and I loved to see that and hear that. And plus, I was listening to the radio a lot – jazz programmes and so on. And a son of a friend of my mother’s, he had some drum sticks, and he showed me -  I saw that he was always playing along with records, with drum sticks, like this – {plays jazz swing ride beat}

RG: So, the swing feel

EI: That’s the swing feel! OK, so I got it down and I played along to all the radio programmes, tapping along on the chair

RG: So the first thing you did was the swing beat

EI: Absolutely – I was hooked on that, and I’m still hooked on that, fifty years later (laughs)

RG: So when did you get your first drum set?

EI: Thirteen

RG: Thirteen as well?

EI: Yes, it was an English drum set. It was a snare drum from…..there was an English drummer called Eric Delaney, and Eric Delaney invented a sort of snare drum with a cymbal attached, a crash cymbal. So my brother, my oldest brother, he brought me that snare drum and a hi-hat. So I had that and some brushes.

RG: So did you get any lessons at any point?

EI: Yes, I first got classical lessons for one year, but that didn’t succeed so much because the guy gave me this terrible book of Heinrich Knauer, the German – it already sounds not swinging! (laughs) But he also had a Gene Krupa book, that’s a book from 1938, and he could play that on snare drum. You know, one of those classical snare drum players who loves also to do that. And eventually that was the book I liked most. But after a year, things didn’t work out – I wanted the cymbal beat, I wanted some swing in there, and I didn’t get it from that. And he felt it also, and so I said well, maybe we should stop. But I had already checked out guys like John Engels and Cees See, and I wanted lessons off these guys – that’s what I needed. So I was doing some interviews for the school paper, with a friend of mine who was also a jazz fan, we said ‘let’s do some interviews’, so we did some articles about jazz musicians in Holland and we had a chance to interview the Diamond Five. 

(John Engels)

The Diamond Five was the first really good Hard Bop combo in Holland, and John Engels was the drummer and I thought to myself, ‘if I get a connection there, and get to his house and maybe……” So, I went to his house, and he said, ‘yeah come on, you guys can interview me, but I just have one hour because I have to buy a new refrigerator’, (laughs). So he asked me if I was playing anything and I said yes, I played the drums, and he said ‘here’s a pair of drumsticks, get down in the cellar and play’, so I played something and he said ‘OK, I will give you lessons’

RG: Fantastic

EI: Yes, and my oldest brother he said ‘OK, I’ll pay for 25 lessons’ (laughs). Of course it became a big friendship, and over the years………. That was a great thing, because first of all there were not any jazz schools. They offered me - ‘Eric, if you want to go to the conservatory, it’s possible, but it’s only classical’, and I didn’t want that. So then I had a chance to get lessons from Johnny, and that was great because he had all the recordings – Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Charlie Parker – there was a bottle of Jenever on the table, and as soon as he wrote out phrases, he wrote out simple triplets – {sings typical triplet based bebop rhythm} – and I said ‘Hey, OK – this is the way Philly and Max are phrasing’, so as soon as I discovered that, I could figure out what they were playing on the records. So I never transcribed anything, but I did everything by ear. And maybe that’s the best way.

RG:  Definitely. I used to transcribe things, but it was much later when I transcribed full solos, I used to take bits. And of course I didn’t write them down, mostly because I didn’t know how to write (laughs), but I used learn a bit of Woody Shaw, a bit of McCoy Tyner, a little bit of this and that, and they would somehow come together in the playing, or hopefully they would, so I know exactly what you mean.

So what was the first band you played with – how long was it after you started playing, that you began playing with other guys?

EI: That took a couple of years, till I was like around 17, then I started to play with real jazz guys. Slowly I came into that scene.

RG: And of course you’re incredibly well known for playing with so many great visiting musicians. Who was the first guy you played with, who was the first….visiting American probably, though it may not have been.

EI: It was Hank Mobley

RG: That’s a pretty good start! (laughs)

EI: It was only one night, but that night, Hank Mobley came to Holland and I think it was Pierre Courbois who was supposed to do it but he couldn’t make the gig, and so they phoned me to do it. The first night Mobley was supposed to do it, but he got ‘ill’……

RG: Indisposed I think the English call it

EI: Exactly! (laughs) So, I got the gig, but instead of him they got Piet Noordijk, the famous alto player, to do the gig for him. But it was already with Ruud Jacobs on bass, Pim Jacobs who organized it, and Wim Overgaauw on guitar. And Ferdinand Povel joined also, he said ‘Eric I’ll come along as well’, and he came. That meant that everything went well because Rudi was such an exceptionally good player, so he got me off the ground immediately. So it was easy, I’d never experienced anything like that, with such a good bass player, because it runs by itself. And everything went fine and Piet Noordijk, said ‘hey, what’s your telephone number man, because I really like your playing’. So already, that thing got started and a couple of months later he called me for an important gig.

So Pim asked me, ‘could you make it in Groningen next week? Hank Mobley will definitely be there’, and Hank was there, and it seems, I heard that that was the best night of the tour, so I was very lucky to play with him. And I remember, and this is in the book too, he turned around to me and said ‘Yeah man, not everything is coming out yet but it’s swinging!’ (laughs)

RG: So what was he like? Do you have any memory of him?

EI: Not really, I didn’t talk to him – I was so shy, I was only 21 and was very shy. It was Hank Mobley, so I knew him from the records and Wim Overgaauw, the week before, told me that I should come to his house and I’ll give you the album of Hank Mobley with Grant Green’, the famous ‘Workout’ – ‘That album’ he said ‘you should learn’ – so I was listening to it all the time. And of course he didn’t play one tune from it! (laughs)

One nice thing – during the concert he said to Wim Overgaauw, ‘who’s you’re favourite guitar player?’, and Wim said, ‘Grant Green’, and Hank didn’t say anything. And then about 10 minutes later he turned to Wim and said ‘Mine too’ (laughs). But he looked like on the cover of the records with the sunglasses and the jacket – looking cool. And it was great because the phrasing was also different to what I had encountered with the Dutch players, you know, that little feeling of behind the beat, just a little – which of course with Dexter was enormous, but with Mobley it was just slightly behind.

RG: You told me that you went to New York for a while – how did that happen and what effect did it have on you?

EI: That was in 1966, I was 19. They had these student trips for American students from the Amrican Field Service, they organized that the students who studied in Europe could go back to their Daddies and Mummies, in the US in the summer. The Europe-Canada line always had a band on board, most of the time Dixieland. There was one great Dixieland band in Holland, the Beale Street Jazz Band, a very professional band – the piano player was Henk Elkerbout who was already playing in the Skymasters. But the drummer couldn’t make it – normally you go 10 days on the boat, one night in New York, and next night you have to go back. But this trip we could skip one trip, so we could stay three and a half weeks in New York. At our own expense of course, but the travel was free, we got some money on board, all meals – everything was free, so you only had to live in New York, or in the US, wherever you want to go.

The plan was for the whole band to go to California, hire a car – which most of them did. But the trumpet player said to me ‘Eric man, let’s stay in New York – I know some places’ – he had already been in New York before – ‘we’ll take a hotel and not drive through the corn fields!’ (laughs) So we took a hotel in Greenwich Village, and you know, when you’re 19 years old and you arrive in New York at six in the morning, and sail under the Verazzano Bridge, and see the New York skyline, and see the sunshine….. It’s tremendous – tremendous! You never forget that……….

So, we got a hotel – the Hotel Earl, which was right in Washington Square, and the Hotel Earl was where Charles Mingus always had his drinks, Eddie Coleman came there – it was a sort of musicians’ hangout. The hotel was a little bit, you know – funky. It’s still there by the way, though they’ve changed the name to the Hotel Washington, and it looks more decent now. But anyway, we checked in and he said ‘OK, let’s go down to the 5 Spot and see what’s happening’, and I said ‘The 5 Spot – wow!’ So we went to the 5 Spot, it was a Monday night, and there was this little sign hanging on the door of the club ‘Monday night – Elvin Jones Quartet – Paul Chambers, McCoy Tyner’!

RG: Wow!

EI: And I said “Elvin Jones Quartet!? Wait a minute! That’s where I’m going to be tonight!’ (laughs). So that night, at 10 O Clock in the evening I was sitting with a beer in front of Elvin Jones

RG: You won the lottery straight away!

EI: Yeah, I said THAT’s where I want to be, and every Monday night I was sitting there, from 10 till 4. And at 4.O’Clock, Frank Foster went into the kitchen next to the bandstand, practicing till 4.30

RG: Amazing

EI: When I played with him later on, I told him about that, and he was already in his 30s, and he said ‘yeah, that’s when I was a kid!’ (laughs). But it was so great to see Elvin – it was amazing, he had his little Gretsch kit, two cymbals, wearing a suit – his grey suit. And the rhythm section was Chambers with his famous bass with the lion’s head on it – and took his bowing solos he stepped in front and then stepped back again. It was so…….I mean, it was like a fairytale.

RG: I don’t think there’s any recording of Elvin with Paul Chambers…….

EI: There is!

RG: Is there?

EI: Yeah, there’s a record with Tommy Flanagan – I think it’s Clifford Jordan, with Flanagan, Chambers and Elvin. I think there’s a trumpet player on it, I think Donald Byrd, it’s a Blue Note album – I think it’s ‘Whims of Chambers’

RG: I’ll definitely look for it. So would you say that going to New York was a major landmark in making you, or crystallising in your mind, how you wanted to do what you wanted to do?

EI: Yes, definitely! What I saw was 200% jazz, and I said ‘that’s what I want to do, and nothing else’. This was the vibe I got. And I spoke to Joe LaBarbera later on, and he said that this was probably the last year that they had this vibe in New York – the one they had at the beginning of the 60s, the 50s  - that was the last period, because you already felt that there was something new coming up – the free jazz was coming up, and rock and roll – the Mommas and the Poppas, they’re already playing in Central Park, the Beatles…. That whole thing was already coming up, and you felt there was something exciting coming up.

I also went to a free jazz concert, to see the Ornette Coleman Trio with David Izenson and Charles Moffat

RG: Did you? What was the experience of seeing that? Did you find it amazing? Interesting? Disturbing?

EI: No, because everyone talked about David Izenson, because he was a technical wizard. Maybe later on, when I got to know the music better, I realized he wasn’t the greatest swinger in the world (Laughs) But Charles Moffat, he could play really, he was a good drummer, there was something exciting in that trio, you know, like on that Stockholm recording

RG: The Golden Circle recording?

EI: Yes the Golden Circle, and it was in that period. But you know, the free jazz concert, first of all I had to sit through Frank Wright and all these guys….. I hated it! (Laughs) Horrible music – what kind of shit is this!? You know? It was a big mess for two hours, and finally , in the end, Ornette came on.

RG: Ornette must have sounded like Dixieland after that (Laughs)

OK, let me ask you a musical question now. You’ve played with literally hundreds of bass players at this point – of course I’m asking a bass player question (laughs). What do you really like in a bass player – to play with – and what do you really not like?

EI: I think the bass player, and with you that’s never any problem, that uplifting feeling, that springy feeling….. so that as soon as you {hits desk to represent downbeat}, you feel that it’s lifting off the ground right away.  It’s sort of like you feel the upbeat, the off-beat – which I think is a really important thing in swing in general. The offbeat makes it get off the ground, and when a bass player has that, I really like it, because then it’s so easy to play with, you know? Sometimes, some bass players when they play time, and they play good lines, and everything is fine, but you have to work….

RG: I know what you mean – the energy is not there in the quarter note

EI: No, and that’sthe difference!

RG: And what do you really hate in a bass player

EI: Dragging! Dragging man – I always think about Jake Hanna, he said ‘don’t ever play with bass players who drag – it gives you back trouble!’ (Laughs) Which is a great remark, because it’s true man, if you stand up in the morning after a whole night working with a bass player who drags, you’ll have back trouble! Because you have to work. I’m the type who….. I have to have this energy!

RG: I know what you mean. Another musical question – a technical musical question. One thing I always notice about your brush playing is the enormous volume you generate from the brushes – you have this huge sound when you play with the brushes. Obviously it’s a conscious thing, but how did you…. (laughs) how do you do that!?

EI: It’s just that I keep the brush on the head and I press it a little bit. And then I get a fat….. always when I heard Elvin and Philly Joe, they had this tremendous fat brush sound. Johnny Engels was always, and still is, a great brush player, and he also could generate a fat brush sound. And when I heard the album ‘Tommy Flanagan Overseas’, with Elvin and Wilbur Little, that’s – in my opinion – the best brush record ever! Because there is a sound with brushes from Elvin that is unsurpassed. It’s so fat and so deep, and when I heard it I said ‘that’s the sound I want to know’, because it gives such a …. I don’t know. It’s like eating apple cake with cream, the best! (laughs) How do you say that…..? It’s the….

RG: The richest thing you can eat

EI: Yes, right! And that sound, that brushes sound – there are so many different ways, there is not ‘a’ way…. when I teach brushes, I just show them the easiest way, but there are so many different ways to do it. Philly has his different ways – I play the circle…….how do you say that?

RG: Clockwise?

EI: Yes, clockwise, but Philly plays the circle the other way around  - that way, and Shelly Manne does the same thing. But I do it the easiest way, I just do it clockwise. But as long as you get the sound you want to have, it doesn’t matter how you do it, it’s just a matter of getting the sound.

RG: And I think that’s a very interesting point, because one thing I notice about a lot of modern drummers is that they don’t get a sound from the brushes

EI: No, that’s true, they are great technicians with the brushes and they could play anything, and could probably play ten thousand times faster than I play – but it’s the sound I want, I love that sound.

RG: Would it be true to say that with brush playing, that one of the reasons the drummers don’t get the same sound, is because they don’t do as many gigs on brushes that you guys had to do because of amplification etc?

EI: Maybe so

RG: And working with singers etc

EI: Yes, both playing with singers and playing nightclubs. My brush playing really came together when I had these guitar/bass/drums gigs, you know, in a bar – I’d just say to myself, ‘Tonight I’m not gonna use even one drumstick, I’ll just play brushes. I’ll go four-to-the-floor with the bass drum, and play brushes’, and that’s what I did. And people would say ‘Hey Eric, will you play the sticks?’ – no way!  

RG: I heard a funny story about some saxophone player who was playing with Philly Joe, and Philly Joe was playing the brushes – completely killing as alays, and the saxophone player turned around to Philly and shouted ‘Sticks!”, and Philly Joe shouted back, ‘Flute!’

(Both laugh)

EI: That’s very good!

RG: One person I’ve been listening to a lot recently is Jimmy Raney, and he’s a very underrated guy, almost forgotten, even among the guitar players. But he has this gigantic sound, a wonderful sound, apart from the great lines – now you worked a lot with him…..

EI: I did four tours with Jimmy. I first met Jimmy in ’77, because Gerry Teekens, who later started Criss Cross Records, he was bringing those guys like Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz, Peter Ind, and Raney. Because Raney was back again, he didn’t drink anymore, he was getting clean and he came back to New York. So he (Gerry Teekens) heard that and he said he should come over again, so he brought him over. Al Levitt was the drummer, but at the end of the tour Jimmy fired Al Levitt, because he said to Al Levitt , ‘Can you play me a decent intro, like 8 bars?’,  and Al Levitt played him a march! (Laughs)

So there were some gigs left, like one in Lausanne in Switzerland, and Gerry called me said ‘Hey Eric can you do this gig?’ And I’d heard some stories about Jimmy, that he was not easy for drummers, because he just wanted to have this nice light and swinging thing – easy to play with.  So I was afraid, and I knew he played with Tiny Kahn and Osie Johnson and all those guys – he liked those drummers. I’d already met Doug in The Hague, his son Doug was already hanging out in The Hague, so I’d met him also, just right before that. So I met Jimmy at the airport in Amsterdam, Gerry called me and told me that there was a flight ticket for me for Switzerland and so and so… and I met Jimmy, and he was such a decent nice…..

RG: So all the stories that had frightened you weren’t true?

EI: He was so nice, and polite and easy, and then as soon as we did the soundcheck in this hall in Lausanne – that’s where Jarrett did that solo recording, in that hall – he played, I think it was ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, just doing the soundcheck, and he immediately turned around, smiling at me, he said, ‘that’s what I like!’  - so the ice was broken immediately. So after these couple of dates we did, we said goodbye and he went back, and then in 1980 I met him in Nice, I played at the festival with a Dutch band, and Jimmy was there with Lee Konitz. And I bumped into him – I get offstage and there he is. He was on this big package – George Wein package tour, he got everyone on the plane – Hank Jones, Roy Haynes, Jimmy Cobb, everybody together on stage (laughs)

RG: Like a circus!

EI: Yes, and Jimmy said ‘Hey Eric, what are you doing here?’, I said, ‘playing’ and he said , ‘come to the hotel’, and I went, I had my wife with me, and he said ‘let’s get you a cup of coffee and talk’. So I went and, and he invited us to the concert with Lee, and he told me ‘You know Lee, he’s playing so behind – terrible!’ (laughs) He hated it! And when I came home, Gerry Teekens called me again and said, ‘I heard you met Jimmy Raney, how is he, is he good? Because I want to bring him over again’. And I said yes, he’s OK, he’s fine.  So the next year he called me to do the tour with Doug and Jesper Lundgaard. And then every year, for three years in a row, we did a long tour – Holland, Germany, Paris, Belgium, and that was great. And he always invited me personally with a letter

RG: Very nice

EI: Very nice – ‘Eric We’d love to have you on….’, and I thought, ‘wow….’

RG: I hope you kept those letters!

EI: Yes I kept them of course. And to be on the stage, and hear the sound of Jimmy – it was just a huge sound. I mean it wasn’t loud or something like that, but it’s a huge sound. And the time Ronan, was the best time I ever heard from any guitar player. It was so good – and the lines he played…. It never stops, it goes on. He just sits there like this {imitates classic Raney pose – see photo above}, foot on one and three, and aaww…..it was…. The only thing I had to do was play time – it runs by itself! I never encountered anything like that, I said ‘this is what time should be’, for me, eventually this is what it should be. It’s relaxed, it’s not like, hanging……. It’s relaxed, it’s easy, it’s not rushing. In fact I think a lot of guitar players, they want to play so much guitar. It’s like piano players who want to play….

RG: All ten fingers

EI: Right. But the real bebop players, they play those lines, like Barry Harris. And Jimmy was the same thing – they play like horn players, and I think that’s probably what made him different.

Here's a track from 'Raney '81'  - 'Bill Evans' 'Peri's Scope' - with Eric on drums, Jesper Lundgaard on bass, and Doug Raney on second guitar

RG: I know in your book you talk about many different people, but maybe for the purposes of this interview, maybe you could tell me about someone you have particularly fond memories of – either playing or as a person, or both – and someone that you found quite difficult.

(Frank Foster)

EI: Well I was fond of Jimmy of course, and I was fond of Frank Foster. With Frank Foster you hear the whole history of the tenor saxophone – it goes from Coleman Hawkins up to Coltrane. It comes along over the whole night, sometimes even in just one blues! We played ‘Billies’ Bounce’ I think it was, in Belgium, there’s a tape of it, he started of like Coleman Hawkins, and in a twenty minute solo, a twenty/twenty five minute solo, by the end he was completely screaming, like Coltrane – it’s incredible! (Laughs) Very nice man also, and I found it great the way the energy came off him.

But there were so many good ones…. I loved Pete Chrislieb, easy to play with, great time feel – greattime feel, reminds me of Cannonball on tenor. There are so many easy players, some real mainstream players, like Scott Hamilton. But I love to play with Dave (Liebman) too, because he generates this………. They’re so different, there’s no such thing as the best of whatever, you know what I mean?

But a guy like Lee Konitz? He can be a pain in the ass! (Laughs) I tell you……… because his personality – one day it’s this and the other day it’s that.  Maybe he’s very unsure about himself, it’s a sort of insecurity. Sometimes you know, he wants the rhythm section to play more free, and it doesn’t work, and then he’ll say ‘OK let’s play like this…’, and so every night it’s different, but I think the best way with Lee is to just go straight ahead, and let him go, you know? Sometimes he’ll just play one note, and nothing happens because he’s not inspired, he can’t find it. But some nights it was great, he even started singing! He made the whole band do enforced scatting – even me I had to! Not play the fours on the drums, but scatting – he’s nuts! (laughs)

(Ack Von Rooyen)

But on the other hand, on the last tour I did with him, his behavior was very strange. We had Ack Von Rooyen…

RG: Right, the trumpet player

EI: And we thought it would be nice to get these two older statesmen of jazz together – Ack a lyrical player, Lee a lyrical player together, for seven or eight concerts. And Lee was behaving…. I don’t know if he has… I think he has a big ego – the whole concert he was standing behind the rhythm section

RG: While he was playing!?

EI: Yes! Ack was standing in front!

RG: (Laughs) That’s bizarre!

EI: I mean, what is this? A new wave or something? He was standing all the time behind me!

RG: That’s very strange

EI: And he didn’t have any contact with Ack, and Ack was feeling very uncomfortable! (laughs) So things like that – Lee Konitz, in other ways he could be very nice, Lee, but no he’s not easy – one week of Lee Konitz is enough!  (Laughs)

RG: You’re playing for how long now? Fifty years?

EI: Yes, something like that.

RG: And I know one of the great things, from watching you play, and playing with you, is the vibe, the enthusiasm for playing.

EI: Yes

RG: Is this something you…. I mean, how do you maintain this? Because this is a very interesting question, and especially for young musicians. Because when you’re younger, it’s easier in a way. I don’t mean that in any kind of dismissive way, but it’s a bit easier because, you know, you’re young, you have energy, you have your life in front of you and all that stuff. But when you get older, you know, life becomes more complicated, everything becomes more complicated. And it definitely becomes less easy to maintain the enthusiasm, as you get older, because your life is different.

So, for you, as someone who has literally played thousands of gigs, and I watched you play the jam session last night, and you were having the time of your life – after midnight etc etc, and you looked like you couldn’t be doing anything better with your life than what you were doing at that moment. So, and this may be a stupid question, how do you maintain your enthusiasm, after all these years of playing?

EI: It’s the energy I have I guess, in myself, and also I love the music so much. And, I need to swing! It’s just a life source, it’s still a life source. I wouldn’t dream of retiring!  My wife said, ‘You retiring!? Man, you would be a pain in the ass! Please shut up!’ (Both laugh), ‘you would be the most difficult person in the world!’ And also, the thing is, that’s my way of teaching I guess – I’ve heard it many times from people I play with, that they love that I kick ass – and that’s what I do with students too, to give them the input, to make them play, and make them study, and give them the enthusiasm for the music. I love jazz…. Ronan, I love jazz so much man. It’s my life……

RG: Fantastic…..

Thank you very much Eric

EI: Thank you Ronan, it was a pleasure

And to finish - here's a clip of Eric playing with Sonny Fortune and Benjamin Herman - all the trademarks are here - the spacious beat, the powerful quarter note, the commitment, the relentless swing. You can see from this clip why Eric has been in such demand for so many years, and why he's the master of the Big Beat!

Steve Coleman on Rhythm - Part 1

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I’ve known Steve Coleman for a long time – I first met him in 1986 when I was lucky enough to study with him at the Banff Centre. Since then I’ve met him many times and we’ve hung out and discussed music (and other things) on many occasions, and we’ve played at a few informal sessions and I recorded an (unreleased), track with him a while back. All my dealings with him have shown me, time and time again, that he is a unique and very influential figure in contemporary jazz (although he may argue with the description of what he does as being ‘contemporary jazz’), someone with an extraordinary originality in all aspects of what he does. And this originality is driven by intense research and thinking – Steve is constantly on a quest for knowledge, and the results of this quest has provided all kinds of food for thought for the curious musician.

Steve is innovative in all areas of music, but in my opinion his rhythmic concept is particularly noteworthy. I don’t think anyone has really gone into rhythm in the depth that he has, or thought about it in the way that he does. So I took the opportunity of a visit by Steve to our school in Dublin, to interview him on the specific subject of rhythm and the results are here.

Steve is discursive but not digressive  - he has a way of elaborating on every statement he makes that makes the job of the transcriber (me!) a labour-intensive one, but he never loses sight of the point he’s making. The length of our conversation meant that it took me a long time to transcribe it, and for one reason and another, it’s taken a while to get it up here too, but I think the results are fascinating, and it gives a real insight into how Steve thinks about rhythm, and what the influences were that helped to shape the way he thinks about rhythm.

This is Part 1 – Part 2 will follow soon

Early Rhythmic Experiences

RG: I remember in Banff  in 1986 when I first talked to you about rhythm and all of that, it was clear you had a very different way of looking at pretty much everything relating to rhythm in terms of the conventional ways that I’d been exposed to at that point. Your conceptual take on rhythm was very different. I know it’s probably something that’s an amalgam of different things, but were there particular things, or can you identify particular points where there were things that made a very big impact on the way you thought about rhythm, and pulse and the whole rhythmic world?

SC: Yeah, the first thing I can remember is just what I grew up on – this happened before I was a musician or anything. We were listening to these recordings of music on the radio, and it was all R ‘n’ B-type stuff – James Brown and all this kind of stuff. And I remember us beating out the stuff on the top of people’s cars and people would actually come out and chase us away, being kids, because we’d be denting the cars and things like that, but we would actually beat out the drum parts on the cars. And it wasn’t something that somebody was telling us to do, it wasn’t because we were musicians – we just heard this stuff, we heard all this rhythm and we would just try and imitate the rhythms.

So that was the first sense that I remember of specifically listening to rhythms. Not rhythms as in songs but just rhythm by itself and trying to imitate it in some kind of way. So we would be like – {Sings funk kind of rhythm} – and fucking up these people’s cars! (Laughs) Or whatever we could do – we’d be going around the neighbourhood doing this and singing and maybe one guy would be dancing or whatever – it wasn’t me! (laughs). And that was the first concept I remember.

Then when I got into music, I didn’t relate the two things immediately because when I started playing in band in school, they had us reading off the charts – and we were reading you know – {sings the opening to the overture of Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro} – and I didn’t immediately relate that to – {Sings funk rhythm} – the two things didn’t click at first.

But then when guys found out you played saxophone and everything, they’d say ‘We have this band, and we play for dances and stuff like that, do you want to play?’, you know, and the logical thing was to say yes. There were no charts in that situation, there was nothing about charts, it was ‘OK, we’re playing this song that’s on this record’, it wasn’t an original, ‘and you’ve got to take off the horn part’. So we’d learn it by ear – I didn’t know at the time that this was transcribing or anything, we would just take off the horn part, literally. So we would learn the parts by ear, and, you know, just figure it out, there was no education thing or whatever. And as you got better this grew and we had these bands and we’d get hired out for fashion shows and dances and different things like that, but it was always the music of what was popular on the radio.

Then, we were aware that some people could improvise, we called it ‘riffin’ at the time – we would say:

‘Did you hear about this cat in the school? Yeah, well he can riff’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, he took a solo, he didn’t play what was written on the paper – he just did his own thing!”

But this was just among students, I wasn’t aware that there was this whole world, right outside of where we were, of professionals that were doing that.

So there was that, and of course if you were going to do that, there’s what you were going to play, rhythmically and that kind of stuff. And what happened was that people were right away critical of the way you played things – rhythmically of the way you played them. I remember that being a big thing, people would say ‘that’s just not hip’, or ‘that’s corny’, you know. I mean the feel of something, they were critical right away about that.

OK, I’m saying all this to say that as we got better and better in these bands, a little later on I started to get into improvisation and I also joined bands where we started to write our own stuff, you know, we started to create our own stuff. Then these two streams – the improvisation stream and figuring out these rhythms and stuff – started to come together just a little bit, because I first of all started to write my own music, I had to write the rhythms and stuff. Even the rhythm section, I had to tell them what to play, and this included the drummer – what kind of beat that you want and all this kind of stuff.

So you start to become more conscious of this and also the criticism – of stuff that was hip and not hip. It started to dawn on you what that meant – what does it mean when something’s hip, what does it mean when it’s not hip? What is this groove thing, this feel thing, some people had a better feel than others – you started to put together what all that meant.

This was all when I was still pretty young. Then when I got among the professionals all that increased. Everything that we’d been trying to figure out, all increased because these guys all had it together. If your sound wasn’t together they would just tell you that you need to get your sound together. If your feel was, you know – if your shit’s not swinging, or it’s not grooving for whatever situation you were in – because there was a lot of different situations you could play in. You could play with professional R ‘n’ B type cats, or there was a lot of blues happening in Chicago, you could play with professional blues musicians, or you could play with cats like Von (Freeman).

(Von Freeman)

There were at least three distinct scenes – Chicago was very segregated then, it was all among black musicians. There were three separate scenes that were all kind of related in some way. At least in terms of the feel thing a lot of them were related. The Blues scene and the R ‘n’ B scene were closer to each other, than with what Von and them were doing. Because you really had to know a lot to do what Von and them did. You had to know harmony and shit like this, so this wasn’t a scene that you could just jump into. I mean if they’re playing 'Days of Wine and Roses', you just can’t come in there and just play pentatonic scales – you had to know something.

So their scene had to be combined with the sophisticated pitch shit they were doing, and the other scenes didn’t. In those scenes you could get away with playing blues licks and pentatonic things and stuff like that. So I did that first, but when I started following Sonny Stitt and these guys around, their shit was way more sophisticated pitch-wise. But the rhythmic thing, they still talked about it in the same way. So I said to myself ‘OK the pitch shit is more sophisticated but they’re still on this rhythm thing’. And the first thing I noticed is that when I played with Von and we’d play ‘Billie’s Bounce’, or anything, how different it felt. I mean I’m playing with him, but I feel like ‘Man, this guy – the weight of what he’s playing, and the feel – just the way it feels and everything, it’s so much different to what I’m doing. I mean I’m playing the same notes, but it’s not even close!’, you know.

And so I started trying to analyze this whole micro-beat thing I was talking about the other day, {in a conversation we’d had the previous day - RG} like why does it feel like that when he’s playing and notwhen I’m playing? What is it that I’m missing here? What’s happening?

So I started to try to analyze this, not in a way like – I don’t know if you ever saw Vijay Iyer’s essay online where he does this whole computerised kind of thing, in terms of like ‘we measured the beat and it’s 15% behind’ kind of thing – well it wasn’t that you know, it was just trying to figure out what was happening with what these cats were doing. And then I started listening to the drummers and everything.

So that was one kind of shock, was that whole period of figuring that out, and also realizing this stuff had nothing to do with reading music. It had nothing to do with what cats were doing when they read music. This was something completely outside that and it couldn’t even be notated. Even when I started transcribing, I would transcribe something and I would just write ‘lay back’, or ‘pull back’, or whatever, because there was no other way of notating it. But pull back where? How much? None of that was there – there was no information, I just knew what it meant when I saw that sort of like a ‘stickit’ thing {a stickit is a note you write to yourself} once I saw that it reminded me that that had to be done.

And so I realized that their beat was more like this……….it was like this variable amoeba-like thing, but it wasn’t just amoeba anywhere there was a certain concept to how to do it and it just took listening and all that. So that was my first shock with the rhythmic thing and it included the R’n’B thing and stuff like that.

Thad and Mel

My second big shock was when I played with Thad (Jones) and Mel (Lewis). Thad had this thing, I mean he took the laid back thing to another level. He had this thing where when I first joined the band, he would give a downbeat, and I would come in where he gave the downbeat, and I would always be early. Every single time I would be early – because there was this built-in delay that was just part of what they did, and I had never played in a big band like that. I mean everything I’d played before that when the cat gave the downbeat, that was the downbeat! But it was like a built-in delay, he would literally..{demonstrates by physically giving down downbeat and singing the note a second later}.. and I would be like “what the fuck!?” (Laughs) I mean I’d be WAY early, so the cats would tell me ‘you know, that’s the way it is, you got to get with the program!” (Laughs). So after a while you learned it – so I learned it from him, I’d think “Damn, he has the same shit that Elvin has, only with a big band!’ It was like this late fucking beat! I couldn’t believe it, and also at that time Dexter Gordon just started coming back to the States and HE was late as hell too. So I’m like “are these guys just lazy or is it part of their thing?’

So I started noticing there was this almost extreme laid back thing that was happening with some guys, so that was the second kind of shock I got.

Doug Hammond

The third shock was probably………. Well Sam Rivers’ thing was hip to me rhythmically and everything, but the third shock was Doug Hammond, and that was a big one.

RG: What was unique about him?

SC: Well, this cello player Muneer Abdul Fattah asked me did I want to do this gig with some dancers – he had this small group playing with these dancers, and I said sure – it was up in Harlem – and I asked him ‘who’s the drummer?’ and he said, ‘it’s this cat named Doug, you don’t know him’, and I said ‘OK, fine’. Now Doug’s even older than Muneer, and Muneer had this vision that he was going to bring me and Doug together, neither one of us were aware of this. So we played this gig and we played Muneer’s music, which is fine, and we get to this point in the rehearsal and Doug said ‘Well Steve,  we’re going to play a piece of mine now, and you don’t know this piece so you can go and get a coke or whatever’.

So I said fine, and I was on my way out the door and they started playing this piece called ‘Perspicuity’ and I stopped right at the door as soon as I heard it, I stopped and turned around – I never went outside – I turned around and listened to what they were playing. So he starts off playing the chant:

To listen, click here

There’s this kind of inbuilt counterpoint happening within it, and it had this really nice groove, but it was spacious  - it wasn’t, (sings typical fast Balkan groove), it wasn’t that kind of thing, it had this space kind of thing happening. And then the melody came in and it fit with the rhythm in a certain way (sings excerpt of the melody while clapping rhythm), it fit a certain way rhythmically, it was almost like he thought of it being rhythm as well as being pitches. This fucked me up. I mean it’s a simple tune really, but it messed me up, and then in the improvisation there were no chords and all this kind of stuff, and I was like ‘Man, what IS that!?’, after he finished playing, and he said ‘that’s a tune of mine called ‘Perspicuity’,  I didn’t care about the name or anything like that, but I said ‘Um, do you have more music like that?’ and the guy said ‘Yes, I’ve got boxes of it’, and I said ‘You’ve just found an alto player if you want one’ (laughs), ‘because I’ve got to understand what that is’. He was glad that somebody liked his music so he said ‘Sure’.

In my mind, I’d been doing something with forms and stuff like that, and I’d been doing all this stuff with melody, the symmetry thing  - it was already developed, I was doing all this stuff, feeling around and everything. But I felt like ‘something’s missing’ – you know I always felt that, but I couldn’t put it into words. I always felt like ‘You know, all this shit I’ve been doing but something ain’t right’. When I heard his music, I thought to myself, ‘THAT’S what’s missing’ (laughs). It just hit me – it was something about the balance of what he did.

You see the cats I liked, it turned out to be the same cats he liked – I really liked Max Roach - I really liked Max Roach and I really liked all the stuff I talked about in that Charlie Parker Dozens article..........

{an extensive essay on Charlie Parker written by Steve - you can see it here - RG} 

I heard that stuff early on, his relationship to Bird etc. Even though they were improvising I heard that it was composition – it was like a fixed fucking thing to me, but it was just that they were improvising. But it sounded so fixed, it was like Max could anticipate what Bird was doing and Bird could anticipate what Max was doing and they were creating this composition together. Doug’s music had that in it, but it was developed in a way, like it was updated or something like this. I wasn’t aware of this until later, until Doug told me of the connection to Ed Blackwell and all these kind of cats – I wasn’t aware of that, I was taking the shit straight from Max to Doug. And it had a funky kind of thing, I always felt that Max , even though he was playing swing, that the shit was funky – that it had this funk kind of feel to it. Which is what attracted me to that because it reminded me of the stuff I heard in my childhood when we were beating on the cars and everything. Max had that kind of thing, but it was with this – the swing thing – happening.

And so I really dug it (Hammond’s concept), and then he had these other tunes that all had this chant concept – he called them chants, that’s why I call it that. They all had this drum chant thing, that he had gotten from several sources – from Africa, from Max Roach and plus, he had listened to………..the three drummers he listened to a lot, that he always talked about were Big Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and Cozy Cole. All cats whom I hadn’t listened to a lot up to that point. He talked about these pre-Max Roach type drummers, and most cats when they talk about pre-Max Roach drummers, they talk about Jo Jones - Papa Jo Jones. But they don’t go back – but Doug would talk about Baby Dodds and all these cats from the past.  And he would always say, ‘the young cats today, all they do is play cymbals, they don’t play the DRUMS enough – you’re a drummer - a drummer, not a cymbal-er!’ (Laughs). He would go into this thing – ‘Cymbals came from China!’ – he would go into this whole thing about drums versus cymbals, how Tony Williams was fucking all these cats up – he would go into this whole spiel.

And so eventually he would influence me and I would go back and listen to these cats – and I would say ‘Chick Webb? Cozy Cole? Big Sid? What kinds of names are these? Cozy!?Who names a kid Cozy!?’ (Laughs). But I was piqued by the names and all this kind of stuff and just listened to them, and listened to Jo Jones, and I realized these cats did have some stuff, and I heard some of the stuff that Max was getting some of his stuff from. There was this funky thing in what they were doing and he was getting that.

Ed Blackwell

And then Doug said that the modern cat he was listening to was Ed Blackwell.  Because Blackwell took that shit, plus went to Africa and lived in Africa for a while and took that stuff and basically adapted it for the drums. And then brought that into Ornette’s thing, plus this New Orleans thing that he had, that Second Line shit. And he brought that into Ornette’s thing, and it gave Ornette’s thing – to me – it gave it foundation, it gave it form. Because Ed Blackwell was a real form kind of cat, he had natural form in what he was doing - plus that chant stuff, when you do those rhythms and everything it’s sort of an automatic form. To me he brought that to the group, so the group – at least the early group – didn’t have that wavy kind of thing that somebody like Rashied has – it had grooves and stuff, even though there was all this crazy Ornette shit on top. Later on I met Ed Blackwell, and he would sit down with me and Smitty, (the drummer Marvin Smitty Smith), and show us some of this stuff and he would be swinging and all of a sudden he would go into this -  (sings rhythm) - these chants and stuff and then he would break back into swing, and he would go back and forth and stuff like that. And he was real influenced by Max but he added this African thing. And so Doug said that messed him up. And so then Doug kind of did an updated version of that, plus he was a real composer, so he could actually write the stuff and everything.

The First Rehearsal

But the big shock was the first rehearsal, because I came into the first rehearsal, and Doug said ‘OK bring some music if you’ve got some music’ and I brought some music and passed it out – there was only a few people there – I passed it out and I gave everybody a part but Doug. And he said ‘Where’s my part?’ and I said’ Well you know, there’s no drum part, what do you mean where’s your part? There’s no drum part’, so I started to describe what I wanted – ‘well you know it’s kind of like…..’ and he said ‘Stop!’ – he was really like a hard cat. ‘Stop – I wantmy part’, and I said ‘There IS no part!’, and he said ‘Write one!’ and I said, “Write one!? I’ve never written for drums in my life, I don’t know how to write a drum part!’, and he said, ‘Learn’ – he was looking at me all crazy (laughs), and so I was like ‘I don’t even know where to start’, and he said ‘I’ll teach you’ (Laughs). And so he showed me ‘This is a drum key, this is where .. etc”, he showed me, ‘OK you got this? Now I want my drum part’ (laughs). I thought ‘Man, this guy is crazy!’ (Laughs). And he was saying ‘Learn how to write drum parts, don’t give me some of this I want a little Max, a little DeJohnette  - I don’t care about these cats, write my drum part!’ I said, ‘what do you mean, write your drum part’, and he said, ‘Write an example of how you hear it should go, and give it to me’. So I said OK, so I started doing that. And I really dug the results!

And I realized that that’s what he’s doing - that I hear is the thing that’s missing – the glove that’s missing on the hands of my music. What he’s doing is that he’s treating the rhythm like everything else. It’s like it’s a melody and he’s looking specifically at detailed rhythmic information, which to me – at the end of the 70s, going into the 80s – was a revelation. Everybody was doing this ‘Just give me a little beat like this or like this, some Latin shit – yeah but more simple’ (Laughs) You know, everybody was doing that, but his shit was -  ‘I want the same shit that you give everybody else. Other people are going to improvise too, but they have a starting point – I want a starting point. I want to know what’s in your mind. And I don’t want to know about styles – I don’t give a fuck about styles. Don’t tell me about Elvin or Max or something – I don’t want to know about that. What do you have in your mind in terms of this particular piece of music? And then when we move on to the next piece tell what else you have in your mind.” So first of all it was a novel thing – a drummer begging to read something was like a weird thing, because they’re like…………

RG: Well they have a funny thing, because I write drum music, sometimes very specifically too – my brother’s a drummer and I used to play his drums a lot at home so I’ve got a sense of the instrument. So occasionally – quite often – I actually will write something. And I notice a funny thing about drummers – they have a little ghetto that they both hate and yet don’t want to get out of. In the sense that they really get pissed off – and rightly so – when they’re the only one not getting a part. Or someone says ‘here’s the saxophone part’.

SC: Yeah, right

RG: On the other hand if you hand them all the stuff written out, they go ‘what the fuck is this!?” (Both laugh). So it’s a funny psychology that one, you know, because some drummers don’t like you to be specific yet they get pissed off if you’re vague.

SC: Well he was weird because I mean he was a composer, he was a prolific composer. He really literally had boxes of music – he had more music than I had, he was older than me too, but still. And I suppose, from writing so much, he was into it.  And sometimes I gave him stuff that was hard, and he’d say ‘Man this shit is hard!’, but he still wanted it – he still did it.

I remember I wrote ‘Snake Pit Strut’ – these are the early tunes – ‘Murdxas’ and which is really just sax drum written backwards. And those were the first tunes, there on that first album of his that I did – you have that right, Spaces?

RG: Yes, I have it somewhere

SC: So, both of those tunes – but especially ‘Murdxas’  - turned out so well that I basically never stopped doing that. I just got deeper and deeper and deeper into what it was and all this kind of stuff. And right away I noticed that OK, I can just sing this drum phrase, and I don’t have to pay any attention to how long it is, or you know……….it’s just that if it feels right to me, balance-wise, then I’ll just write it down and that’s it. What I used to do is I used to just sing the stuff into a tape recorder or something like that, or if I didn’t have a tape recorder, repeat it enough till I remembered it. Or play it with my hands and feet or whatever, and then just write it down.

It was sort of like a story that Benny Golson told me about ‘Stablemates’. He said he wrote out this tune and it wasn’t 8/8/8/8, it got to a certain point and he said shit, it didn’t work out. And so he went to try to fix it but then he thought – well why should I fix it? If it feels right, then that’s what I intended and that’s what it is.

I was like that with these drum chants, I would write it out, and whatever it came out to be. I was just worried about the feel and all that kind of stuff, but whatever it came out to be I would just leave it – the first time, I would never fix it, I would leave it. So after a while things got – from other’s people’s perspective – odder and odder. Because I began to feel these things and I began to feel, I guess, odder and odder stuff. But I would let it go, I would never come back and say that needs some extra 8^th notes, or that needs an extra beat or whatever. Because I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of 8^th notes or anything when I was feeling it – it was just what it was.

I mean still to this day a lot of things come by feel for me. What I mean by that is that even though I’m working now with these esoteric concepts and things like that, when it comes to the actual information – because that stuff doesn’t determine what the actual information is, if you say ‘I’m going to do something with ‘Venus and Mars’ – musically that could be anything. Musically that could be anything, if you’re John Adams it’s going to be that language, if you’re Henry Threadgill it’s going to be that language. It’s going to be whoever you are. People ask (me) about that but they don’t realize that that doesn’t determine the information, your experience as a musician is what’s really determining the information. I mean if you’re T.A.S. Mani then it can’t possibly come out like John Adams, I mean it just can’t! Your experience is different. So that has a bigger influence over what it’s going to sound like – your experience – than any idea you get that’s outside of music or whatever.

If Beethoven had the same ideas as me it couldn’t possibly come out the same. And people don’t realize how much your experience dictates what you do and who you are and everything. Now for you it could add more variety and lead you in different directions that you might not have investigated, but it’s still going to be some Ronan shit, on some level it’s still going to basically be you, it’s not all of a sudden going to turn into Charlie Haden, it’s just not going to happen. If it does it might do it for like a split second – you might write a beat and a half of something that somebody would say reminds them of somebody, but all this other shit still reminds me of him. Because you have a certain personality and the way that you put shit together it comes out like you.

So when I heard all this stuff that everybody was doing – Max Roach and Bird and everything – mypersonality was interpreting that in a certain way. So when people go to the jazz.com thing, they say ‘oh yeah, we never thought about that’ – but that’s because you’re not me! That’s what I’M hearing you know – I’m not making any claim that Charlie Parker was hearing like that or that Max Roach was hearing like that. This is what I get from this music when I hear it. It could have nothing to do with what they…….. but what I discovered -  I was lucky enough to know some of these old cats – what I discovered was that they had a way of thinking that, although it was different than mine, in some kind of way it came close to the way I was thinking in their language.

I told Von Freeman one time, I said, ‘you know, me and you we probably think really differently about this music’ and he said ‘Oh I don’t know about that’ – he said that immediately – ‘I don’t know about that. I mean you probably have your way of, your language of interpreting and everything, and I have my language, but I don’t think  - I’ve been listening to you for years – I don’t think it’s all that different’. And I was surprised to hear that from him, because here’s a cat that’s like born in 1922, you know what I mean. I know if Barry Harris or somebody heard the shit he’d be like ‘what the fuck!?’ (laughs). But he was like……’I don’t know…….’ When we did that gig (with Von Freeman), we did Moose the Mooch, but we did it over this tune 'Change the Guard' that we always do. So it was like, you know, bent. So me and Jonathan (Finlayson) were playing it and it was like – {Sings Moose the Mooche in the 7 beat cycle of Change the Guard} – it had that half beat peg-leg shit in it. And so Von was sitting there listening to it, he wasn’t playing he was just listening. This was like the first……. It was during the rehearsal, and I haven’t done many rehearsals with him. So after we finished he said ‘You know, I think I’m finally starting to understand what you’re trying to do’. 

And I know what it was that made it click for him was the fact that he knew part of what we were doing – he knew Moose the Mooche. He knew the way it normally went, and then he heard this corrupted-ass version of it, and he was like, ‘these cats are fucking with the rhythm!’ (Laughs). It became obvious. But when you hear original stuff, you don’t hear that because….

RG: You don’t have the point of reference.

SC: There’s nothing that you know – exactly. So he was sitting there listening, and he was listening really carefully and then we started improvising on it. Rhythm Changes – he knew it was Rhythm Changes, he knew all that, but then he heard what was different stood out more in relief, against what he already  knew. I mean he knew this shit better than we did – I mean he REALLY knew this stuff. So he’s hearing this stuff and he’s like ‘these cats are basically changing the balance of this shit – they’re fucking with the balance’. And so he told me ‘I’m starting to get it’, and I told him, ‘well yeah, what you heard on Moose the Mooche we’re doing that with our original stuff too – it’s essentially the same idea’ 

And he even played on some of the stuff, and that was crazy to hear for me. Because it was a whole different – he had a whole different………… it was like bending the shit. But he could hear it you know. And I never thought I’d have anybody that age playing on my shit. People don’t…… I mean it’s not like Lester Young and them started playing Charlie Parker’s music. I mean they played together with Jazz at the Philharmonic, but it was older stuff.  They didn’t start playing {sings fast bebop-type line} – it just didn’t happen. Louis Armstrong and them, when Dizzy played with Louis Armstrong they played ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ or something like that, but he didn’t really play Dizzy’s music – he didn’t play ‘Things to Come’  or something like that. That never happens. And Dizzy had played with Trane – I mean Trane had played with Dizzy, when Trane was younger. But once Trane got going with his real thing in the 60s, it’s not like Dizzy came in and played that.That’s not how it goes – the older cats never play the newer cats stuff, it just doesn’t go that way. If you want to play with the older cats you gotta play their shit. And out of respect that’s what you should do, you shouldn’t give some old cat some new shit you’re working on and say ‘see if you can do this man’ – give that to Sonny Rollins – you would never do that.

We were very careful when Von did that gig – what he played on and everything, but there was one thing he said he wanted to play on. As a matter of fact he didn’t say it, he just started playing, and I was like ‘oh this is going to be interesting……..’, just to hear it and stuff like that. Those were the things that I took  -  all those specific things that those cats were doing

Art Tatum

Another thing that was shocking that I didn’t mention was Art Tatum. I have a special kind of relationship to Art Tatum, I shouldn’t say relationship because I didn’t know him. He died the same year I was born. But, he did this tune called ‘Aunt Hagar’s Blues’, and there’s this one section that he does on it that has this – I call it ‘Peg Leg’ rhythms, because it reminds me of a pirate with one leg shorter than the other, when he’s doing this, you know. Because this tune I did called ‘Snake Pit Strut’  is based off that. 

{Sings Tatum rhythm followed by Snake Pit Strut rhythm to show similarity - you can listen to it here}

And it has this sort of Peg Leg thing. Cause if you just beat the beat like this {clicks fingers on regular pulse}, then of course the beat would turn around on itself – so it had this long beat/short beat thing. So I started experimenting with that stuff then – some of that came from Art Tatum. This is in Bulgarian music and a lot of other stuff too, but the thing is they fill up all the beats. Art Tatum was doing it in a funky, more like an African kind of way where all the beats weren’t filled up. He was picking his spots where he played and everything.

So I said OK, how do you make it funky like that, make it groove like that, where you’re picking your spots, (because they’re not just picking any spots of course, they’re picking the spots that make it sound a certain way), and still do this other thing. That was my thing - not do the {sings ‘Blue Rondo’-type rhythm}, because I would hear this Bulgarian Music {sings typical Bulgarian folk melody} – and every space would be filled with turns –{continues singing Bulgarian style piece} – and that’s cool and I dig that and everything, I mean that’s because of their language and culture and all this kind of stuff. But when Max would be doing this  - {sings very syncopated drum phrases} and the tempo would be like this {really fast}, and it would be really spaced out where the beats are or the Bata stuff – {Sings typically a Babalu Aye Bata bata rhythm while simultaneously clapping the clave} – that’s really hard because there’s a lot of space and the shit’s placed in a certain way, but it‘s funky. And so to me that’s what Bird and Max and Tatum and all those cats were doing and I was like – OK how do you do THAT, but change the balance? But still keep that – exactly what they have, still keep that thing.

Part 2 will follow soon  - in the meantime, here's a clip from a concert in France in 1999, that gives an idea of the flavour of Steve's rhythmic approach, as well as featuring great playing by him and the other band members