After that, I played Yamaha drums with the likes of Weather Report, Steps Ahead, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Wheeler, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Boz Scaggs, Kate Bush, Gary Burton and Pat Metheny, the Yellowjackets, Michael Brecker, Diana Krall, my own groups, on movie dates, even with the BBC, Berlin, and London Symphony Orchestras. I felt a kinship with their instruments. A drumset is much like a car, and whether you prefer a BMW or Porsche, Mercedes or a Lexus, when it’s your car it makes you proud, and you can spot one on a busy highway in seconds.
Yamaha pioneered the wave of signature snare drums in the industry (my Limited Edition 4x14 Birch signature snare was the first of these that Yamaha produced), and dreamt up some clever alternative drumsets like the HipGig (portable) and Club Jordan (cocktail) kits with the assistance of drummers like Rick Marotta and Steve Jordan. Other innovators like Dave Weckl, Steve Gadd, Al Foster, Roy Haynes, Manu Katché, Russ Miller, et al, contributed to the collective design inspiration. Yamaha eventually offered several signature products with my name and design imprint: the FreeStanding StickBag, the 4x10 Sopranino Snare Drum, and 4x12 Soprano Snare Drum.
However, it was during a botched music industry trade show introduction of a new version of this add-on snare that my drum company switch got set into motion. The big annual music industry tradeshow known as NAMM is often a “perfect storm” where such upheavals can occur — often regrettable, but inevitably for the better, I suppose.
Yamaha, unlike the Zildjian Company, had no single patriarch in the traditional sense, but if one man could be said to have been the heart and soul of Yamaha Drums it was the now-retired Hagi. He lived and breathed Yamaha. While it may never be apropos to use the cliché “those Japanese are clever people,” it can be said that Hagi was one of the cleverest people in the biz. He’s the reason several generations of drummers played Yamaha. To be honest, once Hagi was no longer in the picture, things seemed to change at Yamaha, and my needs and expectations were changing as well. Interestingly, it would be a cymbal stand that would once again speak out to me with enough import to force me to rethink things and switch loyalties and brands, this time to the American-made Drum Workshop drumset, manufactured just one hour up the road from our home. And just like anything else in life, the success or failure of an association can depend on location, and/or the relationship to the people behind the product…
20. Drum Workshop
photo : Rob Shanahan, courtesy of DW
While my saying goodbye to a drum association of twenty-five years, Yamaha, and saying hello to Drum Workshop caused a bit of a stir in some quarters, I tried to remind people that with everything else going on in the world my changing drum brands was not of such cosmic importance. Still, this was a big change for me. I became enthralled with DW and their beautiful instruments and hardware. There is a tremendous amount of passion and expertise at DW, and a total willingness to try new things, combined with the ability to make any possible improvements or modifications to the instruments in short order. I feel extremely lucky to be in such inspiring company. This instrument has allowed or even forced me to make new choices when I play, and I’m liking the way I’m sounding more than ever before. A musical instrument is, ultimately, about the final result in sound. I feel more creative, more focused, more “free” as a musician. I can't think of a much better thing to say about an instrument beyond “it makes me play better.”
My move did not involve money. The only “business” was the opportunity to work with a company that was interested in responding to my requests in terms of drum and hardware design. DW is a fantastic company in that respect, too.
It was the DW flush-base cymbal stand, specifically reminiscent of the type of hardware jazz drummers were using in the early 1960s, that lured me to DW’s door (or, more accurately, to their NAMM display booth). I had played on a drumset “du jour” while on tour a few months earlier, a kit that had three of these cymbal stands as part of the setup, and I enjoyed playing on them so much that I sent an email to my wife after the gig about those cymbal stands. Ah, sweet nothings. At the same time, the good people at Yamaha had turned a deaf ear to me when it came to my asking, then begging, then hollering for them to make such a cymbal stand (light in weight, better-sounding in my opinion because it allows everything to vibrate freely versus the perfect/non-vibrating quality endpoint that had become the holy grail in most drum hardware design ever since the 1980s), to the point where I offered up an old Ludwig stand from the ’60s for the Yamaha engineers to copy and replicate. Of course, that was ill-mannered on my part and didn’t help matters any. In any event, while leaving the NAMM show for the day and the year, feeling dispirited by our morning meeting at Yamaha that went poorly, my wife and I walked right by the DW display where I saw MY holy grail in drumset design, that flush-based cymbal stand, whereupon founder Don Lombardi proceeded to nearly tear his booth partway down just so he could pull the stand off the wall and show it to us; and as Don was enthusiastically demonstrating this and that, my wife turned to me and said, “THIS is how it’s supposed to be.” Don offered that he had always respected my relationship with Yamaha, but would I ever “want to come visit the factory in Oxnard?” I replied, “Sure. How about next week?”
>My switch occurred around the same time I was doing an unusual amount of film recording (for me), working on the films Mission Impossible 3 and Spiderman 3. Hollywood loves a good sequel, and so do I. It might be fair to say, then, that with my having professionally started off on Slingerland drums when I was 18, switching to Yamaha when I was 25, and then playing DW, this was an appropriate debut for “Peter 3” in the studios.
My first public appearance playing my own DW drumset occurs in Rome, Italy at the Casa del Jazz where I am appearing in concert with the Lounge Art Ensemble, a trio I shared with saxophonist Bob Sheppard and the late bassist Dave Carpenter. The drums take some getting-used to. I write an email to my wife after the concert, confessing that, with all of the Italian drumming fans in the audience — all of whom had seen and heard me play Yamaha drums for the past 20 years — I felt like I had gone to a party with another woman, and everyone there saw me not with my wife but with this other woman, my girlfriend. And she wrote back right away: “Your DW drums are not your girlfriend, they are your daughter.”
That aside, it’s hard not to think of DW and “passion” in the same thought. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful wood. For all that is said about different drum and cymbal brands, however, when I expected DW drums to sound a certain way, they would meet that expectation. Now that I have different expectations, I imagine a different sound, and it seems I’m able to get that without a problem. So I got on the other side of my prior experience or prior expectations that I put on the instrument. In other words: as long as a drum or cymbal is round, the chances are pretty good that it can be made to sound good, especially if the musician has that sound in his or her head. The aesthetics complete the picture. Life is too short not to feel good about what we do, how we do it, and whom we do it with.
Other important music-industry relationships include Evans Drumheads (my first official endorsement deal and ad). Evans heads were the Kenton band heads, so that was how I discovered them. I flirted with a rival company’s products for a few years but returned to Evans. Originally run by Mr. Bob Beals out of his Dodge City, Kansas factory, the heads are now designed and made at the impressive D’Addario & Sons manufacturing compound in Long Island, New York. Everything about these guys and their products will appear in any dictionary if you look up the phrase “state of the art.”
My drumsticks, brushes, and mallets are made by Vic Firth and company. Vic was the timpanist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra for many years and is the consummate musician, businessman, innovator, and friend. He markets several models of drumsticks bearing my name, two of them bearing the results of a lot of thought, testing, and morphing over time — my signature “Ride Stick” in particular being a very popular model.
It was Bob Beals who told me back when
I started my family: “You’ve got to find a way to make money while you sleep.” The signature musical instrument is a fitting way to participate in the success of a design concept along with your name. “Win-win” solutions are my favorite.
Now let’s go back to those Slingerland days.
photo : Fred Erskine
21. Slingerland Drums
The Kenton band played all sorts of venues, from concert halls to shopping malls, jazz clubs to Elks Lodges. It was at an outdoor shopping center gig in Illinois that one of the reps from the Slingerland Drum Company, Brad Morey, came to see and hear Stan’s band. The drummer before me, Jerry McKenzie, was a Slingerland-sponsored artist. I was brand new on the scene and only had my Ludwig kit that was, admittedly, not quite up to the task of driving that band due to the sizes of the drums. But I literally pushed the pedal to the metal with that drumset. Stan was not hesitant to recommend me to Brad, saying within earshot, “You’d better grab this kid before another company does.” In fact, the Ludwig company was making a mild overture, but I recall that I may have asked for too much too soon during my lunch meeting with them following my touring the factory in Chicago. Soon afterwards I enjoyed another tour of a drum factory, this time in the Chicago suburb of Niles where Slingerland drums were made. Brad dazzled me on the tour; everything seemed friendlier and more promising in that well-lit, humming, and buzzing factory. The combination of tradition and innovation appealed to me, and Brad outlined what the company would like to do for me in terms of promotional consideration (advertising) and, of course, drums.
My mother reminded me some years later that I had expressed the wish that I could one day have enough drums to stretch all of the way from Atlantic Avenue to the Boardwalk (a long two blocks), and that wish has come true and then some, I would guess.
But it was time for me to get my first Slingerland drumset, with an appropriately-sized bass drum (22-inch, with two heads, of course), a 13-inch rack tom with 16- and 18-inch floor toms, new hardware, in the color I had always wanted my Ludwig kit to be (but the local music store in Atlantic City only had the natural maple), dark mahogany!
The kit was ordered, and when the Kenton band made its way back to the Chicago area, there was a brand-new set of Slingerland drums set up and waiting for me at the gig (in a hotel ballroom). Man, they were beautiful! I sat behind them and adjusted the individual pieces as best I could — this was a new car I would be driving — and meanwhile the audience entered and the Slingerland people sat down at a table front row center to see what this new kid drummer was about. Brad Morey had been the only Slingerland person to have actually seen or heard me play, and it was on the strength of his word combined with Stan’s admonition that I got the deal. It was proof-in-the-pudding time for the President, Don Osborne, Sr. (whose son, Donny Osborne, Jr., was and is an excellent drummer in more of the Buddy Rich style than could be said for me). Oh yeah, Buddy played Slingerland Drums at the time, too. So, there’s Don Osborne, Sr. seated right in front of me with his arms folded across his chest, and we begin to play — and his face is getting a more sour look every four bars or so.
The kid holds the sticks matched grip!
I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but I decided just to concentrate on the music (and the new drums) and not worry about the expression or body language of this guy, and then all of a sudden everything was okay. That’s because the tune changed from a “Latin” beat where I held the left stick in a “matched” or similar manner to the right hand, and instead began playing in the “traditional” grip manner, much like the way marching snare drummers used to hold their sticks. Well, after that, everything was fine. Drum industry folks loved the Kenton band. It was a good night out for them and a great feature for their instrument: We toured constantly, played a lot in schools, and were still deemed musically relevant at that point in time, so why not?
Thus began my Kenton, Maynard, and Weather Report eras’ association with Slingerland.
22. I Leave Kenton
After three years and five albums with the Kenton band — and several love affairs — it was time to get off the road. My parents’ marriage had been falling apart, and it was all becoming too distracting to travel and play concerts and see one or both of them whenever the band would return back east and endure their incessant hostility and arguing — too long of a story to go into, even for a book of this size — and so I landed back home in New Jersey, not sure of where to go or what to do next. Another big band? That seemed to be my entire identity at the moment. What else was I but a big band drummer? A sideman? A person who had gotten so used to writing the word “drums” after signing his name that it became habit even when I signed a poster in Weather Report. I needed a change of perspective. I got that by visiting my sister Lois, who was by then living in Caracas, Venezuela. A month there, followed by a couple of weeks in Las Vegas, and then a month back in New Jersey, I knew what I wanted to do: go back to school.
Professor Gaber welcomed me with open arms and made my re-admittance into the university system as smooth as possible; he even loaned me some of his furniture. Before I knew it, I was back in Bloomington, this time with my Slingerland drums and a bunch of Kenton posters to hang on the wall of my small rented house, and an armful of bad drumming habits engendered by three years of hitting the drums as hard as I could. But here I was, back in school, the one professional in the bunch who had left a gig to return to his studies while everyone else seemed to be chomping at the bit to get out of the place. All of which made for some interesting bedfellows and classmates.
Most of all, the year centers around my trying to figure out my identity as a musician and person while my professor concerns himself with these issues as well as the pure mechanics of my playing (which have become quite un-pure), and so we go back to the drawing board where I might relearn how to strike an instrument and maybe even reacquaint myself with practicing.
Gaber assigns me to the Philharmonic orchestra, where future rock drumming avatar and star Kenny Aronoff is playing timpani. I’m playing the Chinese temple blocks. Gaber comes up on stage after the performance and goes ’round the percussion section, saying things like “Bravo” to one player, “Terrific job” to another, and so on, while I patiently await my own accolade. When he finally reaches me, he only says, “I wanna see you in my office first thing tomorrow morning,” and strides away. “Now what?” I think to myself, in addition to, “That was nice…” And so I drive into school early the next morning and knock on Gaber’s office door. He answers after a moment and beckons me inside, and starts, “Why were you hitting those things so hard last night?” I had no good answer for him.
I spend the remainder of the year at Indiana working on the practice pad while enjoying being in one place for a while. I make good friends at school and also benefit from the opportunity to take a Japanese culture class. My first visit to Japan with the Kenton band made a tremendous impression upon me, and I’m curious to learn more about the place. It might seem strange for one to learn about bunraku in Bloomington (ikebana in Indiana), but that’s what I do. I’m digging on being back in school and have every intention of studying and finishing my degree this time around. The road to the road is paved with good intentions, I suppose.
Near the end of the academic year, Maynard Ferguson’s management called and asked if I would like to join the band. As I was back at school after three grueling years on the road, I politely declined the invitation — three times. I finally agreed to join the band for only a summer tour so I could return to school in late August, and so I flew to Chicago with my drums to meet Maynard and the band. With one rehearsal under our belts we played in concert at a jazz club in Chicago, and the audience included many friends and members of the music industry who were in town for the summer NAMM convention. It was all too much fun, being in the drumming/driver’s seat once again, and I would remain with Maynard for two years of touring and recording.
23. Maynard Ferguson
The first time I heard Ma
ynard Ferguson, I was sitting in front of the family phonograph player. The year was 1963 and I was nine years old. My older sister, who was dating a jazz musician at the time, brought home an album titled Color Him Wild, and I sat in awe and wonder at the stratospheric melodies and bravura cadenzas that soared above a relentlessly hot band with a hip and burning rhythm section. Maynard was wild! His big band was more like a big small group, driven on this and other recordings by drummer Tony Inzalaco. Great players like Willie Maiden, Slide Hampton, Jaki Byard, Rufus “Speedy” Jones, even Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, were all sidemen on Maynard’s bands. But, as great as those players were, or as hip as the arrangements sounded, it was Maynard who astounded the ears of anyone who listened.
By the time I got to high school, Maynard had left the USA and traveled to India and then to the United Kingdom, where he put together a terrific band of British musicians. The music was a reflection of the times, when jazz met rock, and his U.K. band could swing and rock most convincingly. During my first year on the road with Stan Kenton, at the tender age of 18, I got to hear Maynard’s band live when we split a concert appearance at a jazz festival in Wichita, Kansas.
The great drummer Randy Jones was working with Maynard at the time, and I was already a fan of his playing from the MF Horn album series. After I greeted him with effusive compliments, he graciously thanked me and then proceeded to inform me that he and his mates were now going to get “pissed.” USA vernacular or usage of that term had always meant “to become angered,” and so I asked him, “Randy, why in the world would you want to do that?” Now, if I had known the true meaning of his mission, i.e., to get drunk, I might have asked the same question with an even bigger question mark! He just looked at me as if I were some sort of moron and took off to find a drink. Maynard’s band played great later that night in spite of those pre-concert libations. Color me naïve!
No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report Page 7