Walking With Giants - demystifying a Kendrick Scott solo

So I've issued this little challenge to myself. Explain a piece of modern jazz drumming in a historical context to a non-musician without illiciting yawns.
You see, my piece last week mishmashing jazz, teaching music, and "kids these days" into one mess of an article, got me thinking. I'll write more on teaching and "kids these days" soon, but at present I'm thinking about music and influences. In college I saw a brilliant lecture about one of Mozart's piano pieces - with the assistance of a "live" pianist onstage - broken down for the "lay" listener, and it dawned on me how much understanding art can heighten appreciation.


So here goes-

Check this out:



That's Kendrick Scott, playing a drum solo with Terence Blanchard's band on pianist Aaron Parks' tune Harvesting Dance.

It's hard for me to picture exactly what a non-musician would be thinking about this, but if you were witnessing it live, the spectacle and intensitiy would probably overcome everything else and you would be moved to applaud, as this audience did. (Hah-another "blog to come" on making esoteric music universally palatable;) On this video, however, it's a little harder to follow. The ensemble is obviously playing something around him, and he's "freaking out" on the drums in acrobatic but esoteric ways. But without the feeling of "being there" or a basic understanding of what's going on, the watcher's attention may wander.

But I contend anyone can get closer to understanding what's going on in Kendrick's solo by appreciating a couple of simple elements and their lineage. To start with, what's going on musically, in the context of the composition and the band? It's probably hard to tell in the Kendrick clip, but I'd wager it's easier in this:




Many of us know Dave Brubeck's famous tune Take Five from radio, movie soundtracks and jazz compilations, even if we never bought a Brubeck record. (Fewer know that Joe Morello, the drummer pictured here, was an icon and pioneer who taught a generation of students.) Because the tune is familiar and catchy, I'll wager the solo held your attention for longer. But musically, what's going on in the Brubeck clip is exactly the same thing as what's going on in the Kendrick clip. It's the middle of the song, and the band is playing a repeating figure while the drummer improvises. The drummer finishes the solo, and the band plays the melody again.

Our familiarity with Take Five helps us put the drum solo in context. Let's take two minutes and get more familiar with Aaron Parks' fantastic tune, Harvesting Dance.



If you've made it to the two minute mark you've heard the whole melody.

Now skip to six minutes. You hear the last half of that same melody, then the drum solo begins. This is the part of the tune the Kendrick clip depicts. (I should add that Eric Harland is the drummer on this recording.)(If you like the tune, pick up a copy of Aaron's new CD, Invisible Cinema.)

Putting Kendrick Scott's drum solo in the context of the song and the band gets us halfway, but what's going on behind the drums? To understand that we have to address, briefly, three elements: "drumistic" idioms ("rudiments", in the vernacular), theme and variation, and building intensity within a long solo.

To start with, rudiments. A very brief history: drum vocabulary originated in part from the military, where drums provided a beat to march to.



New Orleans musicians in the early part of the century combined this traditional drum style with spiritual-derived blues tunes for their "second line" funerary marches (still popular today), like this one:




The tune and the vibe are very different from the fife and drum band, but the snare drummers aren't playing all that differently - they've just added "swing" to their traditional military idioms. But the drums are a little hard to hear in the above video. Below, drummer Herlin Riley gives a good demonstration of this historic style:





But how do you get to Kendrick Scott from New Orleans? Actually it's not a far leap at all. Some of the vocabulary Kendrick plays comes directly from the New Orleans idiom. In the first minute of the solo Kendrick is playing "buzz rolls" (pressing the sticks into the drum to create a sustained, "buzz" sound) exactly the way Herlin Riley does in the video above. But there's nearly a century worth of vocabulary to tap into, and we'll look right now at some of that.

Below is Gene Krupa, who I wager most readers have heard on Benny Goodman's recordings if they haven't heard of him by name. He was definitely not the first drummer to take "solos" - Warren Dodds, Sid Catlett, and many before Mr. Krupa were arguably more virtuostic. (Mr. Krupa, like Mr. Goodman, coopted an African American idiom and translated it to a white audience - which is not to impugn Krupa's or Benny Goodman's musicality or their genius one bit, but simply to state the verifyable fact that their race played a role in their record sales and "mainstream" acceptance.) But Gene Krupa captured the spotlight like no drummer before, with his solos.



The quality is bad, but I chose this clip for its similarity to the Herlin Riley New Orleans drumming. Sure, Krupa plays fast and loud, and "shows off", but listen to how he starts. The "swing" beat comes right out of the New Orleans "rudimental" drumming - he's just adding more notes and more variation.

Eventually, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Pappa Jo Jones and others added some sophistication to the idiom (taking it one step away from popular music in the process, but that's another blog;). Perhaps the best example of the "be bop" drum style comes from "Philly" Joe Jones (no relation to Pappa).



By now, you can probably trace the resemblance to the New Orleans drumming, and maybe even to the military fife and drum band. Drummers could spend days telling you the various ways that Jones and his peers innovated, but suffice it to say they took an older style and added textural variety by incorporating more different drum sounds.

This gets us a long way to understanding what Kendrick is doing. When you see the "flurries of activity" and things like changing the sounds by striking one stick against the other, it's all out of this tradition. But Kendrick's solo differs from Philly Joe's, Gene Krupa's and Joe Morello's in two important ways. The first is theme and variation: while the other drummers pictured so far begin a solo and throw thoughts at you more-or-less "stream of consciousness", like you might speak to someone on the phone, Kendrick is organizing his ideas a different way, a way tipified by Max Roach:



Max was a contemporary of Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gilespie and others in the Bebop movement that begain in the 1940s in the US. He beat Philly Joe Jones to the New York scene by a few years.

Max is using "theme and variation" to organize his thoughts, and it's one of the reasons he was able to do "drum only" concerts like this one in his later years. Instead of playing esoteric, drumistic things, he plays "melodies" and phrases that sound like a blues song on the radio, then repeats himself. (The "tune" is Big Sid, Max's homage to precursor Sid Catlett.) The simplicity of Max's playing (in this example at least) makes it easy to follow, and the "fun" is in listening to the variations he throws in - "where will he go next?"

Kendrick employs the same strategy, albeit more subtlely.

Finally, Kendrick doesn't simply hit you gangbusters from the first bar, but takes fully three minutes to "build" his solo. This way of playing was for years more practical on live performances than recordings (because of the time limitations of the early records). One of the greatest at "building" a solo was Count Basie drummer Sonny Payne:



This is Old Man River, played ludicrously fast. (If you're familiar with the tune, you may be able to hear bits of in Sonny's solo - he's definitely "quoting" from the melody.) Sonny doesn't "start slow" the way Kendrick does, but at about 1:40 he drops the volume to an almost inaudible level and proceeds to build to a satisfying climax.

Let's look at Kendrick's solo again:



My guess is you'll hear a lot of those other drummers' vocabulary and approach. At the beginning, the buzz rolls from Herlin Riley and Sonny Payne. At about 0:35, some playful theme and variation like Max Roach. At 0:56, some great rudimental vocabulary straight out of Philly Joe (with some extensions you might expect from 45 years of drum evolution since then). At 1:45, the intensity builds, just like the end of Sonny Payne's solo. (Aaron Parks, the pianist/composer, is giving a "helping hand" by adding more notes to his truly sinister voicings.) Finally, at 2:42, the band comes back for the final melody just as in Joe Morello's Take Five solo.

To hear the complete studio recording of Harvesting Dance check out Terence Blanchard's 2005 record, Flow. (Harvesting Dance is the last track.)