Recently

A few updates and links to share:

*On Friday, I made my debut as the live drummer for Psalm Zero. I love this band, and I'm honored to be working with them. Friday's performance marked my first time using a double kick pedal at a show. As a metal fan, I've enjoyed double-bass drumming for 20-odd years, but as a player, I come more out of the post-hardcore tradition—and later the Zeppelin/Sabbath lineage—where single-pedal performance reigns. Rehearsing over the past few months, it's been nice to complete this circuit, so to speak, and help bring songs from The Drain, PZ's excellent 2014 album, to life.

Our next show is April 15, opening for Liturgy at Saint Vitus. (Friday's show was also at Vitus, and I should mention that it's a serious thrill to perform on a stage where I've seen so many of my metal heroes play.)

*I've also had a blast playing live with A. Rex & J. Rex, a rock & roll band co-led by my friend and Time Out New York colleague Andrew Frisicano, over the past ten months or so. Our next show is April 29 at Black Bear.

*My primary musical project, STATS—in which I handle drums and some vocals, and share composition duties—is currently in its 13th year of activity. We've recorded plenty during that time, but we've never released a full-length album. That changes this year with the late-summer/early-fall release of Mercy, a 40-minute set recorded in the summer of 2013, via the awesome New Atlantis label. I can't wait to share this music, the latest document of my ongoing collaboration with two of my best friends: guitarist Joe Petrucelli and bassist Tony Gedrich. Heavy, structurally ambitious prog-punk, now with more vocals! More news on this soon.

*I'm thrilled to be relaunching my 2014 Craw Kickstarter project in early May with the help of Northern Spy Records. Full update here. More news via Facebook.

*Two recent Time Out interviews that I was really happy to land: Jason Moran on the 80th anniversary series he curated for the Village Vanguard, during which I saw that amazing Charles Lloyd performance I raved about previously; and Antonio Sanchez on his fascinating solo-drums score for Birdman. It was a pleasure speaking with each of these gentlemen.

*I profiled one of my favorite drummers, Slint's Britt Walford, for Modern Drummer. The piece isn't online, but the issue is out now.

*Two recent "classic rock" primer pieces for GQ, on—surprise, surprise—Sabbath and Zeppelin. As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I'm constantly finding excuses to rattle on about one or the other of these bands during my daily life, so it was healthy for me to have these outlets.

Please do me favor and watch the 1969 Danmarks Radio performance linked at the end of the Zeppelin piece. For years, I've hunted in vain for Zeppelin footage that's not plagued by excessive Plant/Page-centricity and/or stupidly ADD-ish editing, i.e., footage where one can actually Watch Bonham Slay. This video is the holy grail. The Bonham-focused bit from 4:00–4:20 is heart-stopping.

Brrrrrr-rap-pap: The rhythmic poetry of Slint's Britt Walford

"Even after all this time, those screams gives me the chills… If Brian [McMahan] hadn't made himself vulnerable on that record we wouldn't be talking about it now. It would have just been an interesting album of instrumentals, but he wore his heart on his sleeve."—Dave Pajo on Spiderland

I think Slint guitarist Dave Pajo is probably right. Though vocals play something of a background role on Spiderland, they're pivotal to the appeal of the album. Pajo's referring specifically to the famously torrential "I miss you!" climax of "Good Morning, Captain," but the act of "[making] himself vulnerable" extends to the other two McMahan sung/spoken tracks on the record, "Breadcrumb Trail" and (especially) "Washer," not to mention drummer Britt Walford's haunted turn at the mic on "Don, Aman." I know that, to me, forming my own Slint mythology as a teenager, the delicate emo-ness (for lack of a better term) at the heart of many of these songs—buried beneath layers of stoic restraint—was crucial to their appeal. The vocals were often cryptic, but they were key.

Seeing Slint last night at the Wick (great room, btw!), I felt a similar kind of emotional pull, a familiar choking up. But while part of that was just nostalgia kicking in—I've loved this band and its songs for 20 years—there was something else going on, too. As I've grown older, the part of my brain/heart that connects with music seems to have fused in some very direct way with the part of me that drums and experiences the drumming of others, so that when I hear drumming I truly love, I feel the same kind of emotional squeeze, if you will, that I used to associate most directly with the voice and the verbal expression of feeling.

I always had a sense that Britt Walford was a special kind of player. But it's only during my recent listening to Slint that I've elevated him into my personal drumming Hall of Fame. (Inhabited by the likes of Levon Helm, John Bonham, J. Read, Milford Graves, Neil Peart, Dale Crover, Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Bill Ward, Whit Dickey, Bill Bruford, Damon Che, Roy Haynes, Ed Blackwell, Pete Sandoval, Thymme Jones, Dave Lombardo, Paul Motian and John Stanier, for starters.) What these players have in common—in my own head, at least—is the ability to bring something so personal to their execution ("style" feels too superficial for what I'm getting at) that to hear them drum is to hear them speak. Walford, a man who does, in fact—to judge by Lance Bangs's excellent Breadcrumb Trail doc—have a very distinctive speaking voice, has developed one of the most simultaneously unassuming and unmistakable drum voices I've ever heard. There's something about that act that moves me to no end.

The Walford voice is there on record, but as with, say, Milford Graves, you need to hear it live to really know it. What it comes down to is the primordial boom-thwack, the massive lowness of the bass drum, floor tom, etc., and the high, cutting punctuation of the snare. Walford is a master of the rimshot, where you bring the stick down more or less exactly parallel to the head, so you grab a bit of metal (or wood) from the rim of the drum as you strike. Even on hushed songs like "…For Dinner," increasingly one of my favorite Slint tracks, Walford truly goes for that thwack. He's not a basher, but he knows, physically, how to bring the hammer down, how to focus your attention with that one well-placed stab.

There's also his feel. To me, this is holy ground, beyond the realm of what you can really talk about. It's the part of drumming that, these days, can literally bring tears to my eyes. Behind-the-beat isn't everything to me; I am after all a devotee of Neil Peart and Tony Williams, two quintessentially alert, "forward-leaning" drummers, to my ears. But behind-the-beat is a big part of who I am as a player and a listener. I rarely get closer to heaven than when I'm listening to, say, Bonham or Helm (both classic behind-ers) play time. After last night, I would add Walford to that list. There is a glorious shagginess to his time, a feel that, as with Helm, is tough to dissociate from his drawly Southern vocal cadence.

The absurdity of Slint getting saddled with the term "post-rock" really hit home anew last night when I stood there and listened to Walford grind out the absurdly rocking chorus and bridge on "Nosferatu Man" (Drew Daniel ingeniously singled out Walford's "sidelong lurch into the one" in his Wire review of the Spiderland reissue; the initial kick-in on "Nosferatu," around the 1:00 mark on the record, is a great place to hear that in action), or the relentless, tripping-over-itself groove of "Glenn." It's no wonder that, according to the documentary, Walford gravitated to playing blues in the years after Slint's breakup (God, would I love to hear what that sounded like…): This man has the grease, the slipperiness of cadence that's a signature of so many of my favorite players, that sense of approaching the instrument with a kind of deceptive sluggishness, giving the beat that essential drag, that hair, that shuffle. The realm in which a word like "leaden" is the highest compliment.

I love these feels that lurch along, and Walford has one of the lurchingest I've heard; it's almost cartoonish how much he slurs the beat, but he's always, so to speak, in time. To hear him play live, that combination of deadly boom-thwack dynamic control and unflappable rhythmic lag is all the more poetic. I really did feel choked up being that close to it. And so, yes, the "I miss you!" climax of "Good Morning, Captain" stung a bit, in the way it used to, but a classic Walford move shortly before it squeezed my heart even more. It's that tiny stutter of a fill he plays right around 5:30 on the album version, which slurs and punctuates the transition into the staccato end section of the verse: brrrrrr-rap-pap. I never knew exactly how he was playing that brrrrrr part. It wasn't that it was necessarily difficult to play; it's just that there are a few ways you could approach it—toms only, some tom / bass-drum combination. But I made sure I paid close attention last night. Walford has these two large, super-deep rack toms that he makes beautiful use of throughout the set (the downside is that they completely obscure him if you're watching him, as we all were last night, from a low angle), and it turns out that the brrrrrr is a quick roll on these two toms, culminating, of course, in that mighty double snare thwack. It's the kind of fill that a lesser player might have stumbled on by accident and discarded, but in Walford's hands, it's the emotional pivot point of the song—the drummer's alley-oop pass to McMahan, who is gearing up to shout his lungs out during the most straightforwardly climactic moment in the slim Slint discography. And yes, I do love that "I miss you!" moment, but to me, now, it's almost beside the point: all I need to know, emotionally from this music—its meticulousness, its idiosyncrasy, its stubborn rockingness (post-rock be damned!), its groove, its patience, its violence, its surprise, its joy and anguish, is locked up in that brrrrrr-rap-pap. It's been said of Steve McCall that he could "break your heart with a drum solo." Walford is the kind of player that, for me, only needs about 1.5 seconds of rhythmic real estate, the space of a fill that many listeners might gloss over completely, to accomplish the same feat.

/////

I've followed all this recent Slint activity with great interest. Such a weird feeling to have all these interviews suddenly appear (that Guardian piece I linked above is probably the most insightful, but Drowned in Sound and Fact have also run great pieces), and to think that McMahan and Walford declined to work with Scott Tennent on his still absolutely essential Spiderland book only a few years back.

Re: the box set and the documentary, you need to hear/see these if you're a fan. Re: the box, I'm particularly thrilled by the surfacing of a studio version of the great lost Slint track "Pam," which was—much to my delight—the opening song of last night's set. (I really hope they see fit to record "King's Approach" at some point.) And re: the doc, I mean—I loved it all. That basement practice footage stopped me in my tracks like few music-related archival-video excavations ever have. Shockingly, we get a quick, tantalizing visual/aural glimpse of the Walford brrrrrr-rap-pap at 1:30 in the trailer. Look at the way he holds the sticks, lets them fall with deceptive slackness. Have you ever seen such looseness coupled with such deliberateness? (And is Walford using the same red kit today that he was back then? I think he might be…) Kudos to Lance Bangs for zeroing in on that crucial moment.

Soundchasing: Sunny Murray

In various writings on Milford Graves, I've mentioned the idea of chasing a sound. I'm not sure what it is about this certain species of drummer—Graves, Paul Motian, Sunny Murray, Elvin Jones—but sometimes I get it into my head that I just can't listen to anything else other than the sound of one of these players. It's like a craving for a certain kind of food that overcomes me, sticks around and then gradually departs. And I'm finding that it's cyclical. My pantheon is taking concrete shape, in other words. I'm open to new information, but I think the names mentioned above will always be a part of the rotation; these strong desires to hear them, and only them, will come back around.

Lately, the sound I'm chasing is Sunny Murray's. As with Milford Graves's, Murray's sound can be a hard one to really locate. It's been ages since I've seen the man perform, and that was not a positive experience. So I've been been busy sifting through what's there to sift through on record. Again, as with Milford Graves, I defy the museum-ification of artists like this, the holding up of their
"legendary" early recordings—often the ones on ESP or BYG, or the ones with some similar kind of first-wave cachet—as the best place (other than live) to hear them. Recent examples aren't as numerous as I'd like them to be, but both Graves and Murray have been extremely well-served by state-of-the-art modern recording technology.

Right now, I'm listening to Tiresias, a 2011 release under Louie Belogenis's name. As Clifford Allen—a serious Murray scholar—points out in the liner notes, we should treasure this opportunity to hear Murray in such gorgeous studio fidelity. (Beyond Quantum, a 2008 Tzadik set featuring William Parker and Anthony Braxton, is probably the closest equivalent in the Milford Graves discography.) So I've got this record on, and I just want to dive deep down in it. The crisp rattle of the snare, the lavish boom of the toms and bass drums—a sublimated thunder, as though Murray could shake the walls if he wanted to, but is content to flutter around wraithlike. And then gradually swelling the cymbals, rustling and conjuring, behind Belogenis. It's such a loving curtain of sound that Murray drapes over this session. He was obviously onto something similiar as early as Spiritual Unity, but I think he's a better listener, a better drummer, a better musician now.

The sound quality on I Stepped Onto a Bee, recorded in 2010 with Murray's current working-triomates Tony Bevan and John Edwards, isn't quite as stellar as what you hear on Tiresias—there's a certain brittleness to the sound, kind to the high end, but less so to the Elvin-y low end that's so crucial to Murray's overall delivery—but this one's also essential for the devoted Sunny Murray soundchaser.

There's a prevailing sense that Murray's approach to drumming is a sort of a default: He couldn't swing back in the day, so he had to resort to this. There aren't enough good vintage examples of Murray trying to "swing" for us to really make that call. I think Murray's dangerously easy to underestimate, though. Certainly, unlike Milford Graves—at least in my experience of seeing him play, Graves has never seemed anything less than scarily poised—there are times (such as the 2003 Tonic gig I caught) where Murray has appeared on the bandstand in a less-than-ideal headspace. You listen to these recent records, though, and you hear Murray's voice as clearly as if he were speaking; he's not doing this thing because he can't do that thing. He's doing this thing because it's the thing he's chosen and perfected.

This signature Murray style isn't the only style he's capable of delivering, by any means. There are plenty of obscure recent sessions—such as this very strange and not quite satisfying Archie Shepp record with Richard Davis, and an astounding bootleg I grabbed off Soulseek years ago of a 1998 Sonny Simmons / Sonny Murray duo gig in Cambridge—where you can hear Sunny Murray capably swinging in a relatively traditional vein, and sounding utterly like himself at the same time. But at his best, such as on I Stepped Onto a Bee, the idea of whether or not he's technically swinging is irrelevant. The point is that he controls the pace and the sensation of the music completely, decides whether it will be a ghostly dirge-blues, or this sort of surging free shout. And while the Murray sound is enveloping, especially that patented irregular cymbal swell, which carries you along like a mist at your back, what's most impressive is the blend, the way he occupies certain frequencies, fills up all the sound around his collaborators, so that he's buffeting them rather than drowning him out. (It would seem from this great Paris Transatlantic interview with Murray that there's more science to this—i.e., that very special way in which Murray inhabits and sort of plasticizes musical space—than many have thought. "I wanted to get more from the beat than just the beat," as he puts it.)

On Dawn of a New Vibration, Murray's tough-to-find 2000 duo session with the late Arthur Doyle (see also: Burning Ambulance), the drummer gets so much more from the beat than just the beat. One of the tracks here is titled "Elephant Dreams," and that's exactly how I think of Murray's sound on this record. The shaggy, loping weight of the sound coming off his kit here is just extraordinary. More and more, this is what I look for in a drum sound. It's Bonham; it's Elvin; it's Milford; it's Motian; it's prime Sunny Murray. It's that sense of dragging sound and rhythm, hauling it around like a sack of potatoes. It's not mutually exclusive with a certain kind of nimbleness, but the principal imperative is the earth-ness of the sound, the way that it rumbles through the ground and the air. Dawn of a new vibration, indeed.

During times like these, I need nothing more than that thwack, that thump and shimmer, that unmistakable sonic signature. It's not something you can capture. You need to be in the room with it, really. But recent, top-quality studio recordings can get you about halfway there, which is saying a lot. Right now, I'm breathing it in like oxygen.

/////

In terms of sheer distinctiveness of voice, I've also been deep into both Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace and Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning. Such a pleasure to hear these men speaking, as Sunny Murray does, with such authority and idiosyncrasy—being themselves at such a simultaneously refined and unapologetically raw level, in other words. That is what we mean by author, artist.

And since hearing this wonderful news, I've also been chasing the sound of Slint drummer Britt Walford, another player who's got a secure spot in my aforementioned percussive pantheon. When it comes to boomy, wide-open girth of sound, and a gorgeously loose feel, he is one of our contemporary masters. Such a shame that his discography is so tiny—really just three Slint releases and one relatively unrepresentative LP apiece by the Breeders and Evergreen, as well as various odds and ends, including this crucial pre-Slint rarity by Maurice. Even Graves's and Murray's relatively scant recorded works dwarf Walford's. I did find this enticing tidbit from last year, though. By the way, all fans of Britt Walford specifically and Slint in general need to read Scott Tennent's 33 1/3 book on Spiderland. The coming Lance Bangs doc ought to be a revelation, but until then, Scott's volume represents the deepest knowledge base we have on this insular band/scene.

Words on music: Slint and prog metal

I've switched reading gears rather drastically since finishing James Salter's outstanding mounting-climbing-themed novel Solo Faces. Within the past couple of weeks, two music books I'd feverishly anticipated have crossed my desk, and diligent devouring has ensued.
















Scott Tennent's Spiderland, part of the esteemed 33 1/3 series that will issue my book on Ween's Chocolate and Cheese next March, is a fascinating read. The premise is a simple yet, all told, extremely tricky one: Tennent sets out to demystify Slint, a band whose reputation has everything to do with the fetishization of mystery. Few Slint fans would deny that the very fact of knowing so little about them has contributed greatly to their rabidness. But Tennent's demystification is a healthy and helpful one. A large part of what he's trying to do is set the record straight on one key point: The little-known band Maurice, which contained future Slint guitarist Dave Pajo and drummer Britt Walford, played a much more formative role in shaping the eventual Slint sound than did the much better known Squirrel Bait, the pre-Slint project of Brian McMahan. Tennent pieces together the Maurice story—as far as I know, entirely untold up till now—via interviews with Pajo and the band's vocalist, Sean "Rat" Garrison, and also excavates the tale of the Languid and Flaccid, an improbably advanced grade-school band that included Walford and McMahan, along with Will Oldham's brother (and future Anomoanon leader) Ned. (An excerpt from the book dealing with the latter project is available via the 33 1/3 blog.)

This may seem like a matter of minutiae, but it's not: The point is that, contrary to popular belief, Spiderland came from somewhere; it was an album in a context, not only of Maurice but of the rest of Slint's output. As Tennent rightly points out, many Slint enthusiasts try to explain away the band's incongruous debut, Tweez, a dismissal that's both a historical and aesthetic mistake. Tennent argues passionately for what I came to realize after my adolescent devotion to Spiderland lessened enough for me to give Tweez a clear listen: The latter is a fantastic and fantastically strange record, full of inscrutable in-jokes and weird, disorienting virtuosity. Unlike Spiderland, it didn't spawn a whole genre; instead it exists as an alien world.

Tennent combines these main arguments with detailed discussions of Slint's practice and touring regimens (not to mention a stone-cold fascinating account of a formative Maurice road jaunt opening for Samhain), their obsessive attention to technical details (whether guitars were up-picked or downpicked, say), their programmatic songwriting tactics (heard most clearly on Spiderland opener "Breadcrumb Trail," which Tennent analyzes shrewdly) and their unlikely gig history (Slint debuted as a live band 24 years ago this month during an actual Sunday church mass). Walford and McMahan declined to be interviewed for the book, which is a bummer, but nevertheless, there's tons of new information here thanks to the Pajo and Garrison interviews, and to Tennent's methodical approach to tracking the band's history step-by-step. More importantly, though, there's a brave new attitude toward Slint scholarship at work. Tennent encourages his fellow Slint devotees to challenge the myths and enigmas—in some cases, very romantic ones, like the widespread and apocryphal rumor that one or more members of the band were institutionalized after the recording of Spiderland—in order that we might let a little reality into our conception of this extraordinary band. He concludes, and I think you'll agree, that even with many of the facts right at hand, there's plenty of depth left in Spiderland. For us Slint die-hards, the magic isn't dissipating anytime soon.

















The other music book I've been checking out, Mean Deviation—former Metal Maniacs editor Jeff Wagner's history of progressive metal—resembles Tennent's in one crucial sense: It's sent me scurrying to the stereo. In just about every other capacity, though, this is a very different book. Tennent, in accordance with the 33 1/3 credo, focuses much of his scholarly energy on a single record, and even with all the aforementioned context, it's still a narrow project—after all, Slint officially released only 17 measly songs during its life span. Wagner's tome, on the other hand, is macro to the core, an unabashedly superficial overview of a four-decade-old genre.

I've found that the less I already know about a band discussed in Mean Deviation, the more excited I am by Wagner's text. (For example, I've read the sections on Mercyful Fate and Watchtower with much greater interest than those on Gorguts and Confessor.) And in the end, this isn't—like Tennent's book—a project with a strong sense of mission, with some greater purpose for existing outside of the fact that, well, Jeff Wagner is clearly a lifelong devotee of progressive metal—his intro speaks reverently of his personal lode-star album, Voivod's controversial Angel Rat—and he wanted to put together a sort of survey course on the genre, one that namechecked all the key bands without getting too bogged down with respect to any one. (Though I must say, the Dream Theater section I'm currently wading through is trying my patience.) This is valuable in the same way that any exhaustive yet still readable reference book is valuable: It places the spotlight on the artists rather than on the author's agenda, and it inevitably whets a listener's appetite. Right now, I've got a to-download list about 40 albums deep (from Judas Priest's Sad Wings of Destiny to Watchtower's Control and Resistance—and maybe even, if I'm feeling especially brave, Queensrÿche's Rage for Order), and no matter what any writer-about-music may tell you, that's the real objective of what we do: to breed curiosity that leads to actual first-person contact with the art in question. So, in that respect, bravo to you, Jeff Wagner—I'm definitely getting my prog-metal on this week as a result of your work.