SKF NOTE: As of this morning, YouTube analytics tells me Frankie Dunlop’s fast/slow drum lesson video has been viewed almost 52,000 times. It has 982 “Likes” and zero “Dislikes.”

Also, historian Robin Kelley shared Frankie’s story in his book, “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.”

That’s all good news.

From the late 1980s, when I finished the last of my freelance writing for Modern Drummer magazine, and April 2014 when I started this blog, I periodically worried about what would happen to my MD drummer interview cassettes in my absence.

More to the point, I thought about taped moments in some of my interviews I really wanted to share. Not only in the written word, but the actual voices of drummers telling their stories, passing along their life lessons.

But I lacked the know-how to digitize my cassettes. Finally giving up on finding someone else to do the work, I used my double well cassette deck, downloaded the free Audacity audio app, and figured out the digitizing process through trial-and-error. When the digital conversions of my analog tapes sounded presentable, I began isolating drummer interview audio excerpts and posting them on my blog.

Frankie Dunlop’s disagreement with Thelonious Monk on whether or not fast tempo drumming is harder than slow tempo drumming was high on my list of interview audio segments I wanted to share.

Reading what Frankie had to say is good. Hearing Frankie say it is a million times better.