SKF NOTE: A nice news story on The Marshall Tucker Band. Drummer Paul T. Riddle does a great job, in a short period of time, sharing stories about what made the MTB work.
For more information about Paul T. and the MTB, check out my full-length interview with Paul.
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SKF NOTE: I wrote this Dave Tough profile for the January/February 1979 Modern Drummer as a freelance writer pre-internet. The piece includes several names of people and things Life Beyond the Cymbals readers might want to explore further. In the order in which they appear in Dave Tough’s profile, the names are:
Ralph Hadlock; Jazz Masters of the Twenties; Sid Catlett; Jo Jones; Chick Webb; Gene Krupa; George Wettling; The Austin High Gang; New Orleans Rhythm Kings; King Oliver; Louis Armstrong; Warren “Baby” Dodds; Jimmy McPartland; Metronome; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Kenneth Rexroth; George T. Simon; Woody Herman; Ed Soph; Tommy Dorsey; Buddy Rich; Benny Goodman; Ralph Burns; Billy Bauer; Chubby Jackson; Arnold Shaw.
[SKF NOTE: 6/17/17 – Dave Tough’s full profile is now available on MD‘s Archive Page.]
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SKF NOTE: Some more worthwhile advice for drummers from my 1981 Modern Drummer interview with Barbara Borden of the jazz group Alive!. The interview back story is here.
Scott K Fish: Do you feel that a woman considering a career in jazz or drumming should look at being a woman as a challenge?
Barbara Borden: The way I looked at drumming when I started to learn — I wanted to play drums! I didn’t even think about man, woman or any of that. I was a kid at the time.
I feel that if a person really wants to do something they’ll do it.
I mean, there’s a piano player from Europe. He’s 18-years old and he’s only a little over 3-feet tall. He had a disease that he was born with. He played with Charles Lloyd in San Francisco. His bones are very brittle. He’s had, like, 150 broken bones. [SKF NOTE: Barbara Borden is referring to Michel Petrucciani. A concert video of the Michel Petrucciani Trio with Steve Gadd is below.]
Now, you would think, “How could a person like this play the piano?” I mean, he could say, “Well, I’m only 3-feet tall. I can’t even reach the piano pedals.” Or he could say, “I want to play the piano” and invent ways to do it.
That’s being creative. Totally.
So for any women — or anybody — that is doing what’s not considered doing the norm for doing anything: just follow your heart. If you have a strong feeling about playing drums — do it! Sure, those things will come along that go with it. But you don’t have to let that stop you or stand in your way.
You have to learn how to deal with it in a way that makes you feel good and that doesn’t get in the way of the music.
SKF: Dreamers make the world go around, right?
BB: Mm hm. But also, dreamers that do their dreams. Action packed dreamers.
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SKF NOTE: Ed Soph‘s thoughts here on big band vs small band drumming are from my undated interview transcript published as a feature Modern Drummer interview in the 1979 January/February interview. The circumstances of this interview are posted here. I was a freelance writer at the time. Ed was working primarily with Clark Terry, living in upstate New York.
My opening paragraph for this 1979 interview:
“When I went to interview Ed Soph, he and his wife, Carol, were living upstate New York in a beautiful old house in a wooded setting. Brooks gurgled by. A constant bird seranade. Across the Hudson River you could see West Point. And if the wind was right you could hear the drums and bugles while the cadets ran through their drill. It was almost the opposite of what you might expect a musician’s house to look like.”
Today I would no doubt describe the Soph’s rented “beautiful old house” as a quaint cedar shingled cottage. It was a great place in a truly beautiful remote area near Bear Mountain, New York.
I had seen Ed Soph in concert with Woody Herman‘s big band, and listened on record to Ed with Bill Watrous‘s and Clark Terry’s big bands. Now that I’m thinking about it, I had started taking drum lessons around this time to improve my ability to read drum charts.
When I asked Ed Soph about his approach to big bands vs small bands, Ed said:
Ed Soph: There’s really no that much difference. In a big band, when a soloist comes up front with just the rhythm section, it’s a small group. And when the ensemble comes in, then it’s a big band.
In a small group situation there’s greater freedom of expression in that you can be more complicated if you want to be. No that that’s a good criterion for playing in a small group. I just feel like I have greater freedom to stretch the time or to turn the beat around — if it fits what the soloist is doing.
But that can lead to problems. With Woody’s band, when some of the soloists would come out front — like Steve Marcus, who is an adventuresome player — the rhythm section would get loose behind him and away from a very heavy metrical accent on [beats] 2 and 4. When it came time for the band to come in the trumpet players were lost. They didn’t know where their entrance [was]. They would come in all staggered because the guys couldn’t feel where the time was.
I particularly enjoyed Woody’s band when Andy LaVerne was on piano and Wayne Darling was on bass. We really got a small group rhythm section feel within the big band context.
But it took us a while to do that. We had to gradually break in the brass [players]. At first we tried taking the time out by their standards — getting away from a repetitive pulse. And it was just a train wreck.
We’d sit down with [the brass players] and say, ‘Look, you’ve got to rely on the time in yourself. You can’t be up there counting on your fingers and listening to the rhythm section. You’ve got to feel it.’
There [were] some bad feelings at first, but it worked out.
It was our fault too. We were taking a lot on ourselves, assuming a lot, going in behind a soloist and really stretching the time and expecting [the brass players] to be used to it.
Face it. Section players — Third, Fourth, Fifth chairs — in big bands are not really jazz players. They’re section players. And there’s a lot of good ones, but they get lost sometimes.
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