Al Duncan – Great Ears, Good Memory (Circa 1981)

Posted on December 30, 2018 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: (April 11, 2022) – Today I added the audio for Al Duncan’s circa 1981 interview with me. Mr. Duncan’s nephew, Michael Haggins, is a musician too. He has three smooth jazz CD’s of his own available, and he was kind enough to let me use three photos of his uncle I never had.

SKFNOTE: Last week I found an old cassette labeled on one side,“Al Duncan,” among my old cassettes. The cassette itself needed repair, which I did. I then digitized the Al Duncan interview and, for the first time, I am posting one of my Modern Drummer interviews in its entirety.

Almost three years ago to the day I posted on my blog the original transcript I made from this tape. Mine is not a verbatim typed transcript. I transcribed information I believed, circa 1981, would be useful in the History of Rock Drumming I was writing for Modern Drummer magazine.

In January 2016, my blog intro says, in part:

“I was interested in speaking with Al Duncan because I knew — from printed sources and from other musicians, like Willie Dixon — that Mr. Duncan had played on several early rock recording sessions for Chess Records and Motown.

A quick Google search today shows Al Duncan on records by The Orioles, The Spaniels, The Dells, Little Junior Parker, Priscilla Bowman, Dee Clark, The Falcons, The El Dorados, among many others.”

Listeners will hear Al Duncan telling me he’d never heard of Modern Drummer. Also, you will hear me explaining why I was writing my History of Rock Drumming.

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Dave Tough: Absolutely Perfect Bass Drumming

Posted on December 29, 2018 by Scott K Fish
Dave Tough

SKF NOTE: James Lincoln Collier‘s book, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era, has a few interesting Davey Tough insights. This Sid Weiss quote is one example. I don’t recall reading or hearing another musician saying Tough could play faster bass drum than either Buddy Rich or Louie Bellson. Or that Tough’s understanding of playing the bass drum was rare.

In 1945, after eighteen months with the brilliant Herman band, [Dave] Tough won first place in the Down Beat, Esquire and Metronome polls. [In an interview with James Lincoln Collier, jazz bassist] Sid Weiss said:

Buddy Rich is supposed to have that fast foot. But Davey could play faster than Buddy, and also play faster than Louie Bellson with two drums. Davey was unbelievable. Take charge. As small as he was, he knew just how to do it. When I played a note his bass drum would go through the note and amplify it. He had a way of playing the bass drum so it would not cover — the tonality was right or whatever. The way the pedal struck the drum, it was just absolutely perfect. Most drummers didn’t really understand about the bass drum, they weren’t really listening to the bass.

Source: Benny Goodman and the Swing Era, by James Lincoln Collier, Oxford University Press 1989.

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Ravish Momin – Learning How He Makes Music

Posted on December 19, 2018 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: Musician Ravish Momin was good enough to consent to an interview two weeks ago. I will posting excerpts in the days ahead.

Ravish is a drummer who first caught my attention in June 2017 in an online news story. He called his music “folk music from nowhere” and “music that exists from a country that doesn’t exist.”

What’s not to like about that?

In 2017 Ravish was pictured using an acoustic drumset augmented by various electronic devices. Just before our interview, Ravish posted the YouTube video shown here where his current setup has no acoustic drum elements.

I was watching Momin’s YouTube videos — especially his in concert videos — anticipating an experience similar to concerts I’ve attended of acoustic drumset players, from Art Blakey, to Jaimoe, to John Densmore.

That’s the wrong approach. It’s apples and oranges.

Momin’s music is rooted in acoustic drumming. He studied rudiments and acoustic drumet playing with Andrew Cyrille — an acoustic drumset player known for solid straight-ahead drumming, and for pushing the boundaries of drumset playing.

Yet, watching Ravish Momin create his music, I find it best to erase my preconceived ideas of watching acoustic drumset players. And I even find it easier to listen only, to close my eyes and not watch what Momin does onstage.

I think Ravish and I had a wonderful discussion about all that and more. I’m looking forward to re-listening to our interview and sharing it with you. Stay tuned.

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Miles Davis on Philly Joe Jones

Posted on December 17, 2018 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: Nat Hentoff‘s “Jazz Is” was a Christmas present to me from my sister, Maribeth, in 1978. Her inscription says, “Hope you don’t already have this. I can’t wait ’til you’re on the pages of a book like this. Love, Maribeth.”

Can we ever have too many family members who believe in our dreams? I don’t think so.

Each time I pull one of my old music books from my book case, and flip through the pages, passages I underlined when first reading the books, appear as little jewels of wisdom. Keepers. Ideas that, at the time, made sense. I underlined them to make it easy to find the passages again.

Over the years I have not come across one of my underlined passages that now seems dated, irrelevant.

Mr. Hentoff’s recollection of Miles and Philly Joe Jones is a good example.

==========

Miles Davis telling me some years ago that he was turning down an engagement in a jazz club in Toronto. I asked him why. “Because that m*** who owns it told me to fire Philly Joe because he’s too loud! Nobody can tell me what to do with my music.”

Philly Joe Jones, Miles’s drummer at the time, was a brilliant, cracklingly aggressive, polyrhythmically swinging mesmerist who often did indeed play loud. “Shee-it,” said Miles, “I wouldn’t care if he came up on the bandstand in his B.V.D’s and with one arm, and shouting his head off, just so long as he was there.

“He’s got the fire I want. There’s nothing more terrible than playing with a dull rhythm section. Jazz has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t learn it, you can’t buy it. You have it or you don’t. And no critic can put it into any words. It speaks in the music. It speaks for itself.”

Source: “Jazz Is,” by Nat Hentoff (Avon Books, 1978)

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Fred Below: I’m Thinking Melodically All the Time

Posted on December 13, 2018 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: Fred Below had been an inspiration to me for many years before this interview. I was surprised, because it was not typical of blues drummers, to hear Fred Below outline his extensive musical background and his influence in shaping the forms and phrasing of Chicago blues. Mr. Below was key in moving blues players from “haphazard” odd number phrasing to the standard blues phrasing of 8 bars, 12 bars and so forth.

In this excerpt, I ask Below a question I often ask(ed) drummers: When you’re drumming, are you thinking rhythmically or melodically? It was, and still is, my belief, that the best drummers think melodically.

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